they sank too deep into the sliding earth that surged along in a wave before him. When the firm footing at the bottom was reached, he strode out on the little terrace with a quickness and springiness of gait and with glintings of muscular fires that gave the lie to the calm deliberation of his movements on the slide
“Bravo!” Chris shouted across the canyon, clapping his hands.
“The wisest-footed, clearest-headed horse I ever saw,” Lute called back, as she turned the animal to the side and dropped down a broken slope of rubble and into the trees again.
Chris followed her by the sound of her progress, and by occasional glimpses where the foliage was more open, as she zigzagged down the steep and trailless descent. She emerged below him at the rugged rim of the torrent, dropped the horse down a three-foot wall, and halted to study the crossing.
Four feet out in the stream, a narrow ledge thrust above the surface of the water. Beyond the ledge boiled an angry pool. But to the left, from the ledge, and several feet lower, was a they bed of gravel. A giant boulder prevented direct access to the gravel bed. The only way to gain it was by first leaping to the ledge of rock. She studied it carefully, and the tightening of her bridle-arm advertised that she had made up her mind.
Chris, in his anxiety, had sat up to observe more closely what she meditated.
“Don’t tackle it,” he called.
“I have faith in Comanche,” she called in return.
“He can’t make that side-jump to the gravel,” Chris warned. “He’ll never keep his legs. He’ll topple over into the pool. Not one horse in a thousand could do that stunt.”
“And Comanche is that very horse,” she answered. “Watch him.”
She gave the animal his head, and he leaped cleanly and accurately to the ledge, striking with feet close together on the narrow space. On the instant he struck, Lute lightly touched his neck with the rein, impelling him to the left; and in that instant, tottering on the insecure footing, with front feet slipping over into the pool beyond, he lifted on his hind legs, with a half turn, sprang to the left, and dropped squarely down to the tiny gravel bed. An easy jump brought him across the stream, and Lute angled him up the bank and halted before her lover.
“Well?” she asked.
“I am all tense,” Chris answered. “I was holding my breath.”
“Buy him, by all means,” Lute said, dismounting. “He is a bargain. I could dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a horse’s feet.”
“His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it is impossible to get him down.”
“Buy him, buy him at once,” she counselled, “before the man changes his mind. If you don’t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in them that when I am on him I don’t consider he has feet at all. And he’s quick as a cat, and instantly obedient. Bridle-wise is no name for it! You could guide him with silken threads. Oh, I know I’m enthusiastic, but if you don’t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I’ve second refusal.”
Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared the two horses.
“Of course he doesn’t match Dolly the way Ban did,” she concluded regretfully; “but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the horse that is under the coat!”
Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying:
“We won’t go straight back to camp.”
“You forget dinner,” he wanted.
“But I remember 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 rock 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 his eyes.
