He looked a little abstracted, and turned as if to go.  “I think you’ll do well to rest a while just now, and keep as close hid as possible until afternoon.  The trail is a mile away at the nearest point, but some one might miss it and stray over here.  You’re quite safe if you’re careful, and stand by the tree.  You can build a fire here,” he stepped under the chimney-like opening, “without its being noticed.  Even the smoke is lost and cannot be seen so high.”

The light from above was falling on his head and shoulders, as it had on hers.  She looked at him intently.

“You travel a good deal on your figure, pardner, don’t you?” she said, with a certain admiration that was quite sexless in its quality; “but I don’t see how you pick up a living by it in the Carquinez Woods.  So you’re going, are you?  You might be more sociable.  Good-by.”

“Good-by!” He leaped from the opening.

“I say, pardner!”

He turned a little impatiently.  She had knelt down at the entrance, so as to be nearer his level, and was holding out her hand.  But he did not notice it, and she quietly withdrew it.

“If anybody dropped in and asked for you, what name will they say?”

He smiled.  “Don’t wait to hear.”

“But suppose I wanted to sing out for you, what will I call you?”

He hesitated.  “Call me—­Lo.”

“Lo, the poor Indian?” [The first word of Pope’s familiar apostrophe is humorously used in the far West as a distinguishing title for the Indian.]

“Exactly.”

It suddenly occurred to the woman, Teresa, that in the young man’s height, supple, yet erect carriage, color, and singular gravity of demeanor there was a refined, aboriginal suggestion.  He did not look like any Indian she had ever seen, but rather as a youthful chief might have looked.  There was a further suggestion in his fringed buckskin shirt and moccasins; but before she could utter the half-sarcastic comment that rose to her lips he had glided noiselessly away, even as an Indian might have done.

She readjusted the slips of hanging bark with feminine ingenuity, dispersing them so as to completely hide the entrance.  Yet this did not darken the chamber, which seemed to draw a purer and more vigorous light through the soaring shaft that pierced the room than that which came from the dim woodland aisles below.  Nevertheless, she shivered, and drawing her shawl closely around her began to collect some half-burnt fragments of wood in the chimney to make a fire.  But the preoccupation of her thoughts rendered this a tedious process, as she would from time to time stop in the middle of an action and fall into an attitude of rapt abstraction, with far-off eyes and rigid mouth.  When she had at last succeeded in kindling a fire and raising a film of pale blue smoke, that seemed to fade and dissipate entirely before it reached the top of the chimney shaft, she crouched beside it, fixed her eyes on the darkest corner of the cavern, and became motionless.