happy. She
appreciated Dale's state. His eyes reflected the precious treasure
which manifestly he saw, but realization of ownership had not yet become
demonstrable.

Then with gay speech and happy laugh and silent look these five partook
of the supper. When it was finished Roy made known his intention to
leave. They all protested and coaxed, but to no avail. He only laughed
and went on saddling his horse.

"Roy, please stay," implored Helen. "The day's almost ended. You're
tired."

"Nope. I'll never be no third party when there's only two."

"But there are four of us."

"Didn't I just make you an' Dale one?... An', Mrs. Dale, you forget I've
been married more 'n once."

Helen found herself confronted by an unanswerable side of the argument.
Las Vegas rolled on the grass in his mirth. Dale looked strange.

"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