re not long in proving it.

One of them surveyed it in panic wonder, turning in upon herself to face
the ordeal of enforced living. They wandered in the open, three of them,
now, finding it good to feel the bare, elastic earth under their feet
again, and prove the noiseless but sensational life of growing things
all about them. They plucked buds to see their secret hearts, and
exposed the roots of peeping herbs that had begun their strivings
before the snow went.

When the sunny places had been dried and warmed, and were pulsing in
their myriad hidden hearts, so that winter began to fade in their minds
as some dream of night, they would penetrate the sunless depths of a
narrow canyon where the snow yet lay deep and the stream was a mere
choking of ice in a gorge.

It was in the flush of this exultation over winter's downfall that they
planned camp life in a vale at the edge of the lake, where the spruces
thinned to leave wide-vaulted arches, and spread the floor with yielding
brown rugs of the pine needle. They began it as a play, and finished
with a permanent camp into which they moved from the cabin. There were
tents and beds, a table, a sheet-iron stove, chests for their stores,
and hammocks in which to be fanned by the south wind.

Bartell promised his sister vast benefits from this life.

"This will put the finishing touches to you, Sis. A month here and
you'll be loping over the range, high, wide, and handsome. It'll take an
elk-high fence to hold you after you've slept awhile out here."

She felt the truth of what he said, and was appalled by it. Almost daily
she dismayed herself by recalling some unpremeditated feat of strength
or endurance. Life had crept back to her like a whipped dog, and
bitterly she felt the sting of its satire. She was loath to leave the
cabin in which she had so long nursed death. She had impregnated the
very walls with an atmosphere of dissolution. But she understood now
that that prison house could no longer suffice her. Stubborn life had
prevailed over all its powers of suggestion. There she had clung
stubbornly to the old solution, cherishing a hope of some sudden
relapse, despite the new life that taunted her with its animal buoyance.
But once in the open, her brain was washed of that. Her mind was as
clear as the fathomless blue above them at noon; and the stars at night
were not more coldly luminous than the reasoning she bent upon herself,
nor sharper than a certain deductio