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THE MASTER-GIRL
BY THE SAME AUTHOR
MEMOIRS OF A PERSON OF QUALITY
AS IT HAPPENED
AN OLD SCORE
THE MISTAKES OF MISS MANISTY
[Illustration: LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT]
THE
MASTER-GIRL
BY
ASHTON HILLIERS
WITH EIGHT ILLUSTRATIONS BY
ARTHUR H. BUCKLAND
SECOND EDITION
METHUEN & CO, LTD.
36 ESSEX STREET W.C.
LONDON
_First Published_ _April 28th 1910_
_Second Edition_ _1910_
TO MY CAVE MOTHER
Quarried from world-old gloom,
Yellow, brittle and dry,
Here, in our Science-Room,
Locked under glass they lie;
Bone to its bone brought nigh,
Bare to general view,
Bones that of yore were--you!
_And, bone of your bone am I!_
Nature her course has changed,
The sea-worm's lair is dry,
Your moon aloof, estranged,
Stares from an alien sky,
Levelled are low and high,
Mountains have rumbled down,
Here is a gas-lit town,
_But bone of your bone am I._
Lords of the wild who reigned
By fear of fang and eye,
Antlered, tusked and maned,
Under the ooze they lie.
Mute is their hunting cry,
Their forests fall'n and gone,
Yet, the Soul that was you lives on,
_And, bone of your bone am I._
Bend from your cavern-crypt,
Mother, a kindling eye,
Breathe thro' my manuscript
Strength of a day long by;
Colour, vitality,
Passion and laughter give!
Till the story's dry bones live,
For--_bone of your bone am I_!
A.H.
CONTENTS
PAGE
Prologue 1
CHAP.
I. Love at First Sight 17
II. A Housekeeping 33
III. The Ghost-Bear 64
IV. Hard Need Mother of Invention 81
V. The Testing of the New Thing 110
VI. Renunciations 151
VII. Short, somewhat Dry, but Important 162
VIII. The Flitting, and the Forerunner 169
IX. The Home-coming 200
X. The Spear-Throwing 218
XI. The Passing of the Master-Girl 270
Epilogue 293
LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
Love at First Sight _Frontispiece_
_Facing page_
The Ghost-Bear 64
Salving the Ghost-Bear's Skin 100
He threw short with a Gasp 122
Stale-mate 144
Pursued 169
The Forerunner 190
Drew Swiftly, and as Swiftly Loosed 256
THE MASTER-GIRL
PROLOGUE
He had come gently and observantly up the glen, tapping here and
scratching there as he climbed, and ever and anon straightening an
elderly back to deliver a small cough. Also at intervals he would turn
his face to the way by which he had come to rest the plantar muscles
and study the lie of the land.
Chance-led he came and unadventurously, as one might say, and with no
more premonition of impending change, or of this being a White Day
in his life than had you, yourself, dear reader, when you left your
breakfast-table this morning.
He was a little person in the clerical wideawake and dark tweeds of
a don in vacation, elderly and grey, with heavy, lower-middle-class
features refined by expression as a sunset refines a dull street.
Something about the rounded shoulders and narrow chest bespoke the
bookish man, the "scholar's slope," they used to call it. His hands
were large and broad at the finger-tips, such must have done manual
labour in their time, pick-and-shovel work, possibly. At the moment
of his walking into this story they were--I will not say dirty, but
redolent of the soil, for as he went he would still be fumbling in a
roomy wallet which pulled down his shoulder, and be taking therefrom
for close and loving inspection this or that shapeless fragment of
stone which he would presently return to the society of its fellows.
"It never came here by accident--there is no such thing," he murmured,
conversing with himself, thought discussing matters with thought,
as do the thoughts of those of us who live the single life, or
cherish interests which are unshared by those with whom we cohabit.
"We have no example from this level," he went on, turning in hand
a something small and angular which he had picked up a few yards
down the slope, a fragment of grey chert it was. "Three conchoidal
fractures are sufficient, when associated with such patination. Here
are--six--eight minor flaws in these cutting edges, apart from the
cross-fracture--(patinated too). Yes, undoubtedly a used-up flake. And
the thing hasn't travelled half-a-mile from home.... Where's the floor?"
"And, to think," he went on, "that such evidence would be lost--wasted
upon that young doctor-fellow. It is almost incredible, the crass
ignorance of our so-called scientific men.... Tried to interest him ...
no use.... 'Out here to climb,' he says!... And with lovely things like
these under his feet.... Amazing!"
