They examined the horse together.  The owner named thirty dollars as his price.  Old Mizzou said this was cheap.  It was not.  Bennington agreed to take the animal on trial for a day or two, so they hitched a lariat around its neck and led it over to the wagon.  After despatching a few errands they returned to camp.  Bennington got out his ledger and journal and made entries importantly.  Old Mizzou disappeared in the direction of the corral, where he was joined presently by the man Arthur.

CHAPTER VII

THE MEETING AT THE ROCK

On his way to keep the appointment of the afternoon, Bennington de Laney discovered within himself a new psychological experience.  He found that, since the evening before, he had been observing things about him for the purpose of detailing them to his new friend.  Little beauties of nature—­as when a strange bird shone for an instant in vivid contrast to the mountain laurel near his window; an unusual effect of pine silhouettes near the sky; a weird, semi-poetic suggestion of one of Poe’s stories implied in a contorted shadow cast by a gnarled little oak in the light of the moon—­these he had noticed and remembered, and was now eager to tell his companion, with full assurance of her sympathy and understanding.  Three days earlier he would have passed them by.

But stranger still was his discovery that he had always noticed such things, and had remembered them.  Observations of the sort had heretofore been quite unconscious.  Without knowing it he had always been a Nature lover, one who appreciated the poetry of her moods, one who saw the beauty of her smiles, or, what is more rare, the greater beauty of her frown.  The influence had entered into his being, but had lain neglected.  Now it stole forth as the odour of a dried balsam bough steals from the corner of a loft whither it has been thrown carelessly.  It was all delightful and new, and he wanted to tell her of it.

He did so.  After a little he told her about Aliris:  A Romance of all Time, in which she appeared so interested that he detailed the main idea and the plot.  At her request, he promised to read it to her.  He was very young, you see, and very inexperienced; he threw himself generously, without reserve, on this girl’s sympathies in a manner of which, assuredly, he should have been quite ashamed.  Only the very young are not ashamed.

The girl listened, at first half amused.  Then she was touched, for she saw that it was sincere, and youthful, and indicative of clear faith in what is beautiful, and in fine ideals of what is fitting.  Perhaps, dimly, she perceived that this is good stuff of which to make a man, provided it springs from immaturity, and not from the sentimentalism of degeneracy.  The loss of it is a price we pay for wisdom.  Some think the price too high.

As he talked on in this moonshiny way, really believing his ridiculous abstractions the most important things in the world, gradually she too became young.  She listened with parted lips, and in her great eyes the soul rose and rose within, clearing away the surface moods as twilight clears the land of everything but peace.