"Is it a good big one?"
"Indeed, yes."
The head appeared over the edge of the rock, inspected him gravely for
a moment, and was withdrawn.
"Then it is accepted," said the voice.
"Thank you!" he replied sincerely. "And now are you going to let down
your rope ladder, or whatever it is? I really want to talk to you."
"You are so persistent!" cried the petulant voice, "and so foolish! It
is like a man to spoil things by questionings!"
He suddenly felt the truth of this. One can not talk every day to a sun
fairy, and the experience can never be repeated. He settled back on the
rock.
"Pardon me, Sun Fairy!" he cried again. "Rope ladders, indeed, to one
who has but to close her eyes and she finds herself on a downy cloud
near the sun. My mortality blinded me!"
"Now you are a nice boy," she approved more contentedly, "and as a
reward you may ask me one question."
"All right," he agreed; and then, with instinctive tact, "What do you
see up there?"
He could hear her clap her hands with delight, and he felt glad that he
had followed his impulse to ask just this question instead of one more
personal and more in line with his curiosity.
"Listen!" she began. "I see pines, many pines, just the tops of them,
and they are all waving in the breeze. Did you ever see trees from on
top? They are quite different. And out from the pines come great round
hills made all of stone. I think they look like skulls. Then there are
breathless descents where the pines fall away. Once in a while a little
white road flashes out."
"Yes," urged Bennington, as the voice paused. "And what else do you
see?"
"I see the prairie, too," she went on half dreamily. "It is brown now,
but the green is beginning to shine through it just a very little. And
out beyond there is a sparkle. That is the Cheyenne. And beyond that
there is something white, and that is the Bad Lands."
The voice broke off with a happy little laugh.
Bennington saw the scene as though it lay actually spread out before
him. There was something in the choice of the words, clearcut,
decisive, and descriptive; but more in the exquisite modulations of the
voice, adding here a tint, there a shade to the picture, and casting
over the whole that poetic glamour which, rarely, is imitated in
grosser materials by Nature herself, when, just following sunset, she
suffuses the landscape with a mellow afterglow.
The head, sunbonneted, reappeared perked inquiringly sideways.
"Hello, stranger!" it called with a nasal inflection, "how air ye? Do
y' think minin' is goin' t' pan out well this yar spring?" Then she
caught sight of his weapon. "What are you going to shoot?" she asked
with sudden interest.