“Look at my hedge!” he went on.  “It is knee-high already, and my umbrella-trees cast enough shade for anybody, if he will wrap himself around the trunk.  But such things are ornamental.  I have a more practical appeal.  Come on!”

His elation was insistent, superior to any prickling gibes of banter, as they walked on the mealy earth between rows of young orange settings, and the sweet odor of drying alfalfa came to their nostrils, borne by a vagrant breeze.  He swept his hand toward the field in a gesture of pride, his shoulders thrown back in a deep breath of exultation.

“The callouses win!” And he exhibited them again.

But she refused even to glance at them this time.

“You seem to think callouses phenomenal.  Most people in Little Rivers accept them as they do the noses on their faces.”

“They certainly are phenomenal on me.  So is my first crop!  My first crop!  I’ll be up at dawn to stack it—­and then I’m no longer a neophyte.  I am an initiate!  I’m a real rancher!  A holiday is due!  I celebrate!”

He was rhapsodic and he was serious, too.  She was provokingly flippant as an antidote for Marcus Aurelius, whom she was still carrying in the little flexible leather volume.

“How celebrate?” she inquired.  “By walking through the town with a wisp of alfalfa in one hand and exhibiting the callouses on the other? or will you be drawn on a float by Jag Ear—­a float labeled, ’The Idler Enjoying His Own Reform?’ We’ll all turn out and cheer.”

“Amusing, but not dignified and not to my taste.  No!  I shall celebrate by a terrific spree—­a ride to the pass!”

He turned his face toward the range, earnest in its transfixion and suffused with the spirit of restlessness and the call of the mighty rock masses, gray in their great ribs and purple in their abysses.  She felt that same call as something fluid and electric running through the air from sky to earth, and set her lips in readiness for whatever folly he was about to suggest.

“A ride to the pass and a view of the sunset from the very top!” he cried.  He looked down at her quickly, and all the force of the call he had transformed into a sunny, personal appeal, which made her avert her glance.  “My day in the country—­my holiday, if you will go with me!  Will you, and gaze out over that spot of green in the glare of the desert, knowing that a little of it is mine?”

“Your orange-trees are too young.  It’s so far away they will hardly show,” she ventured, surveying the distance to the pass judicially.

“Will you?”

“Why, to me a ride to the pass is not a thing to be planned a day beforehand,” she said deliberately, still studiously observing Galeria.  “It is a matter of momentary inspiration.  Make it a set engagement and it is but a plodding journey.  I can best tell in the morning,” she concluded.  “And, by the way, I see you haven’t yet tried grafting plums on the alfalfa stalks.”