The pink moccasin, the largest of our native orchids, is easily the queen of the rare woodland spot in which it grows. Its flower of bright rose pink, veined with red, is held with the stalwart erectness of an Indian, whose love of solitude and quiet woods it shares.
To Amanda it was one of the loveliest flowers of the woods. She always counted the days as the time drew near when the moccasins bloomed.
When Isabel Souders arrived at the Reist farmhouse she found Amanda ready with basket and trowel for the lady-slipper hunt. Amanda had put on a simple white dress and green-and-white sun hat. She looked with bewilderment at the city girl’s attire, but said nothing just then. They stopped long enough for Isabel to meet the mistress of the home and then they went down the road to the Crow Hill schoolhouse.
Suddenly Isabel stood still and panted. “Oh--Manda--you can run! Have compassion on me. My hair will be all tumbled after such mad walking, and my organdie torn.”
“Hair!” echoed the country girl with a laugh. “Who thinks about hair on a moccasin hunt? You should not go flower hunting in city clothes. With your pink and white dress and lovely Dresden sash, silk stockings and low shoes, you look more fit for a dance than a ramble after deep woods flowers, such as moccasins. But we might as well go on now.”
She led the way across the school-yard, climbed nimbly over the rail fence and laughed at Isabel’s clumsy imitation of her. Pink azaleas grew in great bushes of bloom throughout the woods. Isabel would have stopped to pick some but Amanda said, “That withers easily. Better pick them when we come back.”
They followed a narrow path, so narrow that later the summer luxuriant growth of underbrush would almost obliterate it. But Amanda knew the way to her spot. Deeper into the woods they delved, past bowers of pink azalea and closely growing branches of trees whose tender green foliage was breaking into summer growth. The bright May sunshine dripped through the green and dappled the ground in little discs of gold.
Suddenly the path led up-hill in a steep grade. Amanda stopped and leaned against a slender sapling.
“Stand here and look up,” she invited.
Isabel obeyed, her gaze traveling searchingly along the steep trail.
“Oh, the beauties!” she cried as she discovered the pink flowers. “The beauties! Oh, there are more of them! And still more! Oh, Amanda!”
Before them was Amanda’s haunt of the pink moccasin. From the low underbrush of spring growth rose several dozen gorgeously beautiful pink lady-slippers, each alone on a thick stem with two broad leaves spreading their green beauty near the base. What miracle had brought the rare shy plants so near the dusty road where rattling wagons and gliding automobiles sped on their busy way?
“May I pick them?” asked the city girl.
“Yes, but only one root. I’ll dig that up with the trowel. That’s for your friend’s botany specimen. The rest we’ll pull up gently and we’ll get flower, stem and leaves and leave the roots in the ground for other years. I never pick all of the flowers. I leave some here in the woods --it seems they belong here and I can’t bring myself to walk off with every last one of them in my arms and leave the hill desolate.”
“You are a queer girl!” was the frank statement of the city girl. “But you’re a dear, just the same.”
They picked a number of the largest flowers.
“That’s enough,” Amanda declared.
Isabel laughed. “I’d take every one if it were my haunt.”
“And then other people might come here after some and find the place robbed of all its blooms.”
“Oh,” said the other girl easily, “I look out for Isabel. Now, please, may I pick some of that pretty wild azalea?” she asked teasingly as they came down the hill.
“Help yourself. That isn’t rare. You couldn’t take all of that if you tried.”
So Isabel gathered branches of the pink bloom until her arms were filled with it and the six moccasins in her hand almost overshadowed.
As the two girls reached the edge of the woods and climbed over the fence into the school-yard Martin Landis came walking down the road.
“Hello,” he called gaily. “Been robbing the woods, Amanda?”
“Aren’t they lovely?” she asked. Then when he drew near she introduced him to the girl beside her.
Martin Landis was not a blind man. A pretty girl, dark-eyed and dusky-haired, her arms full of pink azaleas, her lips parted in a smile above the flowers, and that smile given to him--it was too pretty a picture to fail in making an impression upon him.