I tore up the letter just there, and the wind, which was howling that day, caught the pieces and took them over into North Dakota; so I don’t know what else Edith may have had to tell me.  I’d read enough to put me in a mighty nasty temper at any rate, so I suppose its purpose was accomplished.  Edith is like all the rest:  If she can say anything to make a man uncomfortable she’ll do it, every time.

This day, I remember, I went mooning along, thinking hard things about the world in general, and my little corner of it in particular.  The country was beginning to irritate me, and I knew that if something didn’t break loose pretty soon I’d be off somewhere.  Riding over to little buttes, and not meeting a soul on the way or seeing anything but a bare rock when you get there, grows monotonous in time, and rather gets on the nerves of a fellow.

When I came close up to the butte, however, I saw a flutter of skirts on the pinnacle, and it made a difference in my gait; I went up all out of breath, scrambling as if my life hung on a few seconds, and calling myself a different kind of fool for every step I took.  I kept assuring myself, over and over, that it was only Edith, and that there was no need to get excited about it.  But all the while I knew, down deep down in the thumping chest of me, that it wasn’t Edith.  Edith couldn’t make all that disturbance in my circulatory system, not in a thousand years.

She was sitting on the same rock, and she was dressed in the same adorable riding outfit with a blue wisp of veil wound somehow on her gray felt hat, and the same blue roan was dozing, with dragging bridle-reins, a few rods down the other side of the peak.  She was sketching so industriously that she never heard me coming until I stood right at her elbow.

It might have been the first time over again, except that my mental attitude toward her had changed a lot.

“That’s better; I can see now what you’re trying to draw,” I said, looking down over her shoulder—­not at the sketch; it might have been a sea view, for all I knew—­but at the pink curve of her cheek, which was growing pinker while I looked.

She did not glance up, or even start; so she must have known, all along, that I was headed her way.  She went on making a lot of marks that didn’t seem to fit anywhere, and that seemed to me a bit wobbly and uncertain.  I caught just the least hint of a smile twitching the corner of her mouth—­I wanted awfully to kiss it!

“Yes?  I believe I have at last got everything—­King’s Highway—­in the proper perspective and the proper proportion,” she said, stumbling a bit over the alliteration—­and no wonder.  It was a sentence to stampede cattle; but I didn’t stampede.  I wanted, more than ever, to kiss—­but I won’t be like Barney, if I can help it.

“It’s too far off—­too unattainable,” I criticized—­meaning something more than her sketch of the pass.  “And it’s too narrow.  If a fellow rode in there he would have to go straight on through; there wouldn’t be a chance to turn back.”