In fact, the professor exhibited the impatience which the man of one
idea feels for the man of another, and had even the personal repulsion
which a man with the Oxford manner experiences for one who begins all
his sentences with "_M'yess!_"
From which disjointed self-communings the reader will have already
deduced that the professor was an ethnologist, one of that small band
of heroes who during the past hundred years have quietly dug out and
fitted together the buried past of the human race, pelted all the while
by Ignorance and Bigotry as they delved.
The little grey professor had come in for his share of pelting: not
very recently, for his science has won her right to exist and speak
her mind. Dogma, which would have burned the ethnologist some time
back, and more recently did her best to starve him, has of late
lifted the boycott. He is now merely glanced at with a pitying shrug
and passed over when anything good is going, as "Eminent in his own
line, but--peculiar," and forthwith, the good thing goes to a safe
man, someone who never did anything, nor ever will. This is Dogma's
way of coming round. The sons of the men who pelted us will build our
sepulchres, never fear, whilst themselves making a cock-shy of some
other poor devil whom their sons will canonise in turn: for the bigots,
and the poor, ye have always with you.
So it had come to pass that the professor by dint of giving to
fossil-grubbing the forty-five years of life which he might have given
to money-grubbing, and spending upon the collection and verification
of tiny fragments of unpopular evidence the time which he might have
spent more profitably in the delivery of sermons in St Mary's, which
would have delighted the stupid by the "safety" of what they didn't
see the bottom of, and amused the clever by the preacher's address in
skating upon cat-ice, had come to know as much as was known about the
Magdalanian Period.
Others worked at River-drift, Thames gravels and the terraces north of
Amiens: and other some questioned the Plateaux deposits for eoliths
and got but uncertain answers, as to which our professor reserved his
judgment, unconvinced, but not wishing to be found sitting in the seat
of the scornful at the Last Day. Neoliths he pretended to know nothing
about whilst knowing everything that had been written. It was the men
of the Madelaine Cave, the giant hunters of Mentone and their artist
fellows to whom he had given his life.
Now some studies can be pursued by the fireside, the mathematics of
a boomerang, for instance, or why a breakfast egg, if you set it
spinning vigorously upon its side, will presently arise and spin upon
its end. For the collation of Syriac gospels the neighbourhood of the
Bodleian is as good a neighbourhood as any, but our professor, whose
fireside was within a stone's-throw of the Bodleian, cared for neither
mathematics nor codices, and as regards his own particular study had
long since known that to prosecute it as it should be prosecuted
entailed days and weeks in clammy dark caverns long miles from
anywhere, and subsequent months put in with a series of little sieves
and acids and gelatine and what not, cleaning-out and piecing together
the uncleanly little bits of brittle rubbish which eventually would
constitute a New Fact and take a place in the growing chain of evidence.
"To anybody capable of weighing testimony," muttered the professor,
"this flake, which can only have been brought eighty miles up-stream
by human agency, is as good evidence of Early Man at this end of the
valley as if I had projected myself back a thousand centuries and seen
the fellow break his tool and drop it."
He was somewhat out of breath with his climb, moreover the going was
none of the best; there was no path, and the slope was clothed with
a tall growth of flowering weeds, mountain coltsfoot, and the great
purple gentian, dogwood, juniper and aconite. He replaced his hat
after wiping his forehead, and, turning, parted the brush to find
himself faced by a low bluff, an outcrop of the underlying bedrock,
jutting through the rough slope of _débris_ into which the at-one-time
precipitous sides of the glen had broken down. The bluff bore a
ludicrous resemblance to the countenance of some ancient person asleep
and half buried in bedclothes; there aloft was a massive nose and
receding rocky forehead, nearer an upper lip overhung a transverse
fissure, an open mouth, nearly filled with a tongue of soapy-looking
brown stalagmite resting upon a lower jaw of the same material hidden
by a growth of Martagon lilies. The professor, unaware of what Fate had
in store for him, and, to tell the truth, expecting nothing out of the
way, for a man of his years and experiences is past being sanguine,
peered through the lush greenery and saw beneath the edge of that lower
lip a jumble of small broken stone loosely cemented like ill-compacted
concrete into which water has percolated (which was precisely what the
material was and what had befallen it).
And, peering thus, a Something caught the professor's eye. Now the
Thing, whatever it might turn out to be, could not fly away, nor was
its finder a callow novice that he should howk out his trove at sight
and, maybe, destroy evidence in so doing, so he made himself a mental
rough sketch of its surroundings before disturbing them.
