ried she.

He looked up with eager joy, to find that they had met in the middle
of what used to be the road. The gulch had been swept bare by the
flood, not only of every representative of the vegetable world, but
also of the very earth in which it had grown. From the remains of the
roadbed projected sharp flints and rocks, among which the broncos
picked their way.

"Good-morning, Mary," he cried. "I was just coming to see you. Wasn't
it a great rain?"

"And isn't the gulch awful? Down near our way the timber began to jam,
and it is all choked up; but up here it is desolate."

He turned his horse about, and they paced slowly along together,
telling each other their respective experiences in the storm. It seemed
that the Lawtons had known nothing of the cloud-burst itself, except
from its effects in filling up the ravine. Rumours of the drowning of a
miner were about.

It soon became evident that the brightness of the morning was reflected
from the girl's mood. She fairly sparkled with gaiety and high spirits.
The two got along famously.

"Where are you going?" asked Bennington at last.

"On the picnic, of course," she rejoined promptly. "Weren't you
invited? I thought you were."

"I thought it would be too wet," he averred in explanation.

"Not a bit! The rain dries quickly in the hills, and the cloud-burst
only came into this gulch. I have here," she went on, twisting around
in her saddle to inspect a large bundle and a pair of well-stuffed
saddle bags, "I have here a coffee pot, a frying pan, a little kettle,
two tin cups, and various sorts of grub. I am fixed for a scout sure.
Now when we get near your camp you must run up and get an axe and some
matches."

Bennington observed with approval the corpulency of the bundle and the
skilful manner with which it was tied on. He noted, with perhaps more
approval, her lithe figure in its old-fashioned painter's blouse and
rough skirt, and the rosiness of her cheeks under a cloth cap caught on
awry. As the ponies sought a path at a snail's pace through the sharp
flints, she showed in a thousand ways how high the gaiety of her
animal spirits had mounted. She sang airy little pieces of songs. She
uttered single clear notes. She mocked, with a ludicrously feminine
croak, the hoarse voice of a crow sailing over them. She rallied
Bennington mercilessly on his corduroys, his yellow flapped pistol
holster, his laced boots. She went over in ridiculous pantomime the
scene