He must take the mare, too, she said; and promised to start him on the bridle-path, so that he could not miss it.

“What!  Must I ride on a side-saddle?”

“It should be easy for you,” she laughed.  “You pretended to know all about it when you taught me.”  In the end it was settled that she should ride and he walk beside till Bayard was found.  “Then you can lead her back and leave her with Mr. Strongtharm.”

“But I shall need Bayard to bring home a sack of lime for my mortar.  And you are over thoughtful for Madcap.  I walked up to inspect the pasture, and there is enough to last the pair for a week.  It is odds, too, we find some burnt lands at the back of these woods, with patches of good grass.  Let us keep the horses up here, at any rate until the nights turn colder.  A taste of hard faring will be good for their pampered flesh, as for mine.  Besides—­though you may not know it—­I am a first-class groom.”

“As well as a mason?  You will have to turn hunter, too, before long, else your cook will be out of work.  Dear, dear, how we begin to crowd the days!”

For a whole week he worked at intervals, building his chimney with stones from the river bed, and laying them well and truly.  Ruth helped him at whiles, when household duties did not claim her.  Now and then, when his back ached with the toil, he would break off for a spell and watch her as she stooped over the cooking-pot, or knelt by the stream-side, bare-legged, with petticoat kilted high, beating the linen on a flat stone.

When the chimney was finished they were in great anxiety lest, being built close under the cliff, it should catch a down-draught of the wind and fill the dwelling with smoke.  But the wind came, and, as it turned out, made a leap from the cliff to the valley, singing high overhead and missing the chimney clear.  When they lit their first fire indoors and ran forth to see the smoke rising in a thin blue pillar against the pines, they laughed elated, and at supper drank to their handiwork.

Ruth’s first sacrifice on the new hearth was the solemn heating of a flat iron, to crimp and pleat her lover’s body-linen.

Next day he shot a deer and flayed it; and, the next, set to work to build a bed.  Their couch had been of white linen laid upon skins, the skins resting on a thick mat of leaves.  Now he raised it from the ground on four posts, joining the posts with a stout framework and lacing the framework with cords criss-crossed like the netting of a hammock.  Also he replaced the curtain at the entrance with a door of split pinewood, and fashioned a wooden bolt.

The halcyon weather held for two weeks, the delicate weather of Indian summer.  Day by day the forest dropped its leaves under a blue windless sky; but the nights sharpened their frosts.  Ruth, stealing early to her bathing-pool, found it edged with thin ice, and paused, breaking it with taps of her naked foot while she braced her body for the cold shock.