“And to Alamito,” said he, looking out into the frost-stricken garden with a tenderness in his eyes. “I shall always have a softness in my heart for Alamito, because it gave me you. That garden out there yielded me the dearest flower that any garden ever gave a man”—he took her hands, and folded them above his heart—“a flower with a soul in it to keep it alive forever.”
She bowed her head as he spoke, as if receiving a benediction.
“I hate saying good-bye to Mrs. Chadron,” she said, her voice trembling, “for she’ll cry, and I’m afraid I’ll cry, too.”
“It will not be farewell, only hasta luego[A] we can assure her of that. We’ll be neighbors to her, for this is home, dear heart, this is our val paraiso.”
“Our valley of paradise,” she nodded, her hands reaching up to his shoulders and clinging there a moment in soft caress, “our home!”
His arm about her shoulders, he faced her to the window, and pointed to the hills, asleep now in their brown winter coat behind a clear film of smoky blue.
“I stood up there one evening, weighted down with 329 guns and ammunition, hunting and hunted in the most desperate game I ever played,” he said. “The sun was low over this valley, and Alamito was a gleam of white among the autumn gold. I was tired, hungry, dusty, thirsty and sore, and my heart was all but dead in its case. That was after you had sent me away from the post, scorned and half despised.”
“Don’t rebuke me for that night now, Alan,” she pleaded, turning her pained eyes to his. “I have suffered for my injustice.”
“It wasn’t injustice, it was discipline, and it was good for both of us. We must come to confidence through misunderstandings and false charges very frequently in this life. Never mind that; I was telling you about that evening on the side of the hill. I had been sitting with my back to a rock, watching the brush for Mark Thorn, but I was thinking more of you than of him. For he meant only death, and you were life. But I thought that I had lost you that day.”
She drew nearer to him as they stood, in the unequivocal consolation of her presence, in the most comforting refutation of that sad hour’s dark forebodings.