“Has this ever happened to the cabin before?” he asked, as he thought of its peculiar base.

“No.”

He looked at the water again.  There was a decided current.  The overflow was evidently no part of the original inundation.  He put his hand in the water.  It was icy cold.  Yes, he understood it now.  It was the sudden melting of snow in the Sierras which had brought this volume down the canyon.  But was there more still to come?

“Have you anything like a long pole or stick in the cabin?”

“Nary,” said the girl, opening her big eyes and shaking her head with a simulation of despair, which was, however, flatly contradicted by her laughing mouth.

“Nor any cord or twine?” he continued.

She handed him a ball of coarse twine.

“May I take a couple of these hooks?” he asked, pointing to some rough iron hooks in the rafters, on which bacon and jerked beef were hanging.

She nodded.  He dislodged the hooks, greased them with the bacon rind, and affixed them to the twine.

“Fishin’?” she asked demurely.

“Exactly,” he replied gravely.

He threw the line in the water.  It slackened at about six feet, straightened, and became taut at an angle, and then dragged.  After one or two sharp jerks he pulled it up.  A few leaves and grasses were caught in the hooks.  He examined them attentively.

“We’re not in the creek,” he said, “nor in the old overflow.  There’s no mud or gravel on the hooks, and these grasses don’t grow near water.”

“Now, that’s mighty cute of you,” she said admiringly, as she knelt beside him on the platform.  “Let’s see what you’ve caught.  Look yer!” she added, suddenly lifting a limp stalk, “that’s ‘old man,’ and thar ain’t a scrap of it grows nearer than Springer’s Rise,—­four miles from home.”

“Are you sure?” he asked quickly.

“Sure as pop!  I used to go huntin’ it for smellidge.”

“For what?” he said, with a bewildered smile.

“For this,”—­she thrust the leaves to his nose and then to her own pink nostrils; “for—­for”—­she hesitated, and then with a mischievous simulation of correctness added, “for the perfume.”

He looked at her admiringly.  For all her five feet ten inches, what a mere child she was, after all!  What a fool he was to have taken a resentful attitude towards her!  How charming and graceful she looked, kneeling there beside him!

“Tell me,” he said suddenly, in a gentler voice, “what were you laughing at just now?”

Her brown eyes wavered for a moment, and then brimmed with merriment.  She threw herself sideways, in a leaning posture, supporting herself on one arm, while with her other hand she slowly drew out her apron string, as she said, in a demure voice:—­

“Well, I reckoned it was jest too killin’ to think of you, who didn’t want to talk to me, and would hev given your hull pile to hev skipped out o’ this, jest stuck here alongside o’ me, whether you would or no, for Lord knows how long!”