“Please don’t put yourself to any inconvenience at all, Kate.  I am really not hungry at all.  Provisions were furnished those who fought the fire.  I had coffee, and a really substantial breakfast before I left them.  I shall lie here for a while and enjoy the luxury of doing nothing for a while.  By George, Kate!  The Forest Service certainly does make a man work!  Think of felling trees all night long!  That is the way they go about it, I find.  They cut down trees and clear away a strip across the front of the fire where there seems to be the greatest possibility of keeping the flames from jumping across.  They even go so far as to rake back the pine needles and dry cones as thoroughly as possible, and in that manner they prevent the flames from creeping along the ground.  It is really wonderfully effective when they can get to work in the light growth.  I was astounded to see what may be accomplished with axes and picks and rakes and shovels.  But it is work, though.  By George, it is work!”

“Don’t try to root in those needles for a soft spot,” Kate advised him practically.  “Not when some persons have more cushions than they need or can use.”  Whereupon she went over and took two pillows from under Marion’s feet, and pulled another from under her shoulder.

These made the professor comfortable enough.  He lay back smiling gratefully—­even affectionately—­upon her.

“You certainly do know how to make a man glad that he is alive,” he thanked her.  “Now, if I could lie here and look up through these branches and listen while a dear little woman I know recites Shelley’s The Cloud, I could feel that paradise holds no greater joys than this sheltered little vale.”

The hammock became suddenly and violently agitated.  Marion was turning over with a movement that, in one less gracefully slim, might be called a flop.

“Well, good night!  I hope you’ll excuse me, Kate, for beating it,” she said, sitting up.  “But I’ve heard The Cloud till I could say it backwards with my tongue paralyzed.  I’ll go down by the creek and finish my sleep.”  She took the three remaining cushions under her arms and departed.  At the creek she paused, her ear turned toward the shady spot beyond the cabin.  She heard Kate’s elocutionary voice declaiming brightly: 

“From my wings are shaken the dews that waken
The sweet buds, every one—­”

She went on a little farther, until she could hear only the higher tones of Kate’s voice above the happy gurgle of the stream.  She scrambled through a willow tangle, stopped on the farther side to listen, and smiled when the water talked to her with no interruption of human voices.

“And Doug thinks he’s a real nature lover!” she commented, throwing her cushions down into a grassy little hollow under the bank.  “But if he would rather hear Kate elocute about it than to lie and listen to the real thing, he’s nothing more or less than a nature pirate.”  She curled herself down among the cushions and stared up through the slender willow branches into the top of an alder that leaned over the bank and dangled its finger-tip branches playfully toward her.