Comanche," she retorted. "We'll ride directly over to
the ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep."

"But the cook won't," Chris laughed. "She's already threatened to leave,
what of our late-comings."

"Even so," was the answer. "Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook,
but at any rate we shall have got Comanche."

They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the
Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley.
But the climb was hard, the going was slow. Sometimes they topped the
bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and
crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods. They rode
through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to
emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry
and cracked under the sun.

On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before
them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the
mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in
impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was
an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts
of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun's broader blazes. The
sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum
of mountain bees.

The horses broke into an easy lope. Chris rode on the outside, looking
down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he
saw. Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of
falling water. It grew louder with every stride of the horses.

"Look!" he cried.

Lute leaned well out from her horse to see. Beneath them the water slid
foaming down a smooth-faced rock to the lip, whence it leaped clear--a
pulsating ribbon of white, a-breath with movement, ever falling and ever
remaining, changing its substance but never its form, an aerial waterway
as immaterial as gauze and as permanent as the hills, that spanned space
and the free air from the lip of the rock to the tops of the trees far
below, into whose green screen it disappeared to fall into a secret
pool.

They had flashed past. The descending water became a distant murmur that
merged again into the murmur of the bees and ceased. Swayed by a common
impulse, they looked at each other.

"Oh, Chris, it is good to be alive... and to have you here by my side!"

He answered her by the warm light in