But the girl herself was a truer nomad than many to whom with warm
friendliness she nodded and spoke.
Late one afternoon Diane espied a woodland brook. Shot with gold and
shadow, it laughed along, under a waving canopy of green, freckled with
cool, clean pebbles and hiding roguishly now and then beneath a
trailing branch. A brook was a luxury. It was mirror and spring and
lullaby in one.
By six the tents of the nomad were pitched by the forest brook and the
nomad herself was smoothing back her ruffled hair over a crystalline
mirror.
A drowsy negro on a load of hay drove by on the road beyond.
Diane studied him with critical interest.
"Johnny," she said, "just why are there so many drowsy negroes about
driving loads of hay? Or is that the same one? And if it is, where
under Heaven has he been driving that hay for the last three days?"
Johnny didn't know. Wherefore he pursed his lips and shook his head.
The hay wagon turned on into the forest on the farther side of the road
and halted. The drowsy negro leisurely alighted and shuffled through
the trees until he stood before Diane with a square of birch bark in
his hand. Greatly astonished--for this negro was apparently too lazy
to talk when he deemed it unnecessary--Diane took the birch bark and
inspected it in mystification.
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