"Lynette!"
A flash from her gay mood had set his eyes on fire. He sprang up and came toward her, his two hands out. But as a black cloud can run over the face of the young moon, so did a sudden change of mood wipe the tempting look out of her eyes and darken them. Her spirit had peeped forth at him, merry-making; as quick as bird-flight it was gone, and she stepped back and looked at him steadily, cool now and aloof and dampening to a man's ardent nonsense.
"You have a way of saying something, Babe Deveril," she told him coolly, "which appeals to me. In your own upstanding words: 'Let's go!'"
He laughed back at her lightly, hiding under a light cloak his own chagrin. At that moment he had wanted her in his arms; had wanted that as he wanted neither Mexicali Joe's gold nor any other coldly glittering thing. Now he felt himself growing angry with her....
"Right. You've said it. Let's go."
He made short work of catching up the few articles they were to carry with them and of stamping into dead coals the few remaining glowing embers of their fire. Then, striding ahead, he led the way. And for a matter of a mile or more she was hard beset to keep up with him.
The day was filled with happenings to divert their thoughts from any one channel. They startled, in a tiny meadow, three deer, which shot away through a tangle of brush, leaping, plunging, shooting forward and down a slope like great, gleaming, graceful arrows. "A man could live like a king here, with a rifle," said Deveril longingly. They saw a tall, thin wisp of smoke an hour before noon; it stood against the sky to the southwest of them, at a distance of perhaps two miles. "Taggart's noonday camp," they decided, deciding further that Taggart must have insisted on an early start, and therefore had found his stomach demanding lunch well before midday. Later, some two or three hours after twelve, they heard the long, reverberating crack and rumble and echo of a rifle-shot. "Taggart's crowd, killing a deer or bear or rabbit," they imagined. And all along they were contented, making what time they could through the open spaces, over the ridges, down through tiny green valleys and up long, dreary slopes, resting frequently, never hastening beyond their powers, secure in knowing that the Taggart trail and the Lynette-Deveril trail, though paralleling, would have no common point of contact before both trails ran into the country in the vicinity of the Big Bear Creek, the rim of the Timber-Wolf country.
"The whole thing," exulted Babe Deveril, "lies in the fact that we know where they are and they haven't the least idea where we are! We know where they are going, and they haven't a guess which way we are steering...."
"Do you know," said Lynette thoughtfully, "I don't believe that Mexicali Joe intends for a minute to lead them to his gold!"