“Listen!” she began.  “I see pines, many pines, just the tops of them, and they are all waving in the breeze.  Did you ever see trees from on top?  They are quite different.  And out from the pines come great round hills made all of stone.  I think they look like skulls.  Then there are breathless descents where the pines fall away.  Once in a while a little white road flashes out.”

“Yes,” urged Bennington, as the voice paused.  “And what else do you see?”

“I see the prairie, too,” she went on half dreamily.  “It is brown now, but the green is beginning to shine through it just a very little.  And out beyond there is a sparkle.  That is the Cheyenne.  And beyond that there is something white, and that is the Bad Lands.”

The voice broke off with a happy little laugh.

Bennington saw the scene as though it lay actually spread out before him.  There was something in the choice of the words, clearcut, decisive, and descriptive; but more in the exquisite modulations of the voice, adding here a tint, there a shade to the picture, and casting over the whole that poetic glamour which, rarely, is imitated in grosser materials by Nature herself, when, just following sunset, she suffuses the landscape with a mellow afterglow.

The head, sunbonneted, reappeared perked inquiringly sideways.

“Hello, stranger!” it called with a nasal inflection, “how air ye?  Do y’ think minin’ is goin’ t’ pan out well this yar spring?” Then she caught sight of his weapon.  “What are you going to shoot?” she asked with sudden interest.

“I thought I might see a deer.”

“Deer! hoh!” she cried in lofty scorn, reassuming her nasal tone.  “You is shore a tenderfoot!  Don’ you-all know that blastin’ scares all th’ deer away from a minin’ camp?”

Bennington looked confused.  “No, I hadn’t thought of that,” he confessed stoutly enough.

“I kind of like to shoot!” said she, a little wistfully.  “What sort of a gun is it?”

“A Savage smokeless,” answered Bennington perfunctorily.

“One of the thirty-calibres?” inquired the sunbonnet with new interest.

“Yes,” gasped Bennington, astonished at so much feminine knowledge of firearms.

“Oh!  I’d like to see it.  I never saw any of those.  May I shoot it, just once?”

“Of course you may.  More than once.  Shall I come up?”

“No.  I’ll come down.  You sit right still on that rock.”

The sunbonnet disappeared, and there ensued a momentary commotion on the other side of the dike.  In an instant the girl came around the corner, picking her way over the loose blocks of stone.  With the finger-tips of either hand she held the pink starched skirt up, displaying a neat little foot in a heavy little shoe.  Diagonally across the skirt ran two irregular brown stains.  She caught him looking at them.

“Naughty, naughty!” said she, glancing down at them with a grimace.