"I don't agree with you at all."
"I don't expect you to," he answered, and making an ironical bow turned on his heel and swung off.
The next morning, in the pallor of the dawn, they started, rolling out into a gray country with the keen-edged cold of early day in the air, and Laramie Peak, gold tipped, before them. As the sky brightened and the prospect began to take on warmer hues, they looked ahead toward the profiles of the mountains and thought of the journey to come. At this hour of low vitality it seemed enormous, and they paced forward a silent, lifeless caravan, the hoof beats sounding hollow on the beaten track.
Then from behind them came a sound of singing, a man's voice caroling in the dawn. Both girls wheeled and saw Zavier Leroux ambling after them on his rough-haired pony, the pack horse behind. He waved his hand and shouted across the silence:
"I come to go with you as far as South Pass," and then he broke out again into his singing. It was the song Courant had sung, and as he heard it he lifted up his voice at the head of the train, and the two strains blending, the old French chanson swept out over the barren land:
"A la claire fontaine!
M'en allant promener
J'ai trouvé l'eau si belle
Que je me suis baigné!"
Susan waved a beckoning hand to the voyageur, then turned to Lucy and said joyously:
"What fun to have Zavier! He'll keep us laughing all the time. Aren't you glad he's coming?"
Lucy gave an unenthusiastic "Yes." After the first glance backward she had bent over her horse smoothing its mane her face suddenly dyed with a flood of red.