"That's how I get up," explained the girl. "Now you go back around the
corner again, and when I'm ready I'll call."
Bennington obeyed. In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air
summoning him to approach and climb.
He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight
feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller
of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated.
"Hi!" he called, "how did you get up this?"
He looked across the intervening space expectantly, and then, to his
surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously.
"I--I," stammered a small voice after a moment's hesitation, "I guess
I--shinned!"
A light broke across Bennington's mind as to the origin of the two dark
streaks on the gown, and he laughed. The girl eyed him reproachfully
for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarrassed
manner. Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder. He shinned up the
tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the
bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was
a matter of no great difficulty. In another instant he stood upon the
top of the dike.
It was, as he had anticipated, nearly flat. Under the pine branch,
which might make a very good chair back, grew a thick cushion of moss.
The one tree broke the freedom of the eye's sweep toward the west, but
in all other directions it was uninterrupted. As the girl had said, the
tops of pines alone met the view, miles on miles of them, undulating,
rising, swelling, breaking against the barrier of a dike, or lapping
the foot of a great round boulder-mountain. Here and there a darker
spot suggested a break for a mountain peak; rarely a fleck of white
marked a mountain road. Back of them all--ridge, mountain, cavernous
valley--towered old Harney, sun-browned, rock-diademed, a few wisps of
cloud streaming down the wind from his brow, locks heavy with the age
of the great Manitou whom he was supposed to represent. Eastward, the
prairie like a peaceful sea. Above, the alert sky of the west. And
through all the air a humming--vast, murmurous, swelling--as the
mountain breeze touched simultaneously with strong hand the chords, not
of one, but a thousand pine harps.
Bennington drew in a deep breath, and looked about in all directions.
The girl watched him.
"Ah! it is beautiful!" he murmured at last with a half sigh, and looked
again.
She seized his hand eagerly.
"Oh, I'm so glad you said that--and no more than that!" she cried. "I
feel the sun fairy can make you welcome now."