The young woman smiled wanly, but shook her head.
“I’m really very tired,” she explained. “I have had a week of it at that awful hotel in the Gulch. It is fearfully noisy at night with drinking cowboys and miners, and so I have had scarcely any sleep for a long while. If I have proved a dull companion to-day, that is the reason, and I am sure you will excuse me now.”
“Miss Fuller, you could not be dull if you tried. I am sorry you should have had so much trouble on my account at that terrible station. I should have sent a man, but I could not guess the horrors of the place before seeing it. Pray forgive my selfishness.”
“Oh, that was really nothing. I am quite accustomed to the life; but, somehow, the first night in the mountains always leaves me stupid and drowsy.”
“To-morrow night, then,” he said very quietly, “we may perhaps view the moonlight together.”
“To-morrow night,” she murmured and was gone.
Steele threw himself into the canvas camp-chair, and, reclining, gazed on the moonlit plain below and listened to the roar of the torrent. Dreamily he fancied himself floating in the seventh heaven of bliss.
Next morning the camp was early astir, for a long day of mountaineering lay ahead. The party numbered seven, all told, there being three men of peaceable demeanour, but rough aspect, in charge of the pack-train. At no time during that day did Steele secure an opportunity of speaking with Alice Fuller alone. They could not ride together, as the mountain path was too narrow. After dinner, at the final camping-place, a wild spot in a profound valley, where John saw with dismay the moon would not be visible, the girl seemed loth to keep him company as had been the case the night before. She laughed somewhat harshly, he thought, when he complained that she must have known they could not see the moon.
“You can study its rays on the northern peaks,” she said. “Who would ever have expected a modern financier to yearn for the moon?”
“A modern financier is but a man, after all,” protested Steele.