"Not in the least." She found his mood contagious and, smiling in that quick, bright way natural to her, showed for a moment the twin dimples of which together with a host of other things he had had ample time to think during his bedroom imprisonment. "Please rave on."
"In due course," he mused, "the fourth stage will arrive and I can be doing something besides talk, can't I? Now let me tell you about the King's Palace."
"You begin well."
"The King's Palace is where we are going on our first outing. That was decided three days ago at four minutes after 6 A.M. You and I and, if you like, Florrie and your kid brother. We'll ride out there in the very early morning, in the saddle before the stars are gone. We'll lunch and loaf there all day. For lunch we will have bacon and coffee, cooked over a fire in one of the Palace anterooms. We will have some trout, fried in the bacon-grease, trout whipped out of the likeliest mountain-stream you ever saw or heard about. We will have cheese, perhaps, and maybe a box of candy for dessert. We'll ride home in the dusk and the dark."
"The King's Palace?" she asked curiously. "I never heard of such a place. Are you making it all up?"
"Not a bit of it. It's all that's left of some of the old ruins of the same folk who lived in the caves up on the cliffs. . . . Do you know why I am bound to get Jim Galloway's tag soon or late?"
Her mind with his had touched upon the hidden rifles, and the abrupt digression was no digression to her, reached by the span of suggestion.
"Because he is in the wrong and you are in the right; or, in other words, because he opposes the law and you represent it."
"Because he plays the game wrong! Some more results of a long week of nothing to do but think things out. There is just one way for a law-breaker to operate if he means to get away with it."
"You mean that a man can get away with it? Surely not for good?"