"A lot of weathering just here," he muttered. "Glen half filled-up
since the watershed was cut back and the stream diverted. This was
a cliff once upon a time, and this was a cave. Roof fallen in and
cemented down to an ancient stalagmite floor ... breccia beneath with,
apparently, a layer of charcoal in it.... If you please!" this to the
lilies; they did please, or at least made way for him; he was down
upon his elderly knees in the moist dirt breaking away the perished
flooring of the old cave with his hammer; interested, of course, for
the case was exactly in his line, but still without enthusiasm, when
(see how our best things approach us unsought) the man made his great
find, the chance of his lifetime came to him, such a trove as he had
ceased to expect, for, despite many long vacations and snatched Easters
spent in patient and systematic grubbing, the man had not been one
of the successful cave explorers. But this was his day; a plate of
stalagmite came away, and the disintegrated breccia beneath it gave to
his cautious and practised handling, and lo, he drew forth the whole
and perfect shoulder-blade of a Cave Bear, the mighty _Ursus spelæus_
himself, glazed all over back and front with a transparent film of
carbonate of lime.
The relic bore abundant marks of the chert knife, a shard of which
was cemented down to it; but, what raised its interest and value to
the _n_th power, and made its discoverer's heart to flutter in his
bosom, was the clear, boldly-drawn lines of the picture with which
the flat surface of the bone was etched. Here was a find indeed, a
leaf from the sketch-book of a Primitive, as good as anything found
by Lartet and Christy. "_De_lightful! a find at last!" exclaimed the
professor. "A contemporary picture of _Spelæus_, positively our first,
I think. A bear attacking two humans, of opposite sexes, eh, what? but
that seems unlikely. And what is this bent object in the hand of the
indeterminate figure?--Weapon?--But what?" screwing up his eyes. "Bent
throwing-stick, Egyptian type? Boomerang?--very curious. Same object
repeated in corner of picture behind bear; conceivably boomerang in
flight. But as to this--er--epicene figure--I doubt its being female
somehow!--and yet--" He turned the bone, "Hey, what have we here?--this
I might almost say justifies a feminine interpretation, there
apparently was a woman in the case," for adhering to the back of the
scapula was a bone needle! "Rough work this, for a female," remarked
the professor, wagging his head whilst polishing his glasses, and
attempting to realise the scene. "This fellow was as big as a horse, a
grizzly would be considerably smaller and with inferior jaw power. The
Magdalanian type was tall, I grant you,--she might have stood six feet
and an inch, but--" he wagged his head again in disapproval of a woman
participating in so rough a field sport as this sketch indicated. The
professor was an old bachelor with mid-Victorian conceptions of the
functions of womanhood.
"There is no getting over the charcoal--it was a cooking-place, a
hearth. The design, here, implies leisure and permanent residence, and
the needle a lady. This was a home, a housekeeping." He wrapped the
relic in a silk handkerchief; it was more precious in his eyes than
the arm of St Mark in those of a Venetian, and at least as authentic.
This done he turned to take stock of the place, conversing gently with
himself the while. "Cave more roomy at one time--hardly to call a cave
now, possibly was never better than _un abri_, just the rock shelter
that I once spent an uncomfortable night under among the Spanish
Pyrenees." He glanced up at the overhang, fringed with fern. "Calls
for systematic exploration.... Costly business at this height, short
season and no quarters within any reasonable distance. Entails a camp,
I fear. Wonder if the University would come down with a grant?... _Who
were these people?_" he stroked the handkerchief. "We get no nearer; a
hundred thousand years is a wide gap--very. It makes the pre-dynastic
Egyptian seem neighbourly. We dig, we fit together, but--they are
too remote. Personally, I despair of getting to closer quarters with
them in my time." He mused with half-shut, speculative eyes. "The
Myers and Gurney business gives unsatisfactory results at its best,
and what communications they claim to have received seem chiefly from
the recently deceased.... Classic idea of a _genius loci_ might have
had something behind it ... but, _they_ approached the Surmise with
propitiatory sacrifices,--we try the planchette--and get piffle! Other
plan seems sounder, but, how to set about it? Language question a
difficulty. Something might be attempted with an Esperanto of Eskimo
and Bushman roots, eh?" he smiled. "And the offering? Coarsish tastes,
I conceive...." In common with some three hundred millions of his
fellow Europeans, the professor had never seen a sacrifice offered. The
conception, once universal, has completely passed out of our ken. That
a trousered, cravatted white man should take anything which he really
valued--a horse, a motor, a family heirloom, a prize pedigree ram, a
cask of claret--what you will, and deliberately destroy it in public
for some definite religious object, or to purchase some visible result,
recompense or immunity, is unthinkable.
