long breaths of this clean air,
sweetened with the scent of growing things. Why couldn't the world be
happy, since it was so beautiful? It made her think of those three weeks
in Big Basin, and the never-forgettable wonder of their love--hers and
Bud's.

She was crying with the pain and the beauty of it when she heard the
first high, chirpy notes of a baby--her baby. Lovin Child was picketed
to a young cedar near the mouth of the Blind ledge tunnel, and he was
throwing rocks at a chipmunk that kept coming toward him in little
rushes, hoping with each rush to get a crumb of the bread and butter
that Lovin Child had flung down. Lovin Child was squealing and
jabbering, with now and then a real word that he had learned from Bud
and Cash. Not particularly nice words--"Doggone" was one and several
times he called the chipmunk a "sunny-gun." And of course he frequently
announced that he would "Tell a worl'" something. His head was bare and
shone in the sun like the gold for which Cash and his Daddy Bud were
digging, away back in the dark hole. He had on a pair of faded overalls
trimmed with red, mates of the ones on the rope line, and he threw rocks
impartially with first his right hand and then his left, and sometimes
with both at once; which did not greatly distress the chipmunk, who knew
Lovin Child of old and had learned how wide the rocks always went of
their mark.

Upon this scene Marie came, still crying. She had always been an
impulsive young woman, and now she forgot that Lovin Child had not seen
her for six months or so, and that baby memories are short. She rushed
in and snatched him off the ground and kissed him and squeezed him and
cried aloud upon her God and her baby, and buried her wet face against
his fat little neck.

Cash, trundling a wheelbarrow of ore out to the tunnel's mouth, heard a
howl and broke into a run with his load, bursting out into the sunlight
with a clatter and upsetting the barrow ten feet short of the regular
dumping place. Marie was frantically trying to untie the rope, and
was having trouble because Lovin Child was in one of his worst
kicking-and-squirming tantrums. Cash rushed in and snatched the child
from her.

"Here! What you doing to that kid? You're scaring him to death--and
you've got no right!"

"I have got a right! I have too got a right!" Marie was clawing like a
wildcat at Cash's grimy hands. "He's my baby! He's mine! You ought to
be hung for stealing him away from me. L