“There,” he reassured her lightly, “don’t do that!  Why, you are a great hunter.  You got your game.  And it was a splendid shot.  We’ll have him skinned when we get back home, and we’ll cure the skin, and you can make something out of it—­a spectacle case,” he suggested at random.  “I know how you feel,” he went on, to give her time to recover, “but all hunters feel that way occasionally.  See, I’ll put him just here until we get ready to go home, where nothing can get him.”

He deposited the squirrel in the cleft of a rock, quite out of sight, and stood back as though pleased.  “There, that’s fine!” he concluded.

With one of those instantaneous transitions, which seemed so natural to her, and yet which appeared to reach not at all to her real nature, she had changed from an aspect of passionate grief to one of solemn inquiry.  Bennington found her looking at him with the soul brimming to the very surface of her great eyes.

“I think you may come up on my rock,” she said simply after a moment.

They skirted the base of the dike together until they had reached the westernmost side.  There Bennington was shown the means of ascent, which he had overlooked before because of his too close examination of the cliff itself.  At a distance of about twenty feet from the dike grew a large pine tree, the lowest branch of which extended directly over the little plateau and about a foot above it.  Next to the large pine stood two smaller saplings side by side and a few inches apart.  These had been converted into a ladder by the nailing across of rustic rounds.

“That’s how I get up,” explained the girl.  “Now you go back around the corner again, and when I’m ready I’ll call.”

Bennington obeyed.  In a few moments he heard again the voice in the air summoning him to approach and climb.

He ascended the natural ladder easily, but when within six or eight feet of the large branch that reached across to the dike, the smaller of the two saplings ceased, and so, naturally, the ladder terminated.

“Hi!” he called, “how did you get up this?”

He looked across the intervening space expectantly, and then, to his surprise, he observed that the girl was blushing furiously.

“I—­I,” stammered a small voice after a moment’s hesitation, “I guess I—­shinned!”

A light broke across Bennington’s mind as to the origin of the two dark streaks on the gown, and he laughed.  The girl eyed him reproachfully for a moment or so; then she too began to laugh in an embarrassed manner.  Whereupon Bennington laughed the harder.  He shinned up the tree, to find that an ingenious hand rope had been fitted above the bridge limb, so that the crossing of the short interval to the rock was a matter of no great difficulty.  In another instant he stood upon the top of the dike.