The professor's mind fell back from this impermeable wall of alien
thought and custom. He sighed and shifted himself as if about to rise,
still muttering. "I'd give a good deal," said he, without the faintest
idea that he was really and veritably offering Something to Someone,
but, sincere as far as he went, "for one hour's genuine confab,
_séance_, communication (call it what you like) with this couple, here.
What _wouldn't_ I give?--ah--say a clear month out of my life--"
He said no more for that time, in fact he stopped short in the middle
of his sentence and fell forward doubled up into a soft mass of the
greenstuff which he had treated with so little ceremony, nor did he
fall alone; a sheet of stalactite, part of the ancient roof of the
cave, had detached itself from the impending lip and fallen upon and
with him.
Was it possible that the _genius loci_ had taken him at his word?
CHAPTER I
LOVE AT FIRST SIGHT
The younger girls picked fast in fear of the Master-Girl's hard little
hand, eating surreptitiously when her eye was off them. They made small
progress, for what with the badgers and the birds and the lateness of
the season the whortleberries were getting thin upon that rock. The
Master-Girl ran a critical eye over the steep face below them. It was
blue with fruit, but dangerous, for the strata dipped and the stuff
was soft. She peeped into her pupils' skin wallets and uttered words
of counsel, took the biggest satchel and went over the edge. It was
finger-and-toe work and loose in places; she could hear smothered
giggling above her as she climbed, and knew that the youngsters
were indulging, but held upon her way. The fruit she had reached was
blue-black, dead-ripe, and for some reason untouched by the birds for
days past. She had never tried this face before; she began to pick.
Then, all suddenly, her hands stopped, her eyes fixed, and every muscle
grew tense, for from just below her feet had sounded a little faint
sneeze!
Dêh-Yān was sixteen, full woman as her people counted, the biggest,
strongest and bravest of the unmarried lasses of the Little Moons.
She could throw a chert-headed assegai forty strides and make it spin
as it flew. She could handle a stone hatchet dexterously, skin, cut
up, and roast. She could rub fire out of two sticks more quickly than
any member of the tribe, could use her bone needle and split sinew to
admiration. In fact she was more than well-grounded in the domestic
arts then practised by woman, and hence the chief, and the head-wife
of that chief, were in no hurry that this household treasure should
marry out of the clan, and had set her in permanent charge over the
younger children. Dêh-Yān was the First Governess.
When a modern woman is startled she shrieks, a perfectly useless
expenditure of energy, and worse, for the sound and its reaction upon
the system of the shrieker prevent her from hearing more; also she
not uncommonly shuts both eyes to shriek the better. Dêh-Yān neither
shrieked nor shut her eyes, although thoroughly startled and indeed
frightened. Now Dêh-Yān was not easily frightened; there were in fact
but three or four things which she really feared, a wolf in open
country, a bear or lion in any country, and a wife-hunter from beyond
the ranges. This sneeze was the sneeze of a man, of a strange man in a
neighbourhood and in times in which a stranger was an enemy confessed.
So, the girl held her breath tightly and remained perfectly rigid for a
few seconds, strung for such activities of flight as might be possible
under the circumstances.
Nothing happened. Her presence was plainly unsuspected. And now the
woman-nature in her proved itself. That small muffled sneeze excited
in her bosom a vehement curiosity. Her duty, her safety, the safeties
of the brats committed to her guardianship, depended upon a silent and
prompt retreat, but, she must needs first see this man who had sneezed.
With infinite precaution she lowered herself to a ledge a few feet
beneath her, crawled, leaned and peeped; farther and yet farther she
craned for a view, and--there he was!--She found herself overlooking
the brow of a cave, a fissure in the limestone, and there, at the
cave's mouth, sate her enemy!
One steady, all-embracing glance assured the girl that this interloper
was not of her clan, nor of its allies. The stone-axe beside him was
plumed with crimson feathers, the wings of a Wall Creeper. Its owner
must needs be a Sun-Disc man, an enemy from the other side of the
mountains, and one who was presumably hunting herself.
