“Good-morning, Mary,” he cried.  “I was just coming to see you.  Wasn’t it a great rain?”

“And isn’t the gulch awful?  Down near our way the timber began to jam, and it is all choked up; but up here it is desolate.”

He turned his horse about, and they paced slowly along together, telling each other their respective experiences in the storm.  It seemed that the Lawtons had known nothing of the cloud-burst itself, except from its effects in filling up the ravine.  Rumours of the drowning of a miner were about.

It soon became evident that the brightness of the morning was reflected from the girl’s mood.  She fairly sparkled with gaiety and high spirits.  The two got along famously.

“Where are you going?” asked Bennington at last.

“On the picnic, of course,” she rejoined promptly.  “Weren’t you invited?  I thought you were.”

“I thought it would be too wet,” he averred in explanation.

“Not a bit!  The rain dries quickly in the hills, and the cloud-burst only came into this gulch.  I have here,” she went on, twisting around in her saddle to inspect a large bundle and a pair of well-stuffed saddle bags, “I have here a coffee pot, a frying pan, a little kettle, two tin cups, and various sorts of grub.  I am fixed for a scout sure.  Now when we get near your camp you must run up and get an axe and some matches.”

Bennington observed with approval the corpulency of the bundle and the skilful manner with which it was tied on.  He noted, with perhaps more approval, her lithe figure in its old-fashioned painter’s blouse and rough skirt, and the rosiness of her cheeks under a cloth cap caught on awry.  As the ponies sought a path at a snail’s pace through the sharp flints, she showed in a thousand ways how high the gaiety of her animal spirits had mounted.  She sang airy little pieces of songs.  She uttered single clear notes.  She mocked, with a ludicrously feminine croak, the hoarse voice of a crow sailing over them.  She rallied Bennington mercilessly on his corduroys, his yellow flapped pistol holster, his laced boots.  She went over in ridiculous pantomime the scene of the mock lynching, until Bennington rolled in his saddle with light-hearted laughter, and wondered how it was possible he had ever taken the affair seriously.  When he returned with the axe she was hugely alarmed lest he harm himself by his awkward way of carrying it, and gave him much wholesome advice in her most maternal manner.  After all of which she would catch his eye, and they would both laugh to startle the birds.

Blue Lead proved to be some distance away, for which fact Bennington was not sorry.  At length they surmounted a little ridge.  Over its summit there started into being a long cool “draw,” broad and shallow near the top, but deepening by insensible degrees into a canon filled already with broad-leaved shrubs, and thickly grown with saplings of beech and ash.  Through the screen of slender trunks could be seen miniature open parks carpeted with a soft tiny fern, not high enough to conceal the ears of a rabbit, or to quench the flame of the tiger lily that grew there.  Soon a little brook sprang from nowhere, and crept timidly through and under thick mosses.  After a time it increased in size, and when it had become large enough to bubble over clear gravel, Mary called a halt.