"Well, Mr. What's-his-name don't own the only ranch in Montana. If we don't buy his, we'll buy another one. You better see that Mr. Schwabheimer tomorrow—he's wanted this place ever since we bought it, and he's offered more than we paid."
"Oh, it won't be any trouble to sell the house. But, about shipping the furniture until we're sure——"
Alice interrupted impetuously: "We'll ship it right straight away—because when we get it out there we'll just have to buy a ranch to put it in!"
Endicott surrendered with a gesture of mock despair: "If that's the way you feel about it, I guess we'll have to buy. But, I'll give you fair warning—it will be up to you to help run the outfit. I don't know anything about the cattle business——"
"We'll find Tex! And we'll make him foreman—and then, when we get all settled I'll invite Margery Demming out for a long visit—I've picked out Margery for Tex—and we can put them up a nice house right near ours, and Margery and I can——"
"Holy Mackerel!" laughed Endicott. "Just like that! Little things don't matter at all—like the fact that we haven't any ranch yet to invite her to, and that she might not come if you did invite her, and if she did come she might not like the country or Tex, or he might not like her. And last of all, we may never find Tex. We've both written him a half a dozen times—and all the letters have been returned. If we had some ham, we'd have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs!"
"There you go, with your old practicability! Anyhow, that's what we'll do—and if Tex don't like her I'll invite someone else, and keep on inviting until I find someone he does like—and as for her—no one could help loving the country, and no one could help loving Tex—so there!"
"I hope the course of their true love will run less tempestuously than ours did for those few days we were under the chaperonage of the Texan," grinned the man.
"Of course it will! It's probably very prosaic out there, the same as it is anywhere, most of the time. It was a peculiar combination of circumstances that plunged us into such a maelstrom of adventure. And yet—I don't see why you should hope for such a placid courtship for them. It took just that ordeal to bring out your really fine points. They were there all the time, dear, but I might never have known they were there. Why, I've lived over those few days, step by step, a hundred times! The wreck, the celebration at Wolf River—" she paused and shuddered, and her husband took up the sequence, mercilessly:
"And your ride with Purdy, and Old Bat thrusting the gun into my hand and urging me to follow—and when I looked up and saw you both on the rim of the bench and saw him drag you from your horse—then the mad dash up the steep trail, and the quick shot as he raised above the sage brush—and then, the fake lynching bee—only it was very real to me as I stood there in the moonlight under that cottonwood limb with a noose about my neck. And then the long ride through the night, and the meeting with you at the ford where you were waiting with Old Bat——"