She caught his fingers with a quick, hard pressure.
"All trails look alike to me," she said, with shining 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 altitude the occasional voices of what bird and animal life was abroad in the wild broke into the evening hush with astonishing 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 passed 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."