Part 19 (2/2)

Hazel followed him about, helping to get the kyaks packed with food.

They caught the three horses, and Bill stripped the pony of Hazel's riding gear and placed a pack on him. Then he put her saddle on Silk.

”He's your private mount henceforth,” Bill told her laughingly.

”You'll ride him with more pleasure than you did the first time, won't you?”

Presently they were ready to start, planning to ride past Limping George's camp and tell him whither they were bound. Hazel was already mounted. Roaring Bill paused, with his toe in the stirrup, and smiled whimsically at her over his horse's back.

”I forgot something,” said he, and went back into the cabin--whence he shortly emerged, bearing in his hand a sheet of paper upon which something was written in bold, angular characters. This he pinned on the door. Hazel rode Silk close to see what it might be, and laughed amusedly, for Bill had written:

”Mr. and Mrs. William Wagstaff will be at home to their friends on and after June the twentieth.”

He swung up into his saddle, and they jogged across the open. In the edge of the first timber they pulled up and looked backward at the cabin drowsing silently under its sentinel tree. Roaring Bill reached out one arm and laid it across Hazel's shoulders.

”Little person,” he said soberly, ”here's the end of one trail, and the beginning of another--the longest trail either of us has ever faced.

How does it look to you?”

She caught his fingers with a quick, hard pressure.

”All trails look alike to me,” she said, with s.h.i.+ning eyes, ”just so we hit them together.”

CHAPTER XVI

A BRIEF TIME OF PLANNING

”What day of the month is this, Bill?” Hazel asked.

”Haven't the least idea,” he answered lazily. ”Time is of no consequence to me at the present moment.”

They were sitting on the warm earth before their cabin, their backs propped comfortably against a log, watching the sun sink behind a distant sky-line all notched with purple mountains upon which snow still lingered. Beside them a smudge dribbled a wisp of smoke sufficient to ward off a pestilential swarm of mosquitoes and black flies. In the clear, thin air of that alt.i.tude the occasional voices of what bird and animal life was abroad in the wild broke into the evening hush with astonis.h.i.+ng distinctness--a lone goose winged above in wide circles, uttering his harsh and solitary cry. He had lost his mate, Bill told her. Far off in the bush a fox barked. The evening flight of the wild duck from Crooked Lake to a chain of swamps pa.s.sed intermittently over the clearing with a sibilant whistle of wings. To all the wild things, no less than to the two who watched and listened to the forest traffic, it was a land of peace and plenty.

”We ought to go up to the swamps to-morrow and rustle some duck eggs,”

Bill observed irrelevantly--his eyes following the arrow flight of a mallard flock. But his wife was counting audibly, checking the days off on her fingers.

”This is July the twenty-fifth, Mr. Roaring Bill Wagstaff,” she announced. ”We've been married exactly one month.”

”A whole month?” he echoed, in mock astonishment. ”A regular calendar month of thirty-one days, huh? You don't say so? Seems like it was only day before yesterday, little person.”

”I wonder,” she snuggled up a little closer to him, ”if any two people were ever as happy as we've been?”

Bill put his arm across her shoulders and tilted her head back so that he could smile down into her face.

”They have been a bunch of golden days, haven't they?” he whispered.

”We haven't come to a single b.u.mp in the road yet. You won't forget this joy time if we ever do hit real hard going, will you, Hazel?”

”The bird of ill omen croaks again,” she reproved. ”Why should we come to hard going, as you call it?”

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