He sprang up and caught the hands she put out so cordially, and stood swinging them back and forth. “I won’t tease you. A word’s enough to me. But I love it, all the same. Understand?” He pressed her hands and dropped them. “Now, where are you going to drag me?”
“I want you to drag me. Over there, to the other houses. They are more interesting than these.” She pointed across the gorge to the row of white houses in the other cliff. “The trail is broken away, but I got up there once. It’s possible. You have to go to the bottom of the canyon, cross the creek, and then go up hand-over-hand.”
Ottenburg, lounging against the sunny wall, his hands in the pockets of his jacket, looked across at the distant dwellings. “It’s an awful climb,” he sighed, “when I could be perfectly happy here with my pipe. However—” He took up his stick and hat and followed Thea down the water trail. “Do you climb this path every day? You surely earn your bath. I went down and had a look at your pool the other afternoon. Neat place, with all those little cottonwoods. Must be very becoming.”
“Think so?” Thea said over her shoulder, as she swung round a turn.
“Yes, and so do you, evidently. I’m becoming expert at reading your meaning in your back. I’m behind you so much on these single-foot trails. You don’t wear stays, do you?”
“Not here.”
“I wouldn’t, anywhere, if I were you. They will make you less elastic. The side muscles get flabby. If you go in for opera, there’s a fortune in a flexible body. Most of the German singers are clumsy, even when they’re well set up.”
Thea switched a piñon branch back at him. “Oh, I’ll never get fat! That I can promise you.”
Fred smiled, looking after her. “Keep that promise, no matter how many others you break,” he drawled.
The upward climb, after they had crossed the stream, was at first a breathless scramble through underbrush. When they reached the big boulders, Ottenburg went first because he had the longer leg-reach, and gave Thea a hand when the step was quite beyond her, swinging her up until she could get a foothold. At last they reached a little platform among the rocks, with only a hundred feet of jagged, sloping wall between them and the cliff-houses.