Ann did not have to watch alone for the lantern that might again be seen flickering and swaying across the deck of the schooner. The band mounted guard in turn and watched so industriously that Mr. and Mrs. Seymour began to wonder what the children hoped to see out in the night.

Jo took upon himself the watch during the late hours, for he believed that no one would be likely to venture aboard the wreck while lamps still glowed from house windows so near. At least a man would not carry a lantern there during the early hours of the night but would creep about in the shadows or hang a covering over the portholes so that whatever light was needed would be hidden.

“I think that the reason you saw it that first night, Ann, was because pop and I go to bed so early. Whoever it was got careless. He thought we always were asleep by that hour and he didn’t know that you folks were coming.”

The evenings were long now; the sun did not set until after supper, and it made the time of watching for a lantern very short. Mr. Seymour had been interested in hearing about the buck deer that Robin Hood had tracked to its lair and he joined with the band in several early forays. They picked their way stealthily through underbrush that dripped with dew and waited silently by the swamp pond, counting discomfort nothing if only they could sometime see a deer drink.

At last they were rewarded in the half-light of one clear dawn. A big buck stepped gently out from the end of the narrow trail they had followed that first day. He slowly approached the pond, cautious at first. But Jo had chosen a hiding place where the breeze would not betray their presence and the animal soon felt perfectly safe. First he nosed about through the tender young marsh grass which grew close to the water’s edge. He pulled a little of it, here and there, before he raised his head. Whether he signaled that all was safe the human beings could never know, although Jo said afterward that deer had ways of warning their own kind, but when he had taken several mouthfuls of grass he threw up his head and looked carefully about him, sniffing into the light rustling breeze.

Down the same trail by which he had entered, his doe came with mincing steps to take her place beside him. The legs that carried her slim body so easily seemed no thicker than the twigs of the trees through which she came so swiftly and quietly, and her big soft ears pricked forward over her gentle brown eyes. The children hardly dared to breathe and they spoke no louder than a whisper even after the deer had vanished.

“Oh, father!” sighed Ben. “How lovely they are! You will show me how to draw them, won’t you?”

So Allan-a-Dale resigned temporarily from Robin Hood’s band and became the constant companion of his father. After his beans were hoed and his potatoes hilled—for both corn and potatoes had sprouted rapidly and gave promise of making an excellent crop—Ben took his canvas and easel and went with his father to the swamp pond. Here they set up their props and worked every day.

Mr. Seymour showed Ben how to plan his picture, so that his drawing would be balanced and the deer stand straight on their own four legs.

“You will have to decide first of all, Ben, just how the deer balances his weight on his feet while he is jumping, and then draw him so that this point of balance comes as a straight right angle up from the line where you are going to draw in your ground. That point of balance is what makes people and animals stand upright, for otherwise they would fall down. So when you draw pictures of them, you have to plan very carefully to get an effect of stability in your drawing.”

In beginning his own picture Mr. Seymour planned to paint the swamp first, and then place the deer in position some morning after he had had an opportunity to sketch them rapidly from life. He hoped to see them again, poised on the edge of the water before him. Consequently he busied himself in transferring the pond with its green motionless water surrounded by the dark pine woods to a canvas that was twice the size of the one that Ben was working on.

Often the rest of the band gathered around the painters to watch the growth of the two pictures, for they felt a personal interest and responsibility because of their share in discovering the deer. Jo liked to watch the brush in Mr. Seymour’s quick deft fingers and see how a few strokes of color here and there made a splotch of green look like a pine tree. Under his eyes Jo saw the swamp grow on the gray canvas. It was the swamp, and yet it was not exactly like the swamp itself, for Mr. Seymour had left out a great deal of underbrush and many of the trees. When Jo asked him why, he explained:

“When you look at that pond out there with the trees for a background, it fills the entire space so far as you are concerned while you are looking at it. That is the first thing you notice. Now what is the second thing?”

“Well, I guess,” Jo ventured, “that I notice next that the pine trees are pointed up into the sky, all jagged, while down below the trees come together and I can’t separate one from another. It is all a darkness.”

“Yes,” said Mr. Seymour, “but doesn’t that mean something more to you than just a lot of pine trees growing together?”

“I don’t exactly know what you mean,” Jo answered. “They are pine trees, most of them, although I can see one or two foliage trees among them—shouldn’t wonder but what they are swamp maples.”

