Her eye, at that, went to the fire, now brilliantly painting the trail, to the pillowed figure upon the moss, with the sweater-roll in the hollow of the injured knee.
"But, land sakes! I needn't ha' been in such a mad hurry getting here, after all--giving my skin to make ear-laps for the old Man Killer!" she cried, holding up two raw palms, flayed by indiscriminate climbing. "For, my senses! they're no stray lambs o' tenderfoot--those 'twa bit lassies'!" mimicking Andrew's blowpipe. "They know how to take care of themselves in a pinch--and of somebody else, too!... And--and, see here, what I've brought you, honey, rolled in the blanket for _him_!"
"Cake--choc'late cake! C-coffee!" Una gasped feebly, confronted by the ghost of her everyday life.
She grasped the reality, though, of that normal life, somewhere waiting for her, with the first bite into the brown-eyed cake, while her sweater was restored to her thinly clad shoulders as the mountain woman spread her blanket over the injured man and tucked it under him for a pillow.
"You--you're a 'trump,' little niece--letting me have it for-r so long," he said wistfully.
Occasionally it is easier to land gracefully after a long jump than a short one in the case of an awkward gulf to be crossed! She saw that her friend Pemrose, no relation at all to this extraordinary uncle, could care for him and welcome him without embarrassment, while, with every doubtful glance in his direction, she felt, still, as if she did not quite know whether she was on her head or her heels.
She crept, for reassurance, very close to the mountain woman, the typical June woman, with the normal rose in her cheeks, and the golden buttercup for a heart, as she picnicked, subdued, by the trail fire.
"I don't think--oh! I don't believe I ever met anybody q-quite like you before. But I'm so glad you're in the world!" she murmured gratefully.
"And I just wish you could come into _my_ world often, girlie," was the cuddling answer, "for it's lonely as old Sarum here on the mountainside--though where old Sarum is I don't know myself!" breezily.
"Old Man Greylock doesn't talk to one, you know--only roars sometimes." The woman lifted her eye to the dim peak above her, with the pale mists streaming, tress-like, about its crown, from which Mount Greylock takes its name; then her anxious glance returned to the sufferer. "Ha! there he goes--making faces at the pain again," she murmured pityingly. "And, mercy! I suppose 'twill be a blue moon yet--a dog's age--before his son can get here."
