"Good-night."
When the time came the Blackguard kicked his relief awake, and the relief in due course kicked another chap whose turn was the morning watch. The stars were doing a very poor business that night on account of the pungent dry smoke from burning woods, but when they gave up their half-hearted twinkling as a bad job, the dawn mist rising from the meadow was cool and ghostlike as usual; full of dream-faces, if one could only have seen them, ghosts of nice children, pretty girls, and respectable parents, who had come to call on the Mounted Police while they were off duty.
Startling all the echoes, making the keen ear tremble, waking the summer world, and losing coherence in the distant hills, reveille rang out clear and sharp, a burst of triumphant, unexpected music—and the night was gone.
Then, to successive bugle calls, blankets were rolled, waggons loaded, the horses carefully tended, breakfast was eaten, and almost before the sun had lighted the deep ravine the mounted party began to toil up the hillside, and the waggons followed groaning across the meadow.
CHAPTER XIV
Miss Violet and the Tenderfoot were sitting on a bench in front of the cabin, she peeling potatoes, he watching her.
"Go on," she said wearily.
"And then we shall have a house in Park Lane."
"We had that before—next door to the Duke of Something."