"See," I cried, "what our family row has led to! Fire out, breakfast ruined, and here I am due at the office in half an hour!"
"Oh, Jack," she looked at me gravely, putting an end to our banter--and for the first time calling me Jack, though I believe she did it unconsciously--"haven't we any more buttonwood? This is serious, isn't it!"
"Not so very, perhaps. We can try another kind."
"Will it be safe?" she asked, uncertainly.
"With a small fire of very dry hardwood, and this rising wind, what little smoke there is won't hold together long enough to be seen."
"But it'll blow right toward their camp! The wind's changed since yesterday!"
"That's more than two miles off, and they're probably still after Smilax. I'll make a very small fire."
This, indeed, seemed to work well enough, and by the time a new breakfast was ready our uncertainties had become shadows of no consequence.
"But you _do_ know I was angry, don't you?" she asked, out of a clear sky, with an unexpectedness that made me throw back my head and laugh.
"You bet I do! And you beat me in the race, too; and you're the best cook on our block!"
"It seems to be the same old story," she smiled, with affected sorrow, "that food must always be the price of masculine tractability. Ah, the long drawn out tragedy of woman's existence, that she must forever be stuffing man with things to eat, as reptiles are stuffed, to keep him facile!"
"You fail to observe, my little snake charmer," I replied, "that you omitted to say good things to eat. I'm never facile after Smilax feeds me."--Though I owe Smilax an apology for this!
"He must have run great risks of being bitten."
"Oh, no; I'm not the biting kind of snake! I'm a constrictor--I hug!"
"Mercy!" She gave a little gasp, then, turned and went indifferently toward the spring.
Whistling happily I finished the dishes. But I finished them with the promise of a better cleansing next time, and soon was calling her.
She came to me humming the song I had been whistling--an unconscious bit of flattery on her part, but it added to my pleasure. There is, after all, so much to be gained by hitching your wagon to a star, that I tried to believe she deliberately intended it. I would have hitched up oftener to that same star, except for the fact that stars sometimes get hot and furious at too many liberties, and switch their tails and kick the wagons of well-meaning people to smithereens. That it may be better to have had a stellar joy-ride and be sent to hell for speeding than keep your boots forever in the clay, I will neither affirm nor deny; but the prudent man hitcheth to the moon!