as rich
a'ready!"

But she put the joke aside, to be told upon herself when the first
chance came. Her long hiding in the thicket while she watched the queer
proceedings of the stranger had chilled her through and through.

Close to the black rock which had so excited him and which she had
uncovered after he had gone, a little forked stick stood upright, and in
its fork, with one end slanted to the ground, a twig of green
witch-hazel still reposed. Beneath the twig a tiny spiral of arizing
smoke showed that here, with these primitive appliances, the treasure
seeker had prepared his dinner, later carefully covering his fire.

"No matter how queer he was dressed, or what queer things he did," she
told herself, "he sure was mountain-born. This here's a mountain
fireplace, sartin sure."

She broke dead branches from a pine-top, not far away, but still far
enough so that, with reasonable watching, it would not be endangered by
a fire built on this spot (the old man plainly had considered this when
he made the fire, for the place was almost the only one in all the
clearing free enough from dry pine branches to make fire building safe)
and laid them on the coals which he had buried, but which she now had
carefully uncovered. She would, she had decided, dry her clothes before
she started on the long, cool, woods-road climb up to her cabin.

Kneeling by the coals and blowing on them, skillfully adjusting
splinters so that they would catch the draft, she soon had started a
small flame. Fed carefully, this grew rapidly. Within five minutes there
was burning on the site of the old man's little cooking-fire a cheerful
blaze of size. Its rushing warmth was very grateful to her, and she held
her hands out to it, then her feet, one after the other, with skirts
lifted daintily, so that her chilled limbs might catch the warmth.

Invigorated by the pleasant heat, she once more yielded to the urgings
of the bounding spirit of rich youth within her. Even as she had sported
in the water ere the interloper came to interrupt her sylvan bath, now
she sported there about the fire in an impromptu dance, never for a
second uncouth, despite the fact that she was quite untrained; scarcely
less graceful than her merrymaking in the water, although then she had
not been, as now, hampered in her grace of movement by the unlovely
draperies of homespun linsey-woolsey. As she had been a water-nymph, so,
now, she might have been some Druid maid dancin