"What! You--" she started in surprise and checked herself.

"Didn't I come by train?" he asked reprovingly.

"No!" she answered. Her eyes were level with the road, her voice was a
little unnatural. "No! You came over the pass, Jack."

It was the first time in the months of his citizenship of Little Rivers
that she had ever hinted anything but belief in the fiction that they had
first met when he asked her to show him a parcel of land. She seemed to
be calling a truth out of the past and grappling with it, while her lips
tightened and she drew in her chin.

"Then I did come over the pass," he agreed; and after a pause added:
"But there was no Pete Leddy."

"Yes, oh, yes--there was a Pete Leddy!"

"But he will not be there this time!"

And now his voice, in a transport that seemed to touch the cloud heights,
was neither like the voice of the easy traveller on the pass, nor the
voice of his sharp call to Leddy to disarm, nor the voice of the
storyteller. It had a new note, a note startling to her.

"We shall be on the pass without Leddy and smiling over Leddy and
thanking him for his unwitting service in making me stop in Little
Rivers," he concluded.

"Yes, he did that," she admitted stoically, as if it were some oppressive
fact for which she could offer no thanks.

"I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose! I want the
great silence! I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky
and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray!
Will you?"

Their steps ran rhythmically together. His look was eager in
anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus
through her fingers. Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but
were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.

"Will you? Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses? Will you go
forth and dream for a day? We'll tell fairy stories! We'll get a pole and
prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar
his awfullest. Will you?"

Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage.
The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes,
dancing with challenging lights. She was augustly, gloriously
mischievous.

"Will you go in costume? Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the
silk shirt?"

The question said that it was not a time to be serious. It sprinkled the
crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of g