"You are much too presumptuous, also, as I discovered in your quarters."
"My only presumption is in loving you."
"That was not presumption," she smiled; "it was pre-emption. You must be punished."
"I shall run away," he threatened. "I shall gallop right off through the woods and—begin to eat grass. I am very wild."
As she talked she drew from her pocket a spool of line, and took a fly-hook from her hat; then, in a trice, she had rigged a fishing-rod, and, creeping out upon a ledge, she whipped the pool below of a half-dozen rainbow trout, which she thrust into his coat while they were still wriggling. Then she as quickly put up her gear, and they resumed their journey, climbing more steeply now, until, when the sun was low, they quit the stream-bed and made through the forest towards the shoulder of an untimbered ridge that ran down into the valley. And there, high up on the edge of the spruce, they selected a mossy shelf and pitched their camp.
They had become so intimate by now as to fall into a whimsical mode of speech, and Necia reverted to a childish habit in her talk that brought many a smile to the youth's face. It had been her fancy as a little girl to speak in adjectives, ignoring many of her nouns, and its quaintness had so amused her father that on rare occasions, when the humor was on him, he also took it up. She now addressed herself to Burrell in the same manner.
"I think we are very smarts to come so far," she said.
"You travel like a deer," he declared, admiringly. "Why, you have tired me down." Removing his pack, he stretched his arms and shook out the ache in his shoulders.
"Which way does our course lie now, Pathfinder?"
"Right up the side of this big, and then along the ridge. In two hours we come to a gully running so"—she indicated an imaginary direction—"which we go down till it joins another stream so, and right there we'll find old 'No Creek's' cabin, so! Won't they be surprised to see us! I think we're very cunning to beat them in, don't you?" She laughed a glad little bubbling laugh, and he cried: