“You have supplies and a tent?”
“Jennings brought them.”
He took a deep breath of delight. For three days and nights they would be alone, buried together in the eternal hills. Such a home-coming as this had been beyond his dreams.
“Are you—glad?” she asked, and her voice was tremulous.
“Glad!” He spoke a little roughly to hide his deep feeling. “If I could only let you know how I feel! If I could!”
Her heart jumped with a sudden gladness. Rowan did not want to meet his friends yet. He wanted to be alone with her and the baby. This was to be, then, their true honeymoon, the seal of their love for each other.
Rowan saddled the horses and packed the third animal, throwing the diamond hitch expertly. His wife watched him work. It was a joy to see how the vigour of his spirit found expression in the economy of his movements, in the certainty of his fingers, in the easy power of the shoulders muscled so beautifully where the bronzed neck sloped into them.
Presently they were moving into the bigger hills. They saw no more sage chickens or antelope, but as they wound deeper into the mountains his keen eye detected signs of life that escaped her observation. He made her get down once to look at the trail of an elk.
“We’ve been following his trail from that pine back there,” McCoy told her. “He’s a big fellow, and he was on his way down to water. But he got scared right here, I expect. Maybe he heard us coming, or maybe he smelled a bear. Anyhow, he plunged right into the aspens without waiting to say good-bye.”
“How do you know all that? I believe you’re spoofing, as one of our riders, an Englishman, sometimes tells me when I joke him.”