of sight around the bend, and watched till she came into sight
returning. She certainly could sit her horse, was his thought,
and she was a sure enough hummer. God, she was the wife for a
man! Made most of them look pretty slim. And to think of her
hammering all week at a typewriter. That was no place for her.
She should be a man's wife, taking it easy, with silks and satins
and diamonds (his frontier notion of what befitted a wife
beloved), and dogs, and horses, and such things--"And we'll see,
Mr. Burning Daylight, what you and me can do about it," he
murmured to himself! and aloud to her:--

"You'll do, Miss Mason; you'll do. There's nothing too good in
horseflesh you don't deserve, a woman who can ride like that.
No; stay with him, and we'll jog along to the quarry." He
chuckled. "Say, he actually gave just the least mite of a
groan that last time you fetched him. Did you hear it? And did
you see the way he dropped his feet to the road--just like he'd
struck a stone wall. And he's got savvee enough to know from now
on that that same stone wall will be always there ready for him
to lam into."

When he parted from her that afternoon, at the gate of the road
that led to Berkeley, he drew off to the edge of the intervening
clump of trees, where, unobserved, he watched her out of sight.
Then, turning to ride back into Oakland, a thought came to him
that made him grin ruefully as he muttered: "And now it's up to
me to make good and buy that blamed quarry. Nothing less than
that can give me an excuse for snooping around these hills."

But the quarry was doomed to pass out of his plans for a time,