“I’m here to help.”
“But if one should miss?”
He shrugged. “Ah! That’s a theological question. If the sky pilots guess right, for y’u heaven and for me hell.”
They negotiated the trough successfully to its uptilted end. She had a bad moment when he leaped for the rock rim above from the narrow ledge on which they stood. But he caught it, drew himself up without the least trouble and turned to assist her. He sat down on the rock edge facing the abyss beneath them, and told her to lock her hands together above his left foot. Then slowly, inch by inch, he drew her up till with one of his hands he could catch her wrist. A moment later she was standing on his rigid toes, from which position she warily edged to safety above.
“Well done, little pardner. You’re the first woman ever climbed the Crags.” He offered a hand to celebrate the achievement.
“If I am it is all due to you, big pardner. I could never have made that last bit alone.”
They ate lunch merrily in the pleasant sunlight, and both of them seemed as free from care as a schoolboy on a holiday.
“It’s good to be alive, isn’t it?” he asked her after they had eaten, as he lay on the warm ground at her feet. “And what a life it is here! To be riding free, with your knees pressing a saddle, in the wind and the sun. There’s something in a man to which the wide spaces call. I’d rather lie here in the sunbeat with you beside me than be a king. You remember the ‘Last Ride’ that fellow Browning tells about? I reckon he’s dead right. If a man could only capture his best moments and hold them forever it would be heaven to the nth degree.”
She studied her sublimated villain with that fascination his vagaries always excited in her. Was ever a more impossible combination put together than this sentimental scamp with the long record of evil?
“Say it,” he laughed.” Whang it out I ask, anything you like, pardner.”