took a camp outfit. There's ne'er a station left, and when ye come to it,
it's ruins ye'll find. A chimbly and a few rails, if the mule-skinners
hasn't burned them. 'Tis a country very devoid of fuel; sagebrush and
grease-wood, and a wind, bedad! that blows the grass-seeds into the next
county."

When these camping-trips were proposed to Moya, she hesitated and
responded languidly; but when Paul suggested leaving her even for a day,
her fears fluttered across his path and wiled him another way. Vaguely he
felt that she was unlike herself--less buoyant, though often restless; and
sometimes he fancied she was pale underneath her sun-burned color like
that of rose-hips in October. Various causes kept him inert, while
strength mounted in his veins, and life seemed made for the pure joy of
living.

The moon of May in that valley is the moon of roses, for the heats once
due come on apace. The young people gave up their all-day horseback rides
and took morning walks instead, following the shore-paths lazily to shaded
coverts dedicated to those happy silences which it takes two to make. Or,
they climbed the bluffs and gazed at the impenetrable vast horizon, and
thought perhaps of their errand with that pang of self-reproach which,
when shared, becomes a subtler form of self-indulgence.

But at night, all the teeming life of the plain rushed up into the sky and
blazed there in a million friendly stars. After the languor of the sleepy
afternoons, it was like a fresh awakening--the dawn of those white May
nights. The wide plain stirred softly through all its miles of sage. The
river's cadenced roar paused beyond the bend and outbroke again. All that
was eerie and furtive in the wild dark found a curdling voice in the
coyote's hunting-call.