“Roy, then that's why you're so nice,” said Bo, with a little devil in her eyes. “Do you know I had my mind made up if Tom hadn't come around I was going to make up to you, Roy.... I sure was. What number wife would I have been?”
It always took Bo to turn the tables on anybody. Roy looked mightily embarrassed. And the laugh was on him. He did not face them again until he had mounted.
“Las Vegas, I've done my best for you—hitched you to thet blue-eyed girl the best I know how,” he declared. “But I shore ain't guaranteein' nothin'. You'd better build a corral for her.”
“Why, Roy, you shore don't savvy the way to break these wild ones,” drawled Las Vegas. “Bo will be eatin' out of my hand in about a week.”
Bo's blue eyes expressed an eloquent doubt as to this extraordinary claim.
“Good-by, friends,” said Roy, and rode away to disappear in the spruces.
Thereupon Bo and Las Vegas forgot Roy, and Dale and Helen, the camp chores to be done, and everything else except themselves. Helen's first wifely duty was to insist that she should and could and would help her husband with the work of cleaning up after the sumptuous supper. Before they had finished a sound startled them. It came from Roy, evidently high on the darkening slope, and was a long, mellow pealing halloo, that rang on the cool air, burst the dreamy silence, and rapped across from slope to slope and cliff to cliff, to lose its power and die away hauntingly in the distant recesses.
Dale shook his head as if he did not care to attempt a reply to that beautiful call. Silence once again enfolded the park, and twilight seemed to be born of the air, drifting downward.
“Nell, do you miss anythin'?” asked Dale.
“No. Nothing in all the world,” she murmured. “I am happier than I ever dared pray to be.”