visions of their accidental meeting. Then his pulses raced. He saw the stocky-barreled Cooney led from the corral to the front of the house by Red Phinney. He could almost discern the Sabbath finery of Red across that crystal mile—for this was the breathing day of the week, when faces were rasped cruelly by indifferent razors, and fine raiment was donned, black trousers and gay, clean shirts and neckerchiefs of flaming silk.
He could not see her mount. The ranch house hid that spectacle. But she rode into view presently, putting Cooney first to his little fox trot and then to a lope, as the road wound among the willows.
He straightened in the saddle as she reached the creek. He was eager to retreat, yet feared to have his cowardice detected. And when Cooney halted midway of the stream, pawing its rocky bed and making a pretense of thirst, the woman looked up and saw her watcher on the trail. She waved the gauntleted hand that held her quirt, and he found himself holding his hat in his hand with an affectation of ease. Then each laughed, and, though neither could hear the other, it was as if they had laughed together in some little flurry of understanding. He could still pretend to have happened there at that moment, he reflected. And this brought him courage as he saw her give Cooney his way where the trail branched. When the little horse had carried her to the summit and stood in panting gratitude, the waiting youth evolved a splendid plan for hiding his fright. He dismounted and forced himself to go coolly and take her hand. Perhaps it was as well that he had not trusted himself to remain in the saddle at that first moment. But when the thing was really over he no longer made a secret of his delight at her coming. His first anxious look at her face had shown him the cordial friendliness of the preceding day. She was amused by him, he could see that, and did not resent it; but she was kind, and in his joy at this he babbled, at first, with little coherence.
"I rode right over here to make sure I would see you," he began, "and then if you rode down the valley, or up, I was going to loaf along and find you by accident, and pretend I was hunting a colt. I was going to be afraid the mountain lions had got it." He laughed immoderately at this joke. "And while I waited for you I kept trying to think how fine it would have sounded last night if you had said, 'I think I shall go over and look at your place again to-morrow.' I couldn't make your voice sound true, though. It's a good thing we needn't try to paint voices."
They were riding together over the first stretch of meadow. It seemed to have been agreed without words that they should ride to the lake cabin.
"To paint voices?" she queried.
"Voices, yes; how could yours be painted? It couldn't. You'll see that. I thought of a jumble of things—wine and velvet, for instance; some kind of rich, golden wine and purple velvet, and then, warm flickers of light in a darkened room, and a big bronze bell struck with something soft that would muffle it and yet make everything about it tremble. You see, don't you?" he concluded with a questioning look of deep seriousness.
His own voice was low and eager, with its undernote of wistfulness. Already he had renewed upon her that companionable charm which she had felt the day before, a charm compounded of half-shy directness, of flashes of self-forgetfulness, of quick-trusting comradeship. She rejected a cant phrase of humorous disclaimer that habit brought to her lips. It would puzzle or affront his forthrightness.
"Very well, we'll agree that my voice can't be painted," she said at last. "So let us talk of you."
"I guess I should like that pretty well," he answered after a moment's pondering. "I don't believe I've ever talked much; but now I feel as if I could tire you out, talking as we did yesterday. Queer, wasn't it?"
He fell silent, however, when the trail narrowed to climb the long ridge, as if the acknowledgment of his desire to speak had somehow quenched it. She fell in ahead, half turning in her saddle to address him from time to time, but he would talk only about things of the moment. In a marshy spot at the edge of the meadow he pointed out a bear wallow, and farther on a deer lick. "It's a sulphur spring," he exclaimed, "and deer come from miles around to drink there."
"Do you shoot them?" she asked.
"We always have fresh meat when we need. Ben Crider says he won't let a deer come up and bite him without trying to defend himself."
"It's like murder, isn't it?"
"Well, I never murdered anyone myself, but I hit the first deer I ever shot at, and I felt as if I'd lain in wait at a street corner and killed a schoolboy on his way home. But I missed the next three or four, and that made me blood-thirsty. I guess if you carried that feeling back far enough a man could go out and shoot his little sister if he'd had to still-hunt her over rough ground all day, and especially if he'd missed two or three cousins or an uncle in the meantime. I think that would raise the savage in him enough."
They were skirting the lake now, a glinting oval of sapphire in its setting of granite. Beyond this they rode through the thinned timber—where Cooney was dissuaded, not without effort, from pursuing his ancient charge, and emerged into the glare of the clearing.
As they dismounted at the door of the cabin a melancholy of minor chords from a guitar came to their ears, and a voice, nasal, but vibrant with emotion, sang the final couplet of what had too plainly been a ballad of pathos:
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