“Thanks awfully. But I didn’t ask you to do it, you know.”
“Oh, now, that’s hardly––when I did it because of what you said.”
“Well, then, I promise to be nice to you until events do us part. That will be in about five minutes. Over there is Dry Fork Gulch. The waterhole is just down around this hill.”
Ashton took his ardent gaze off the girl’s face long enough to glance to his left. He recognized the tremendous gorge in the face of the mountain side that he had tried to ascend the previous day. It ran in with a moderately inclined bottom for nearly a mile, and then scaled up to the top of High Mesa in steep slopes and sheer ledges.
His eyes followed the dry gravelly creek bed around to the right, and he nodded: “Yes, my camp is just over the corner of those crags. But surely, Miss Knowles, you will not end our acquaintance there.”
She met his appealing look with a level glance. “Seriously, Mr. Ashton, don’t you think you had better move camp to another section? It seems to me you have done quite enough unseasonable deer hunting.”
Without waiting for him to reply, she urged her horse into a lope. His own mount was too jaded for a quick start. When he overtook the girl she had 38 rounded the craggy hill on their right and was in sight of a scattered grove of boxelders below a dike of dark colored trap rock that outcropped across the bed of the creek.
Above the natural dam made by this dike the valley was bedded up with sand and large gravel washed down by the torrential rush of spring freshets. Below it the same wild floods, leaping down in a twenty-foot fall, had gouged out a pothole so wide and deep that it was never empty of water even in the driest seasons.