"I don't believe you, but your idea wins," Bayard laughed. "Go on after him. Take ... Say, you take Abe for him to ride back! That's th' thing to do. You put th' parson on Abe an' we'll be as certain to start this fracas on time as I am that his 'bus is apt to secede from itself on th' road any minute!" Bruce sent Abe away with Tommy. Ann arrived. Twenty minutes before the time set for the simple ceremony Abe brought the clergyman through the big gate of the Circle A with his swinging trot, ears up, head alert, as though with conscious pride. "The fact is, Bruce, I'd have been late, if Tommy hadn't come after me," Weyl confessed as he dismounted. "So? I've been expectin' somethin' would happen to you. What was it?" "Why, Nicodemus, my off horse, kicked four spokes out of a front wheel and, when we were putting on another, we found that the axle was hopelessly cracked." "I knew that chariot would quit sometime, but this horse, th' stallion shod with fire ... he don't know what quittin' is!" * * * * * The sun was slipping toward the western horizon when the last of the few who had attended the ceremony passed from sight. For a long time Bruce and Ann stood under the ash tree, watching them depart, hearing the last sounds of wheel and hoof and voice break in on the evening quiet. The girl was wonderfully happy. The strained look about her eyes, the quick, nervous gestures that had characterized her after the tragedy of Ned Lytton's death and before her return to the East, were gone. A splendid look of peace was upon her; one life was gone, thrown away as a piece of botched work; another was opening. Far away to the north and eastward snow-covered peaks, triplets, rose against the bright blue of the sky. As Bruce and Ann looked they lost the silver whiteness and became flushed with the pink of dying day. The distant, pine-covered heights had become blue, the far draws were gathering their purple mists of evening. The lilac of the valley's coloring grew fainter, more delicate, while the deep mauves of a range of hills to the southward deepened towards a dead brown. Over all, that incomparable silence, the inexplicable peace that comes with evening in those big places. No need to dwell further on this for you who have watched and felt and become lost in it; useless to attempt more for the uninitiate. Ann's arm slipped into her husband's and she whispered: "Evening on Manzanita! Is there anything more beautiful?" Bayard smiled. "Not unless it's daytime," he said. "You know, Ann, for a long, long time it's seemed to me as though there's been a shadow on that valley. Even on the brightest days it ain't looked like it should. But now.... Why, even with the sun goin' down, it seems to me as if that shadow's lifted! "I feel freer, too. This fenced-in feelin' that I've had is gone. I ... Why, I feel like life, the world, was all open to me, smilin' at me, waitin' for me, just like that old valley out there.