e, of course."

The stranger must have felt and admired the unconscious dignity of her
tone and words, for he thanked her simply and refrained from looking
too intently at her face.

Fine siftings of snow, like meal flung down from a gigantic sieve,
swept into their faces as they rode on. The man turned his face toward
her after a long silence. She was riding with bowed head and face half
turned from him and the wind alike.

"You'd better ride on ahead and get in out of this," he said curtly.
"Your horse is fresh. It's going to be worse and more of it, before
long; this cayuse of mine has had thirty miles or so of rough going."

"I think I'd better wait for you," she said primly. "There are bad
places where the trail goes close to the bluff, and the lava rock will
be slippery with this snow. And it's getting dark so fast that a
stranger might go over."

"If that's the case, the sooner you are past the bad places the better.
I'm all right. You drift along."

Billy Louise speculated briefly upon the note of calm authority in his
voice. He did not know, evidently, that she was more accustomed to
giving commands than to obeying them; her lips gave a little quirk of
amusement at his mistake.

"You go on. I don't want a guide." He tilted his head peremptorily
toward the blurred trail ahead.

Billy Louise laughed a little. She did not feel in the least
embarrassed now. "Do you never get what you don't want?" she asked him
mildly. "I'd a lot rather lead you past those places than have you go
over the edge," she said, "because nobody could get you up, or even go
down and bury you decently. It wouldn't be a bit nice. It's much
simpler to keep you on top."

He said something, but Billy Louise could not hear what it was; she
suspected him of swearing. She rode on in silence.

"Blue's a dandy horse on bad trails and in the dark," she observed
companionably at last. "He simply can't lose his footing or his way."

"Yes? That's nice."

Billy Louise felt like putting out her tongue at him, for the cool
remoteness of his tone. It would serve him right to ride on and let
him break his neck over the bluff if he wanted to. She shut her teeth
together and turned her face away from him.

So, in silence and with no very good feeling between them, they went
precariously down the steep hill (the hill up which Marthy and the oxen
and Jase had toiled so laboriously, twenty-seven years before) and
across the tiny