their heads. By night came the wider spreading gauzy fan of cloud, reaching from horizon to horizon; but the morning dispersed it, and at noon the sky showed a broad sheet of blue. The white grass was beginning to turn to gray, the trees black and laden with dust, the faint pools in the creek bed were shrunken dry, and every twig snapped under the foot like a spark. They saw, from the shelter of wooded hilltops, the hawk drop slowly, cutting the air, and come to his perch on the dying pine, and stand, his wings held out from his body for heat, his sharp tongue like a splinter in his mouth. They walked in the thick scent of endless pines and smelled, mixed with the resin, the sharper pungence of far-off forest fires. She led him by little unexpected paths to look on new corners of the world. They sat on heights and saw the ragged horizon of trees beyond, and beneath the shelf of rock where perhaps a snake stirred, glistening.
She told him all things, from the shyest places of her thoughts. Even the long-kept fancies of the child—divine foolishnesses—unbelievable unworldlinesses. She pointed out to him again at sunset the little, playing, wild animals, rabbits and whisking chipmunks. She seemed to think, perhaps, they had souls. She brought back to his memory a certain morning beneath cedars; but this place they had not
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