F PLANNING

"What day of the month is this, Bill?" Hazel asked.

"Haven't the least idea," he answered lazily. "Time is of no
consequence to me at the present moment."

They were sitting on the warm earth before their cabin, their backs
propped comfortably against a log, watching the sun sink behind a
distant sky-line all notched with purple mountains upon which snow
still lingered. Beside them a smudge dribbled a wisp of smoke
sufficient to ward off a pestilential swarm of mosquitoes and black
flies. In the clear, thin air of that altitude the occasional voices
of what bird and animal life was abroad in the wild broke into the
evening hush with astonishing distinctness--a lone goose winged above
in wide circles, uttering his harsh and solitary cry. He had lost his
mate, Bill told her. Far off in the bush a fox barked. The evening
flight of the wild duck from Crooked Lake to a chain of swamps passed
intermittently over the clearing with a sibilant whistle of wings. To
all the wild things, no less than to the two who watched and listened
to the forest traffic, it was a land of peace and plenty.

"We ought to go up to the swamps to-morrow and rustle some duck eggs,"
Bill observed irrelevantly--his eyes following the arrow flight of a
mallard flock. But his wife was counting audibly, checking the days
off on her fingers.

"This is July the twenty-fifth, Mr. Roaring Bill Wagstaff," she
announced. "We've been married exactly one month."

"A whole month?" he echoed, in mock astonishment. "A regular calendar
month of thirty-one days, huh? You don't say so? Seems like it was
only day before yesterday, little person."

"I wonder," she snuggled up a little closer to him, "if any two people
were ever as happy as we've been?"

Bill put his arm across her shoulders and tilted her head back so that
he could smile down into her face.

"They have been a bunch of golden days, haven't they?" he whispered.
"We haven't come to a single bump in the road yet. You won't forget
this joy time if we ever do hit real hard going, will you, Hazel?"

"The bird of ill omen croaks again," she reproved. "Why should we come
to hard going, as you call it?"

"We shouldn't," he declared. "But most people do. And we might. One
never can tell what's ahead. Life takes queer and unexpected turns
sometimes. We've got to live pretty close to each other, depend
absolutely on each other in many ways--and that's the acid test of
hum