He was away at dawn behind one of the teams of mules, his wagon rumbling musically through the weird silence of the infancy of another day. The shavetails topped the summit, wound their way down the mountain, around Hairpin Curve and Shirt-tail Bend, across Yucca Flat and Cactus Slope, and down to the yellow desert—to Wild Woman Springs and Box-R Ranch, to Bobcat Point, and on through the rocky pass to Spur. Two days later he was returning over the sandy waste, with a groaning load of lumber under him. And when he reached the foot of the mountains, late in the evening of the second day, he found Madge Mundy awaiting him with the helper span of mules.
He had not expected her that night. The plan had been for him to camp at the beginning of the grade whenever he reached it, and to wait there for the coming of the girl next day. But to save time and get an early morning start, Madge placidly informed him, she had decided to come that afternoon and camp with him that night.
She noted the color and the worried look in his face, and laughed without a blush.
“Chaperons mean nothing in my young life, Joshua,” she said. “I’ve been a railroader, associated with all sorts of men too many years to give room to any old-maid ideas like that. But I might have known you would be a prude. About all that you know of life you have learned from books. Isn’t that true? Now don’t stand there looking bashful. Throw the leather off ’em and feed and water ’em, while I dig greasewood roots for a fire. I’m hungry as a wolf.”
“Your—er—your mother—she approved?”
“About all that she had to remark on the subject was that you wouldn’t. But I told her I’d make you. Pioneers can’t afford to observe the stupid niceties of society at large; they have work to do. Let’s get busy, then. Night’s coming on.”
“I was only thinking of you,” Joshua defended.
“Don’t, then.”
Joshua, his head in a dizzy whirl over this unexpected development and the guilty delight it gave him, went at the unharnessing of his team. Shanty Madge, her hat off and her sleeves rolled above her elbows, took a mattock from his wagon and trudged away to the nearest greasewood bush. By the time that he had attended to the mules she returned with an armful of roots. She built a fire while he took the camp kit from the wagon and sorted out the grub.
And soon they were once more seated one on either side of a cheery campfire—but this time Joshua was alone with the girl of the frizzly bronze-gold hair and the Pocahontas coloring and the topaz eyes that had brought him West.