Lorry drove the pack-animals toward Bronson’s cabin.  He dismounted to tighten the cinch on Chinook’s saddle.

The little cavalcade moved out across the mesa.  Dorothy rode behind the pack-animals, who knew their work too well to need a lead-rope.  It was her adventure.  At the Big Spring, she would graciously allow Lorry to take charge of the expedition.

Lorry, riding behind her, turned as they entered the forest, and waved farewell to Bronson.

To ride the high trails of the Arizona hills is in itself an unadulterated joy.  To ride these wooded uplands, eight thousand feet above the world, with a sprightly Peter Pan clad in silver-gray corduroys and chatting happily, is an enchantment.  In such companionship, when the morning sunlight dapples the dun forest carpet with pools of gold, when vista after vista unfolds beneath the high arches of the rusty-brown giants of the woodlands; when somewhere above there is the open sky and the marching sun, the twilight underworld of the green-roofed caverns is a magic land.

The ponies plodded slowly upward, to turn and plod up the next angle of the trail, without loitering and without haste.  When Dorothy checked her pony to gaze at some new vista, the pack-animals rested, waiting for the word to go on again.  Lorry, awakened to a new charm in Dorothy, rode in a silence that needed no interpreter.

At a bend in the trail, Dorothy reined up.  “Oh, I just noticed!  You are wearing your chaps this morning.”

Lorry flushed, and turned to tie a saddle-string that was already quite secure.

Dorothy nodded to herself and spoke to the horses.  They strained on up a steeper pitch, pausing occasionally to rest.

Lorry seemed to have regained his old manner.  Her mention of the chaps had wakened him to everyday affairs.  After all, she was only a girl; not yet eighteen, her father had said.  “Just a kid,” Lorry had thought; “but mighty pretty in those city clothes.”  He imagined that some women he had seen would look like heck in such a riding-coat and breeches.  But Dorothy looked like a kind of stylish boy-girl, slim and yet not quite as slender as she had appeared in her ordinary clothes.  Lorry could not help associating her appearance with a thoroughbred he had once seen; a dark-bay colt, satin smooth and as graceful as a flame.  He had all but worshiped that horse.  Even as he knew horses, through that colt he had seen perfection; his ideal of something beautiful beyond words.

From his pondering, Lorry arrived at a conclusion having nothing to do with ideals.  He would buy a new suit of clothes the first time he went to Phoenix.  It would be a trim suit of corduroy and a dark-green flannel shirt, like the suit and shirt worn by Lundy, the forestry expert.

At the base of a great gray shoulder of granite, the Big Spring spread in its natural rocky bowl which grew shallower toward the edges.  Below the spring in the black mud softened by the overflow were the tracks of wild turkey and the occasional print of a lynx pad.  The bush had been cleared from around the spring, and the ashes of an old camp-fire marked the spot where Lorry had often “bushed over-night” on his way to the cabin.