"No, every flower garden in Little Rivers is yours!" he declared.

The way he said this made her frown. She saw him taking a step on the other side of that barrier over which she mounted guard.

"Never make your hyperboles felonious!" she warned him. "Besides, if you are going to be a real Little Riversite you should have opinions of your own."

"I haven't any to-day--none except victory!" and he held out his palms, exhibiting their yellowish plates. "Look! Even corns on the joints!"

"Yes, they look quite real," she admitted, censoriously.

"Haven't I made good? Do you remember how you stood here on the very site of my house and lectured me? I would not work! I would not--"

"You have worked a little--a little!" she said grudgingly, and showed him as much of the wondrous sparkle in her eyes as he could see out of the corners between the lashes. She never allowed him to look into her eyes if she apprehended any attempt to cross the barrier. But she could see well enough out of the corners to know that his glances had a kind of hungry joy and a promise of some new demonstration in his att.i.tude toward her. She must watch that barrier very shrewdly.

"Look at my hedge!" he went on. "It is knee-high already, and my umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself around the trunk. But such things are ornamental. I have a more practical appeal. Come on!"

His elation was insistent, superior to any p.r.i.c.kling gibes of banter, as they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings, and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a vagrant breeze. He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride, his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.

"The callouses win!" And he exhibited them again.

But she refused even to glance at them this time.

"You seem to think callouses phenomenal. Most people in Little Rivers accept them as they do the noses on their faces."

"They certainly are phenomenal on me. So is my first crop! My first crop!

I'll be up at dawn to stack it--and then I'm no longer a neophyte. I am an initiate! I'm a real rancher! A holiday is due! I celebrate!"

He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too. She was provokingly flippant as an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the little flexible leather volume.

"How celebrate?" she inquired. "By walking through the town with a wisp of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear--a float labeled, 'The Idler Enjoying His Own Reform?' We'll all turn out and cheer."

"Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste. No! I shall celebrate by a terrific spree--a ride to the pa.s.s!"

He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock ma.s.ses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses. She felt that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he was about to suggest.

"A ride to the pa.s.s and a view of the sunset from the very top!" he cried. He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her glance. "My day in the country--my holiday, if you will go with me! Will you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert, knowing that a little of it is mine?"

"Your orange-trees are too young. It's so far away they will hardly show," she ventured, surveying the distance to the pa.s.s judicially.

"Will you?"

"Why, to me a ride to the pa.s.s is not a thing to be planned a day beforehand," she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria.

"It is a matter of momentary inspiration. Make it a set engagement and it is but a plodding journey. I can best tell in the morning," she concluded. "And, by the way, I see you haven't yet tried grafting plums on the alfalfa stalks."

"No. I have learned better. It is not consistent. You see, you mow alfalfa and you pick plums."

This return to drollery, in keeping with the prescribed order of their relations, made her look up in candid amus.e.m.e.nt over the barrier which for a moment he had been endangering.

"Honestly, Jack, you do improve," she said, with mock encouragement. "You seem to have mastered a number of the simple truths of age-old agricultural experience."

"But will you? Will you ride to the pa.s.s?"

He had the question launched fairly into her eyes. She could not escape it. He saw one bright flash, whether of real anger or simply vexation at his reversion to the theme he could not tell, and her lashes dropped; she ran the leaf edges of the austere Marcus back and forth in her fingers, thip-thip-thip. That was the only sound for some seconds, very long seconds.

"As I've already tried to make clear to you, it's such a businesslike thing to ride to the pa.s.s unless you have the inspiration," she remarked thoughtfully to Marcus. "Perhaps I shall get the inspiration on the way back to the house;" which was a signal that she was going. "And, by the way, Jack, to return to the object of my coming, if you have ideas of your own about flowers incorporate them; that is the way to develop your floricultural talent."

She turned away, but he followed. He was at her side and proceeding with her, his head bent toward her, boyishly, eagerly.

"You see, I have never been out to the pa.s.s," he remarked urgently.

"What! You--" she started in surprise and checked herself.

"Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly.

"No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a little unnatural. "No! You came over the pa.s.s, Jack."

It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips tightened and she drew in her chin.

"Then I did come over the pa.s.s," he agreed; and after a pause added: "But there was no Pete Leddy."

"Yes, oh, yes--there was a Pete Leddy!"

"But he will not be there this time!"

And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights, was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pa.s.s, nor the voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her.

"We shall be on the pa.s.s without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little Rivers," he concluded.

"Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive fact for which she could offer no thanks.

"I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray!

Will you?"

Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in antic.i.p.ation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.

"Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pa.s.s and hear him roar his awfullest. Will you?"

Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful pa.s.sage.

The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes, dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously mischievous.

"Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the silk shirt?"

The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of gla.s.s, which might give zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch.

"I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put streamers on P.D.'s bits!"

"That is too enticing for refusal," she answered, playfully. "I particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar."

They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to consider arrangements. There was no one in sight on the street except Jim Galway, who was approaching at some distance.