The sun was almost
gone and the strong bluish light was settling on everything, giving even
the green spruce trees a curious burnished tone.
Swish! Thud! She faced the woods quickly. It was only a sound that she
had heard how many hundreds of times! It was the snow slipping from some
broad branch of the fir trees to the ground. Yet she started now.
Something was on her mind, agitating her senses, affecting her self-
control.
"I'll be jumping out of my boots when the fire snaps, or the frost cracks
the ice, next," she said aloud contemptuously. "I dunno what's the
matter with me. I feel as if someone was hiding somewhere ready to pop
out on me. I haven't never felt like that before."
She had formed the habit of talking to herself, for it had seemed at
first, as she was left alone when her father went trapping or upon
journeys for the Government, that by and by she would start at the sound
of her own voice, if she didn't think aloud. So she was given to
soliloquy, defying the old belief that people who talked to themselves
were going mad. She laughed at that. She said that birds sang to
themselves and didn't go mad, and crickets chirruped, and frogs croaked,
and owls hooted, and she would talk and not go crazy either.
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