What should she do?--Another girl would have crept stealthily away up
the cliff; another girl would already have been in full flight, and
would have run shrieking to camp. Then the braves would have turned out
and found--nothing!--and that girl would have been beaten for crying
Wolf!
Dêh-Yān did not relish being beaten. She knew all about it; if she had
to run any risks these should not include that risk. She knew herself
as strong as some men and as clever as most. In her heart of hearts
she was somewhat jealous of men. She would have liked enormously to
have been a man and a chief. Moreover she had been for some time in
silent rebellion against her lot. She was well aware that by right
and usage she should have been sold in marriage any time within the
past two years. An old maid was an unknown creature among her people.
Savages do not appreciate the utility of old maids, any more than does
our working-class to-day. Nothing but the covetousness of the old chief
stood between this girl and a husband of one of the allied totems.
She was too useful to part with at any price which her suitors could
pay. Dêh-Yān knew all this, there is not much that a savage woman
aged sixteen does not know which concerns herself. There is nothing
which answers to false modesty in your savage. Hence Dêh-Yān was as
discontented as a young person is likely to be whose future is blocked.
This girl panted for a larger life than she was enjoying. She wanted
to score, but being only a woman she was never allowed an innings. She
knew by fair trial that she had the legs of any young brave in her
tribe; that she was a far better climber than most, and could handle
a man's weapons as well as any lad of her age. Yet, when there was
anything to be done with axe or assegai it was their call, while she
must be stitching a kaross or gathering sticks! The unfairness of it!
And there had been no war in their country for some years, nor any
chance for her to prove her capacity and courage in emergency.
Here was her chance; here, just beneath her feet. 'Twas now or never,
she would kill this woman-hunter and take his scalp back to camp. It
would be a glorious feat, the women would be jealous, no doubt, and so
might the younger men, but someone would make a song about it, and her
name would be remembered. That would be something that would comfort
her when after a few brief years of overwork and child-bearing she was
no longer supple and swift, and had shrivelled into a blear-eyed,
haggard old squaw of thirty-five, bullied and bidden about by her own
sons.
And it was really quite easy. As the villain sate there exactly below
her he was so utterly in her hand. One smashing down-cast and her
hatchet would be in his brain, and--well, it would spoil the scalp!
Was there no other way? She would peep again. He had not changed his
position. From signs she could see that he had not changed it for days.
His left foot fell inwards unpleasantly; it was _broken above the
ankle_.
The man was starving to death. Water he did not want for, a trickle
oozed near him.
Then Dêh-Yān understood why the whortleberries upon that cliff-face had
ripened untouched.
Then the Alternative occurred to her.
The Custom of the Country considered it sound practice that an enemy
taken alive should be tortured before being eaten. The girl knew this
as a matter of course, just as a modern duchess knows that a garotter
is whipped and a murderer hanged by the neck, nor is broken of her
sleep by the knowledge. Dêh-Yān had listened with horrified interest to
the talk of old women who professed to have watched the process out,
or nearly out. Immemorial Custom sanctioned a woman's presence at the
salutary spectacle. The girl was no more responsible for the usages and
customs of her people than a St Louis belle is responsible for lynching.
So, there remained the Alternative, a dreadfully thrilling
catch-you-by-the-throat alternative, of giving this wife-hunter over to
the tribe.
She played with the idea for a moment--women think quickly--then she
acted, as women act, upon impulse. She would have a good look at the
wretch first, would have her fill of jibing at him, teasing him,
terrifying him if that were possible. At least she would tell this
outlander who had come for her--(proposing, as she knew, to knock her
over the head in the dusk at the dipping-hole down by the river and
drag her off half-stunned to be his trophy and slave for the term of
her natural life), she would tell this raider, I say, in good set terms
precisely what was in store for him, and see how he took it.
She peered and dropped a pebble. He looked up, and, albeit neither knew
it, her business, and his too, was done. Incidentally the fates of
countless millions of humans were spun by that brief passage of eyes.
The horoscopes of empires were cast then and there. There and then
was delimitated the eastern frontier of Old Rome, the Parthian march,
which the legion was never to cross. The issue of Senlac was decided;
Agincourt and Crecy were lost and won.
The seated man below leaned slowly back and turned his face up. It was
the handsomest face the girl had ever seen. He wasn't at all what she
had fancied, not by any means a brute, but quite young and--and--nice.
"You there?" said the man, quite naturally. Dêh-Yān studying his face
did not answer.
