Page:Jackson Gregory--joyous trouble maker.djvu/85

Rh The faint breeze which found its gentle way here through the forest and world of rocks touched his hair like her fingers. …

In the keen dawn he was joyously awake. His clothes caught up under one arm, he ran down to a pool whose waters were lambs to the roaring lions of the Goblet, poised a moment in white nakedness upon a favourite flat rock, then leaped out and down, gone from the sight of a curious and chattering chipmunk in the spray his own big body flung upward. He beat his way across the ten-foot-wide pool, threshing the water mightily, feeling it laid like ice against him, turned, swam back with vigorous strokes, emerged and climbed upward along the rocks, dripping, warm, laughing, his chest swelling deeply, his blood running gloriously.

"… and for bath tubs," he completed last night's contented musings, "when neither king nor queen can buy better than this!"

Breakfast, both in the preparation and in the eating, was a sheer joy. The smell of frying bacon set him sniffing with a keenness of natural desire, the aroma of coffee in a black and battered pot whose spout and handle had long ago joined the army of the unnecessary luxuries, mingled in perfect harmony with the other incenses of the camp fire. The flapjacks, mixed with water and fried in sizzling hot bacon grease, were in Steele's mind quite the brownest, most fascinating flapjacks it had ever been his pleasure to encounter. Fascinating, no less; brown, tempting beauties.

The morning meal done with, his pipe going, Steele set his camp in order, made experienced provision