patched; and it hung to the lithe curves of her body in a fashion which
told that she wore little else. She had no hat, but the same spirit of
childlike whimsey that caused her eyes to dance as she answered the
partridge's call had led her to fashion for her own crowning a headgear
of laurel leaves and wild roses. As she stood with the toes of one bare
foot twisting in the gratefully cool moss, she laughed with the sheer
exhilaration of life and youth, and started out on the table top of the
huge rock. But there she halted suddenly with a startled exclamation,
and drew instinctively back. What she saw might well have astonished
her, for it was a thing she had never seen before and of which she had
never heard. Now she paused in indecision between going forward toward
exploration and retreating from new and unexplained phenomena. In her
quick instinctive movements was something like the irresolution of the
fawn whose nostrils have dilated to a sense of possible danger.
Finally, reassured by the silence, she slipped across the broad face of
the flat rock for a distance of twenty-five feet, and paused again to
listen.

At the far edge lay a pair of saddlebags, such as form the only
practical equipment for mountain travelers. They were ordinary
saddlebags, made from the undressed hide of a brindle cow, and they
were fat with tight packing. A pair of saddlebags lying unclaimed at
the roadside would in themselves challenge curiosity. But in this
instance they gave only the prefatory note to a stranger story. Near
them lay a tin box, littered with small and unfamiliar-looking tubes of
soft metal, all grotesquely twisted and stained, and beside the box was
a strangely shaped plaque of wood, smeared with a dozen hues. That this
plaque was a painter's sketching palette was a thing which she could
not know, since the ways of artists had to do with a world as remote
from her own as the life of the moon or stars. It was one of those