Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars, and the unseen heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep defiles where the ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance out of the cinders of old forest-fires and, in a paradoxical defiance, shook their fronds toward the never-melting snow-caps on the sierras across the cañon; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young man to push up alongside and steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her horse’s hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies.
Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her way of putting it had been different.
“Harken, O most revered Drawing Account,” she said, dropping back on a broad place in the trail to be near him. “If you can spare the time for being saddle-sore I want to give you an earful as soon as this procession, as of even date, breaks up. You find a quiet retreat away from the flock and wait there until I find you, savvy?”
So now he was waiting, and from yonder she came toward him, stepping lightly, swinging forward from her hips with a sort of impudent freedom of movement; and to his father’s eyes she never had seemed more graceful or more delectable or more independent-looking.
“Dad,” she began, without preamble, and meeting him eye to eye, “in me you behold a Sabine woman. I’m bespoken.”
“Mmph,” he answered, and the answer might be interpreted, by a person who knew him, in any one of half a dozen ways.
“Such is the case,” she went on, quite unafraid. “That caveman over there in the blue shirt”—she pointed—“he’s the nominee. We’re engaged.”
“I can’t plead surprise, kid,” he stated, taking on for the moment her bantering tone. “The report that you two had come to a sort of understanding has been in active circulation on this reservation for the past forty-eight hours or so—maybe longer.”