“Castleton’s gone with a gun, for hours, it seems,” said Florence.  “Gene just went to hunt him up.  The other gentlemen are still asleep.  I imagine they sure will sleep up heah in this air.”

Then, business-like, Florence fell to questioning Madeline about details of camp arrangement which Stewart, and Florence herself, could hardly see to without suggestion.

Before any of Madeline’s sleepy guests awakened the camp was completed.  Madeline and Florence had a tent under a pine-tree, but they did not intend to sleep in it except during stormy weather.  They spread a tarpaulin, made their bed on it, and elected to sleep under the light of the stars.  After that, taking the hounds with them, they explored.  To Madeline’s surprise, the park was not a little half-mile nook nestling among the crags, but extended farther than they cared to walk, and was rather a series of parks.  They were no more than small valleys between gray-toothed peaks.  As the day advanced the charm of the place grew upon Madeline.  Even at noon, with the sun beating down, there was comfortable warmth rather than heat.  It was the kind of warmth that Madeline liked to feel in the spring.  And the sweet, thin, rare atmosphere began to affect her strangely.  She breathed deeply of it until she felt light-headed, as if her body lacked substance and might drift away like a thistledown.  All at once she grew uncomfortably sleepy.  A dreamy languor possessed her, and, lying under a pine with her head against Florence, she went to sleep.  When she opened her eyes the shadows of the crags stretched from the west, and between them streamed a red-gold light.  It was hazy, smoky sunshine losing its fire.  The afternoon had far advanced.  Madeline sat up.  Florence was lazily reading.  The two Mexican women were at work under the fly where the big stone fireplace had been erected.  No one else was in sight.

Florence, upon being questioned, informed Madeline that incident about camp had been delightfully absent.  Castleton had returned and was profoundly sleeping with the other men.  Presently a chorus of merry calls attracted Madeline’s attention, and she turned to see Helen limping along with Dorothy, and Mrs. Beck and Edith supporting each other.  They were all rested, but lame, and delighted with the place, and as hungry as bears awakened from a winter’s sleep.  Madeline forthwith escorted them round the camp, and through the many aisles between the trees, and to the mossy, pine-matted nooks under the crags.

Then they had dinner, sitting on the ground after the manner of Indians; and it was a dinner that lacked merriment only because everybody was too busily appeasing appetite.