She looked at him with questioning, smiling glance. “Can you drive? It’s all the way down-hill—and steep?”
“If I can’t I’ll ask your aid. I’m old enough to remember the family carriage. I’ve even driven a four-in-hand.”
She surrendered her seat doubtfully, and smiled to see him take up the reins as if he were starting a four-horse coach. He proved adequate and careful, and she was proud of him as, with foot on the brake and the bronchos well in hand, he swung down the long looping road to the railway. She was pleased, too, by his care of the weary animals, easing them down the steepest slopes and sending them along on the comparatively level spots.
Their descent was rapid, but it was long after dark before they reached Flume, which lay up the valley to the right. It was a poor little decaying mining-town set against the hillside, and had but one hotel, a sun-warped and sagging pine building just above the station.
“Not much like the Profile House,” said Wayland, as he drew up to the porch. “But I see no choice.”
“There isn’t any,” Berrie assured him.
“Well, now,” he went on, “I am in command of this expedition. From this on I lead this outfit. When it comes to hotels, railways, and the like o’ that, I’m head ranger.”
Mrs. McFarlane, tired, hungry, and a little dismayed, accepted his control gladly; but Berrie could not at once slip aside her responsibility. “Tell the hostler—”
“Not a word!” commanded Norcross; and the girl with a smile submitted to his guidance, and thereafter his efficiency, his self-possession, his tact delighted her. He persuaded the sullen landlady to get them supper. He secured the best rooms in the house, and arranged for the care of the team, and when they were all seated around the dim, fly-specked oil-lamp at the end of the crumby dining-room table he discovered such a gay and confident mien that the women looked at each other in surprise.
Berrie was correspondingly less masculine. In drawing off her buckskin driving-gloves she had put away the cowgirl, and was silent, a little sad even, in the midst of her enjoyment of his dictatorship. And when he said, “If my father reaches Denver in time I want you to meet him,” she looked the dismay she felt.