She caught his sidelong glance and read its meaning at once.
"Ah, King," she pleaded, "it won't rain—see, there isn't a cloud in the sky! Besides—if it does—let it. There's lots and lots of hay—and there's only a little—just so much summer."
She pinched the end of a slender finger to give point to her last statement, and looked at King with a smile brightening in her eyes.
"You little scamp," he said, going to her and taking her head between his hands, "what's the use of a man making up his mind to anything where you are?"
He kissed her again and started towards the little cabin on the ridge, with Cherry dancing along beside him, clinging to his arm and chattering as she went.
When they came to the cabin they went in for a few moments to prepare for their trip. The cabin was larger and more comfortable than the shack in which King had lived during the previous summer—and infinitely cleaner. King had brought the logs from the hills during the winter, and had built the cabin with the assistance of a half dozen of Keith McBain's men. Cherry did the rest—and the place was as neat and snug as the heart could wish.
In a moment King was out again and was gone to the corral among the willows below the ridge. When he returned and stood before the door of the cabin he led the horses, saddled and bridled and champing their bits. King called and Cherry emerged ready for the road. Sal leaped about them until they had got into the saddles, and then all went off together.
Keith McBain's camp lay some twelve or fifteen miles up the valley to the north and west. With two hours to make the trip they had ample time, without much loitering, to reach camp before the men should leave the grade for supper. They followed the freighters' trail that wound in and out, now skirting the edge of the right-of-way, now heading into the standing poplars, or running out across open reaches of green plain. Before the summer's end the steel gang would have laid the rails and the first trains would have steamed into the valley from beyond the hills. Even now the gang of engineers and levellers were close upon the heels of the graders, giving the road-bed its final touches before the steel was laid.
Cherry and King rode along easily, without hurrying their horses, King listening while Cherry did most of the talking. Here and there new beauties came to meet them in the curving trail and waving grass and tall white poplars with glistening leaves and white powdered trunks. They crossed a half-dozen little streams of clear water rippling over gravel and shale. Frequently they came out where they caught a distant view of the hills that lay to the north of the valley, pale blue and lying low upon the horizon, like a fringe of dark cloud. To-day they were a very pale blue, and Cherry smiled as she pointed to them and reminded King of what she had told him in the meadow.
"You see—it isn't going to rain for days," she said. "See how smoky the hills are."