Though he had rushed at the drawings with a powerful incentive--to make himself free so that he could perform one great service for his lady--he yielded often to the persuasions of Mrs. Laithe and took Virginia out for adventures. They explored box canyons that she believed to be impenetrable until he nonchalantly opened a way to their secret recesses. They whipped trout streams and he complacently caught fish from holes she would angle in without result. He tried to persuade her that certain brown patches he professed to detect off through the forest from time to time were deer; but vainly each time, until there would be a sudden terrific shattering amid the underbrush, and perhaps a fleeting glimpse of the brown patch with its white center, flying in swift rebuke to her unbelief. They climbed hills together, and he irritated her by his continued ease of breath under the strain, while her own "wind" that she had thought so well of in Kensington was exhausted by the first moments of effort. She believed him guilty of a polite fiction when he explained that the altitude made all the difference. She disbelieved his tale of the lake water's coldness--it was annoying to be told that even he wanted no more than a single plunge in it--and bathed there one day to her undoing. She refused to believe that he could shoot accurately with a rifle that made so much noise, or with a revolver that wobbled when one tried to hold it still, until he had demonstrated these matters. And she refused to concede that she could not ride a certain half-broken little mare--which Ewing rode without apparent difficulty--until the mare proved it to the satisfaction of all concerned. These little disbeliefs were not unpleasant to Ewing. He revenged himself for having been proved a "duffer" at her own games. It was on their return from an afternoon's fishing one day that they found Bartell bestowing Cooney on his sister. "I bought him for you from Pierce," he was explaining. "Of course Virgie can ride him until you're fit again." The sick woman greeted her old friend formally in the presence of the others. But when they had gone inside she led the little roan around to the corral, and there, sheltered by its wall, she put an arm tightly over his lowered neck and laid her face to his with fond little words of greeting and remembrance. He had carried her so well on a day when nothing had happened; when she was a girl herself, it almost seemed, more curious of the world than knowing.