person. Lord! I'm
afraid to let go of you for fear you'll vanish into nothing, like a
Hindu fakir stunt."

"No fear," Hazel laughed. "I've got a pony tied to a tree out there,
and four Siwashes and a camp outfit over by Crooked Lake. If I should
vanish I'd leave a plain trail for you to follow."

"Well," Bill said, after a short silence, "it's a hundred and forty
miles to a Hudson's Bay post where there's a mission and a preacher.
Let's be on our way and get married. Then we'll come back here and
spend our honeymoon. Eh?"

She nodded assent.

"Are you game to start in half an hour?" he asked, holding her off at
arm's length admiringly.

"I'm game for anything, or I wouldn't be here," she retorted.

"All right. You just watch an exhibition of speedy packing," Bill
declared--and straightway fell to work.

Hazel followed him about, helping to get the kyaks packed with food.
They caught the three horses, and Bill stripped the pony of Hazel's
riding gear and placed a pack on him. Then he put her saddle on Silk.

"He's your private mount henceforth," Bill told her laughingly.
"You'll ride him with more pleasure than you did the first time, won't
you?"

Presently they were ready to start, planning to ride past Limping
George's camp and tell him whither they were bound. Hazel was already
mounted. Roaring Bill paused, with his toe in the stirrup, and smiled
whimsically at her over his horse's back.

"I forgot something," said he, and went back into the cabin--whence he
shortly emerged, bearing in his hand a sheet of paper upon which
something was written in bold, angular characters. This he pinned on
the door. Hazel rode Silk close to see what it might be, and laughed
amusedly, for Bill had written:

"Mr. and Mrs. William Wagstaff will be at home to their friends on and
after June the twentieth."

He swung up into his saddle, and they jogged across the open. In the
edge of the first timber they pulled up and looked backward at the
cabin drowsing silently under its sentinel tree. Roaring Bill reached
out one arm and laid it across Hazel's shoulders.

"Little person," he said soberly, "here's the end of one trail, and the
beginning of another--the longest trail either of us has ever faced.
How does it look to you?"

She caught his fingers with a quick, hard pressure.

"All trails look alike to me," she said, with shining eyes, "just so we
hit them together."

CHAPTER XVI

A BRIEF TIME O