“After—after Bull comes home.”
In the course of the argument she had coiled up on his knees, and the shy consent issued from the ambush of hair that hid her profile. Wrapped in his arms, soft and warm, she lay in blissful content for some time before he spoke.
“If Bull were here now, we could have gone up with Lovell and have made it a double marriage. Why, what’s the matter?”
She had sat up with a little shiver. “Oh no! I could never be happy in one of those great hotels, huge human warrens!” Coiling up again, she allowed him a peep into her girlish dreamings. “I never saw him, he who was to be my all. His face was always dim, indefinite, as a bright moon behind a cloud, but he felt—like you. In my visions he always took me into the wilds—the hills, woods, cañons, and it is there we must go.
“It would be lovely if we could have taken horses and a pack-mule and gone down the length of the Sierra Madres—at first alone, later traveling with the arrieros up the mule trails to the snow-line, then down on the other side through giant cañons. We should have seen only the simple folk of the country. But the revolution has made that impossible. But this we can do—go to the priest and jefe of San Carlos, who are both old friends of my father’s, to be married, then ride straight out to the mountain pasture and keep house there all by ourselves till—till we feel like coming home. I will cook while you look after the horses, and we can play that we are simple peones and be—oh, so happy!”
Nothing could have appealed to him more strongly. It was almost as good as a Java forest! He wondered at himself. “How perfectly lovely! Why didn’t I think of that myself?”
“You would have, in time. Oh!” She sprang from his knee at a stir and tinkle of water. “Mr. Lovell is up. I must shoot up-stairs and dress.”
“You’ll go out with me to-day?” he called after her.
“No.” She bent down over the rail to answer. “I promised Jake to go with him to Cañon del Norte to look at the colts.”
“Twice with him, twice with Sliver, and only once with me?” he protested. “’Tisn’t fair.”