." And he bowed gravely to Louise.

"Come on, now," whispered Grant, as he joined Allie and Ned in advance,
and left Louise to follow them with her elderly admirer; "the doctor's
lost his wind already, and can't keep up; but, if he wants a walk,
we'll give him one."

His companions entered into the spirit of his proposition, and they
quickened their pace, after casting one backward glance towards Louise,
as she lingered along, with a sort of repressed impatience of step and
manner, while she listened to the Reverend Gabriel's elaborate
explanations of his reasons for following her. Then such a race as they
led him! Quitting the track, they turned aside into the open ground,
covered with uneven tufts of coarse bunch grass and thickets of sage
brush, now racing down a little hillock, now jumping over a tiny stream
and forcing their way through the clumps of willows on the bank, but
always choosing the roughest, hardest path, and always going at the top
of their speed, while Louise and the doctor panted and floundered along
too far in the rear to be heard in their calls for mercy. Even Allie was
beginning to be exhausted when, a few hundred feet above the mouth of
the gulch, Grant turned abruptly to the right and scrambled up the steep
hillside leading to the cemetery.

"There!" he chuckled, while Ned and Allie, breathless with laughing and
with their rapid climb, dropped down on the ground beside him; "we'll
give him a rest when he gets up here. If he's going to come along and
spoil all our fun, he must pay for it; but he'll be tired by this time."

"I wonder if he'll ever get up here alive," said Allie, as she reached
out to the nearest bush, to pick a bit of fur from the twig which had
caught it from some passing cottontail. "You almost used me up, and I
don't believe Miss Lou could have gone on much farther, so I shouldn't
wonder if he was pretty nearly dead."

"Well, 'twould be a nice, convenient place for the funeral; only I
shouldn't be surprised if he stuck, half way up here," suggested Ned,
comfortably lying on his back, and fanning himself with the hat which
Allie had tossed aside. "No; here he comes," he added, as the Reverend
Gabriel's wide-brimmed straw hat and flushed face appeared over the brow
of the hill, followed by Louise, looking rosy and mischievous, but as
fresh as she had done at the start.

"Come over to this tree, doctor, and sit down here in the shade while
you rest," she said kindly, as she