“You’re too definite, Jo.” And Mr. Seymour laughed. “I didn’t mean to ask you to look for the other trees, because you can see them only when you look carefully.”

“I know what you mean, father, and you shouldn’t ask questions—it takes too long. You should tell Jo right out.” Ann looked at her father with her eyes twinkling. “You wanted Jo to say that the first thing he saw in looking into a space filled with trees was the line they grew in.”

“Of course,” Jo agreed. “Everything grows in a line or a clump.”

“That is just what I mean,” Mr. Seymour replied. “After you decide that the space before you is filled with trees you next decide what the line or pattern of the background of your picture is to be. After you decide this, you can plan how to transfer the trees which fill the big space into the much smaller space that is your canvas. You do it by following the pattern which you see before you.”

“But you can’t get all that swamp on a little canvas,” Jo protested. “Exactly,” said Mr. Seymour. “And that’s why I am leaving out so much. By following the pattern of the pine trees for my background and the twisting shore of the pond for my foreground, I can shrink the whole swamp to the size of my canvas even though I leave out a great deal that your eye sees growing there in the living wood. Now, while you are looking and comparing so closely, watching picture and swamp at the same time, the swamp, in contrast, seems magnificent. But next winter when you see only the picture you will forget about these details that mean so much to you now, and you will think the picture looks quite like the swamp as you remember it.”

“Gee!” Jo said sadly. “You’ve forgotten that I won’t be seeing the picture next winter.” He scraped the toe of his boot disconsolately against the loose pebbles. “You aren’t thinking of going home too soon?”

“Not for ages!” exclaimed Ann. “And I’ll write to you every week after we get back,” she promised.

“We’ll sign our names to the same letter,” said Ben.

“You won’t!” Ann assured him, in her most decided manner. “If I write a letter I am going to be the only one to sign it. He will have to write his own letters, won’t he, father?”

“It looks as if he would have to.” Mr. Seymour laughed. “I know that Jo would like to get more than one a week through the winter. How about it, Jo?”

“You bet I would,” answered Jo, his eyes shining.

Ben was almost entirely interested in painting the animals. He was trying to draw them from his recollection of the leaping buck. He got the action very well, Mr. Seymour told him, but he would have to practice more on the outlines, so that the leaping figure would look more like a deer.

“When I saw that deer,” Ben explained excitedly, “I felt as if I were jumping in exactly the same way. That is why I am sure about how the lines should go.”

“With a little patience, Ben,” his father promised, “I feel certain that you will be able to draw.”

“And I shall be very famous?”

“I can’t promise that. The famous—but of course you don’t mean ‘famous’; you aren’t using the right word and I can’t have you saying it. You are trying to ask me whether you can do work that will satisfy yourself, and that no one can prophesy. You will have to work hard. Don’t think that you can be anything you wish by merely wishing it. And besides, some of the greatest painters have only made a bare living after studying and working all their lives long.”

“I don’t care if I don’t make any money,” said Ben stoutly, “if I can paint as much as I like.”

“Paint costs money,” said Mr. Seymour rather sadly. “And an artist has to feed himself and his family.”

“Don’t you worry about that, Ben,” Ann protested. “When Jo and I get our ranch started you can come and live with us—can’t he, Jo?”

“Sure he can,” Jo assented readily. “And he can paint all the time; there will be lots of animals out there, steers and horses. And we can live on potatoes and beans.”

Mr. Seymour seemed to think that this was very funny, for he laughed heartily.

“I’ll come to visit you once in a while,” said Helen. “But I am going to marry a millionaire and live on candy and nuts.”

“You’ll be glad to eat some of Jo’s beans, in that case,” said Ben quite positively. He once had known what it was to eat too much candy. “And if Jo lets me live there with him and with Ann, I’ll promise to do my full share of hoeing.”

“Father will come, too,” said Ann eagerly, “even though he will be the greatest painter in America by that time. When our ranch is paying, neither father nor mother nor Mr. Bailey will need to do any more work for money.”

“That’s a very kind promise,” said Mr. Seymour. “And I shall expect to enjoy visiting you. Helen can bring some of her candy and nuts, for they will make us a pleasant change from a steady diet of beans and potatoes.”

In the evenings Ben was tracing his deer drawings on a piece of shellacked cardboard which he planned to cut into stencils, so that he could stencil some new curtains for the Boston apartment, curtains with deer leaping all along the bottom.