Judith, going to her favorite pool to bathe, saw that it had shrunk till it seemed but a fairy well hid among the willows.  A quarter of a mile above was another pool, hidden like a jewel in its case of green, broidered with scarlet roseberries and white clematis; and towards this she bent her steps, as time was a-plenty that morning.  She kept to the stones of the creek for a pathway, jumping lightly from those that were moss-grown to those that hid their nakedness in the dark, velvet shadows of early morning, her white feet touching the shallow stream like pale gulls that dipped and skimmed.  “Diana’s Pool,” as she called it, was always clear.  It lay half hid beneath a shelving rock, a fount for the tiny, white fall that crooned and sang as it fell.  And here she bathed, as the east flamed where the mountains blackened against it.  Gold halos tipped the clouds, that melted presently into fiery waves, then burst into one great aureole through which the sun rode triumphant, and it was day.

She had kept post-office the day before, and it would not be till day after to-morrow that the squires of the lariat would come again to offer their hearts, their worldly goods, their complete reformation, if she would only change her mind.  It was all such an old story that she had grown to regard them with a tenderness almost maternal.  But to-day was all her own, and the spirit of adventure swelled high in her bosom as she thought of what she had planned.  It was warm and close and still in the Dax house as Judith made her way softly to her own room and began her preparations for the long journey she was to take afoot.  To walk in the abominations devised by the white man for the purpose of cramping his feet would have been a serious handicap to Judith.  The twenty miles that she would walk before nightfall was no very great undertaking to her, but it was part of her primitive directness to accomplish it with as little expenditure of fatigue and comfort as possible.  Moreover, who could steal through the forest in those heeled things without announcing his coming and frightening the forest folk, and sending them skurrying?  And Judith loved to surprise them and see them busy with their affairs—­to creep along in her soft, elk-hide moccasins and catch their watchful eyes and see the things that were not for the heavy-booted white man.

She might have inspired Kitty Colebrooke to a sonnet as she stepped out into the glad morning light, in short skirt and jacket, green-clad as the pines that girdled the mountains, with a knapsack with rations of bread and meat and the wherewithal to build a fire should she wander belated.  She softly closed the door, not to awaken Leander and his slumbering lady, and broke into the running gait that the Indians use on their all-day journeys, the elk-hide moccasins falling soft as snow-flakes on the trail.  Dolly she missed chiefly for her companionship, for Judith had not the white man’s utter helplessness without a horse in this country of high altitudes.  When she walked she breathed, carried herself, covered ground like her mother’s people, and loved the inspiration of it.