full-length on the open hillside, as if to bleach in the fierce sun.
While smoking he carelessly perused the fragment of a newspaper which
had enveloped his tobacco, and being struck with some amusing
paragraph, read it half aloud again to some imaginary auditor,
emphasizing its humor with an hilarious slap upon his leg.
Possibly from the relaxation of fatigue and the bath, which had become
a vapor one as he alternately rolled and dried himself in the baking
grass, his eyes closed dreamily. He was awakened by the sound of
voices. They were distant; they were vague; they approached no nearer.
He rolled himself to the verge of the first precipitous grassy descent.
There was another bank or plateau below him, and then a confused depth
of olive shadows, pierced here and there by the spiked helmets of
pines. There was no trace of habitation, yet the voices were those of
some monotonous occupation, and Lance distinctly heard through them the
click of crockery and the ring of some household utensil. It appeared
to be the interjectional, half listless, half perfunctory, domestic
dialogue of an old man and a girl, of which the words were
unintelligible. Their voices indicated the solitude of the mountain,
but without sadness; they were mysterious without being awe-inspiring.
They might have uttered the dreariest commonplaces, but, in their vast
isolation, they seemed musical and eloquent. Lance drew his first
sigh,--they had suggested dinner.
Careless as his nature was, he was too cautious to risk detection in
broad daylight. He contented himself for the present with endeavoring
to locate that particular part of the depths from which the voices
seemed to rise. It was more difficult, however, to select some other
way of penetrating it than by the stage road. "They're bound to have a
fire or show a light when it's dark," he reasoned, and, satisfied with
that reflection, lay down again. Presently he began to amuse himself by
tossing some silver coins in the air. Then his attention was directed
to a spur of the Coast Range which had been sharply silhouetted against
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