The man’s heart, which was beating fast, seemed suddenly to turn to water—­wild, rushing water, like that of the river below the fall.

“Can you do it?” asked Angela, anxiously.

“I sure will,” answered Nick, with a hundred per cent, more confidence than he felt.  A confidence somewhat increased, however, by last evening’s success.  “Do I begin at the neck or the waist?” he inquired in his most matter-of-fact voice, as if he were about to cord a box, or nail up a crate of oranges.

“At the neck,” Angela instructed him.

The stricken young man had a curious sensation, as if his hands were swelling to an immense size.  He seemed to have as much control of his fingers as though he wore a pair of boxing gloves.

He took hold gingerly of the delicately embroidered collar, a thumb and finger on either side.  “I guess it won’t meet,” he ventured, tentatively.

“Oh, yes, it will.  Just pull it together firmly.”

Nick pulled with resolution.

“Ugh!  You’re choking me!” she gurgled.

All that water which once had been his heart trickled vaguely and icily through the wrong veins, upsetting his whole system.

“Forgive me this time!” he implored.  “It’s going to be right, just as soon as—­as—­I find the buttonholes.”

“There aren’t any.  They’re loops.”

“Oh, those tiny little stick-up things, like loosened threads?”

“Yes.  You’ll see it’s quite easy, after the first.”

Oh, was it indeed?  Nick suppressed a groan, not at his task, but at his own oxlike awkwardness (so he anathematized it) that made a torture of a delicious privilege.  Evidently it was a much harder thing to lasso one of these little pearl atrocities with its alleged “loop” than to rope a vicious steer.  And there were those tangling threads of gold.  If he should hurt her!

The ex-cowboy almost prayed, as, with the caution of a man treading upon knife-blades on the edge of a precipice, he unwound the two little curls from the top button of the collar.  And perhaps his unconscious appeal for mercy had its effect, for the tendrils yielded graciously to coaxing.  He would have given a year of his life to kiss one of those curls; a comparatively worthless year it would be, since, in all probability, it would be empty of Angela May!  Yet no—­now that he had touched her like this, now that he had come so near to her, he felt with all his soul that he could never let her go.  He would have to keep her somehow.

“She may think there’s a dead line between us,” he told himself; “but before we leave the Yosemite Valley together I’m going to do my best to cross that line, if I get shot for my cheek.  It’s better to dare the dash and die, than not to dare, and lose her.”

Never, perhaps, was so desperate a resolve cemented while fastening a woman’s blouse; but there was a hint of triumph in Nick’s voice as he announced, “I’ve done it!” His signal success in two operations of extreme difficulty seemed to him like two separate good omens.