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Never had Mark King known pleasanter companionship than Gloria Gaynor afforded this bright morning.  They passed up the trail, over the first ridge, dropped down into a tiny wild little valley, and had the world all alone to themselves.  Only now was the sun up, and there in the mountains, blazing forth cheerily, it seemed to shine for them alone.  When they rode side by side Gloria chatted brightly, athrill with animation, vivid with her rioting youth.  When the narrow trail demanded and she rode ahead, bright little snatches of lilting song or broken exclamations floated back to the man whose eyes shone with his enjoyment of her.  On every hand this was all a bright new world to her; she had never run wild in the hills as her mother had done through her girlhood; she had never been particularly interested in all of this sprawling ruggedness.  Now she had a hundred eager questions; she saw the shining splendour of the solitudes through King’s eyes; she turned to him with full confidence for the name of a flower, the habit of a bird, even though the latter, unseen among the trees, had only announced himself by a half-dozen enraptured notes.

Yesterday, surrendering her volatile self to a very natural and quite innocent feminine instinct, Gloria had fully determined to parade Mark King before her envious friends as very much her own property.  It was merely a bit of the game, the old, old game at which she, being richly favoured by nature, was as skilful as a girl of eighteen or nineteen could possibly be.  In the eternal skirmish she was an enterprising young savage with many scalps dangling from her triumphant belt.  The petted pompadour of poor Archie, the curly locks of Teddy, the stiff black brush of Mr. Gratton were to have an added fellow in King’s trophy.  Then she had caught a word between her father and his friend; had heard Honeycutt mentioned and a ride to Coloma, and on the break of the instant had determined with a young will which invariably went unthwarted, that high adventure was beckoning her.  A ride on horseback through the mountains with a man who had stirred her more than a little, who filled her romantic fancies with picturesque glamour, who was on a quest of which she knew ten times more than he had any idea she knew.  And that quest itself!  Pure golden glamour everywhere.

Hence, some few minutes afterward, in a cosy nook of the verandah while the others danced, the moon and Gloria were serenely victorious.  King, once assured that the long ride was not too hard for her, saw no slightest reason for objecting to her coming; he did not think of all of that which would mean so much to Ben’s wife—­the conventions and what would people say.  Conventions do not thrive in such regions as the high Sierra.  Ben, to whom King mentioned the thing, looked at it quite as did his friend.  Gloria would be in good hands and ought to have a corking good time; he wished he could get away to go along.  So King telephoned to San Francisco, arranged to have three thousand dollars—­in cash—­sent immediately to him at Coloma, and to-day fancied himself strictly attending to business with an undivided mind.