"Seeing and feeling? Yes, that must be what I mean. But why--what is it? There are the beauty and color--the wild, shaggy slopes--the gray cliffs--the singing wind--the lulling water--the clouds--the sky. And the silence, loneliness, sweetness of it all."
"It's a driftin' back. What I love to do an' yet fear most. It's what makes a lone hunter of a man. An' it can grow so strong that it binds a man to the wilds."
"How strange!" murmured Helen. "But that could never bind ME. Why, I must live and fulfil my mission, my work in the civilized world."
It seemed to Helen that Dale almost imperceptibly shrank at her earnest words.
"The ways of Nature are strange," he said. "I look at it different. Nature's just as keen to wean you back to a savage state as you are to be civilized. An' if Nature won, you would carry out her design all the better."
This hunter's talk shocked Helen and yet stimulated her mind.
"Me--a savage? Oh no!" she exclaimed. "But, if that were possible, what would Nature's design be?"
"You spoke of your mission in life," he replied. "A woman's mission is to have children. The female of any species has only one mission--to reproduce its kind. An' Nature has only one mission--toward greater strength, virility, efficiency--absolute perfection, which is unattainable."
"What of mental and spiritual development of man and woman?" asked Helen.
"Both are direct obstacles to the design of Nature. Nature is physical. To create for limitless endurance for eternal life. That must be Nature's inscrutable design. An' why she must fail."
"But the soul!" whispered Helen.
"Ah! When you speak of the soul an' I speak of life we mean the same. You an' I will have some talks while you're here. I must brush up my thoughts."
"So must I, it seems," said Helen, with a slow smile. She had been rendered grave and thoughtful. "But I guess I'll risk dreaming under the pines."
Bo had been watching them with her keen blue eyes.
"Nell, it'd take a thousand years to make a savage of you," she said. "But a week will do for me."
"Bo, you were one before you left Saint Joe," replied Helen. "Don't you remember that school-teacher Barnes who said you were a wildcat and an Indian mixed? He spanked you with a ruler."
"Never! He missed me," retorted Bo, with red in her cheeks. "Nell, I wish you'd not tell things about me when I was a kid."