“What time is it, Webb?” asked his wife, scarcely less excited.
He had to look again, so absent-minded had been his last glance at the watch. “Nine-fifteen. Why didn’t I telephone to Rogers and ask him to find out which way they were coming? Sometimes I’m mighty thick-headed.”
As Mackenzie had guessed, the party was winding its way through the Box Canyon at that time of speaking. Bucky and Frances led the way, followed by Henderson and the vaquero whom Mackenzie had telephoned to guide them from Aravaipa.
“I reckon this night was made for us, Curly Haid. Even good old Arizona never turned out such a one before. I expect it was ordered for us ever since it was decided we belonged to each other. That may have been thousands of years ago.” Bucky laughed, to relieve the tension, and looked up at the milky way above. “We’re like those stars, honey. All our lives we have been drifting around, but all the time it had been decided by the God-of-things-as-they-are that our orbits were going to run together and gravitate into the same one when the right time came. It has come now.”
“Yes, Bucky,” she answered softly. “We belong, dear.”
“Hello, here’s the end of the cañon. The ranch lies right behind that spur.”
“Does it?” Presently she added: “I’m all a-tremble, Bucky. To think I’m going to meet my father and my mother for the first time really, for I don’t count that other time when we didn’t know. Suppose they shouldn’t like me.”
“Impossible. Suppose something reasonable,” her lover replied.
“But they might not. You think, you silly boy, that because you do everybody must. But I’m so glad I’m clothed and in my right mind again. I couldn’t have borne to meet my mother with that boys suit on. Do you think I look nice in this? I had to take what I could find ready-made, you know.”
Unless his eyes were blinded by the glamour of love, he saw the sweetest vision of loveliness he had known. Such a surpassing miracle of soft, dainty curves, such surplusage of beauty in bare throat, speaking eye, sweet mouth, and dimpled cheeks! But Bucky was a lover, and perhaps no fair judge, for in that touch of vagueness, of fairy-land, lent by the moonlight, he found the world almost too beautiful to believe. Did she look nice? How beggarly words were to express feelings, after all.