“Poor little sorry father!  I wish we had gone home sooner.”

“He certainly’s got more spunk in him than I gave him credit for!  He had old Brigham and the rest of them plumb buffaloed for a minute.  Oh, he did crack the old bull-whip over them good!”

“Poor little father!  Where could he have gone at this hour?”

“I’ve got an idea he’s set out for that cross he’s talked so much about—­that one up here in the Meadows.”

“I’ve seen it,—­where the Indians killed those poor people years ago.  But what did he mean by the crime of his Church there?”

“We’ll ask him when we find him.  And I reckon we’ll find him right there if he holds out to ride that far.”

He tied her pony to an oak-bush a little off the road, threw Dandy’s bridle-rein to the ground to make him stand, and on a shelving rock near by he found her a seat.

“It won’t be long, and the horses need a chance to breathe.  We’ve come along at a right smart clip, and Dandy’s been getting a regular grass-stomach on him back there.”

Side by side they sat, and in the dark and stillness their own great happiness came back to them.

“The first time I liked you very much,” she said, after he had kissed her, “was when I saw you were so kind to your horse.”

“That’s the only way to treat stock.  I can gentle any horse I ever saw.  Are you sure you care enough for me?”

“Oh, yes, yes, yes!  It must be enough.  It’s so much I’m frightened now.”

“Will you go away with me?”

“Yes, I want to go away with you.”

“Well, you just come out with me,—­out of this hole.  There’s a fine big country out there you don’t know anything about.  Our home will reach from Corpus Christi to Deadwood, and from the Missouri clear over to Mister Pacific Ocean.  We’ll have the prairies for our garden, and the high plains will be our front yard, with the buffalo-grass thicker than hair on a dog’s back.  And, say, I don’t know about it, but I believe they have a bigger God out there than you’ve got in this Salt Lake Basin.  Anyway, He acts more like you’d think God ought to act.  He isn’t so particular about your knowing a lot of signs and grips and passwords and winks.  Going to your heaven must be like going into one of those Free Mason lodges,—­a little peek-hole in the door, and God shoving the cover back to see if you know the signs.  I guess God isn’t so trifling as all that,—­having, you know, a lot of signs and getting ducked under water three times and all that business.  I don’t exactly know what His way is, but I’ll bet it isn’t any way that you’d have to laugh at if you saw it—­like as if, now, you saw old man Wright and God making signs to each other through the door, and Wright saying:—­

   ’Eeny meeny miny mo! 
     Cracky feeny finy fo!’

and God looking in a little book to see if he got all the words right.”