"Are you game to start in half an hour?" he asked, holding her off at arm's length admiringly.
"I'm game for anything, or I wouldn't be here," she retorted.
"All right. You just watch an exhibition of speedy packing," Bill declared—and straightway fell to work.
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?"