"Come down and talk to me. I shall not eat you," he smiled wearily.
The girl pouted; this was putting the moccasin upon the wrong foot. And
then the bush she was holding by parted without warning. She snatched,
but failed in getting hold, snatched again at sliding rock and stone,
saw firmaments of constellations, and went to sleep.
A few minutes later, not more, she awoke with a wet face. Someone was
dabbing her sore head with water. Who--Where? She opened her eyes. The
hunter, his own head bleeding from a fallen stone, was holding a sponge
of wet moss to hers.
She struggled up dizzily and sate, within his reach, for the sill of
the cave was narrow and the face beneath it fell steeply.
There was no escape for her if he were still strong enough to strike.
She thought for a moment that he had struck, for she was running red,
she was sitting in a red puddle, but it was whortleberry juice. Her
wallet had partially broken her fall.
"I shan't eat you," he repeated. Nature had been pressing him to
experiment. He had got so far as to finger his knife.
"Why?" she asked stupidly, thinking aloud. One of her Little Moon
braves in similar circumstances would have regarded the tumble of an
enemy-woman as a sheer food-gift from the God of the Hills.
"Sun-Men don't eat girls," he was saying. "Now you are well again, what
will you do?"
"I--don't--know," said Dêh-Yān. He was not only very--very beautiful,
but incredibly gentle; wholly, quite absolutely different from the
young braves of her clan who had been making eyes at her, and whom the
old chief had warned off, Pong-Gu, Low-Mah and Gow-Loo, rough boastful
fellows whom she had known and played with as boys on an equality, but
who, since their midnight initiations had seen fit to treat her as the
dirt under their noble masculine feet.
"Run away, now, if you feel strong again," said the man quite gently,
and seemed to mean it. "Run and fetch your braves. I am tired of
sitting here." (He looked dead tired, and oh, so thin!) "They will take
my scalp and eat me. You Little Moons are not nice feeders."
"They will roast you first, _alive_!" said Dêh-Yān very low, and
covered her mouth with her hand; the unpleasantness of the practice
coming home to her for the first time.
"Yes, I know ... 'tis my risk.... I took it.... But, unless they come
quickly I shall be--dead first."
His words came slowly. He leaned back and--fainted.
Dêh-Yān looked him over as he lay and was conscious that new, and
strangely pleasant, and unnamed feelings were moving within her. She
no longer feared this man; he had given her a horrid fright, but that
was over, and had left no after effects--savages are insensible to what
doctors call shock. Nor did she hate him as she had thought she hated
all Sun-Disc men, and had been prepared to hate this one until he had
turned his face up to her and spoken gently.
The girl's wallet lay where it had fallen disgorging crushed berries
and disclosing a certain ration of jerked meat which she had brought
with her for the day. An extraordinary and wholly irrational desire
suddenly possessed her to capture and tame this man. He promised to be
nice in another sense than the gastronomical. She really was pitying
him, but of this she was unaware, for pity was an emotion unknown to
the Little Moons, who had no equivalent for the word in their speech.
Having bathed his head in her turn and brought him round, the girl
fed her man with bits of meat and presently found him stronger. It
was not that the food was assimilated; it would be an hour before it
passed out of the stomach and was picked up and distributed, but the
nerves sent word along that help had arrived and the system responded
sympathetically. He looked better, more beautiful than any man had ever
looked to Dêh-Yān. Besides he was her discovery, her capture. No one
else, man or woman, should share her possession; he was her very own.
Here came into play the sense of property, but behind it gratitude
awoke, a very rare growth in palæolithic times, as rare as pity. She
sate thinking, hand to mouth, her man still slowly eating, restraining
his ravenousness, enjoying the food as he had never enjoyed food in
his life of seventeen years or so.
What was to do next? A shrill cry from above brought on the crisis.
The children had missed her and were growing anxious: if one of those
youngsters caught a glimpse, had the faintest inkling, she would lose
her treasure.
Necessity was upon her, she must act, and act decisively. Swiftly
shovelling with both hands the rest of her day's food from the bottom
of the wallet into the lap of the man, she whispered quick and low,
"More to-morrow!" and began to re-climb the face.
The boys above saw her coming and grinned roguishly at her slow
movements, and more at her empty wallet and juice-stained kilt and
bleeding head. She got her breath before chasing and smacking the
biggest, then, marshalling her little army, she kept it hard at work
until the sun dipped behind the snows and 'twas time to be making for
camp.