"You can go to sleep with that--that dreadful thought hanging over us?" "I can and I will. Watch me for about another minute and you'll see me doing it." He settled himself on his air mattress and drew the blankets over him. "Well, I know I won't close my eyes this whole night through." "I've heard you say that before and then had to shake you like a dish towel in the morning to make you snap out of it." "This time I won't. I don't want to sleep. I want to plan something since you won't help me. Hector"--she reached across from her side and plucked at his top coverlid--"Hector, listen, I've got an idea--let's break off this trip tomorrow. Let's bundle right up and start back East. You can say you've got a message calling you back to the office--say you forgot something important, say--" "And tip our hands just at the most critical time! We will not!... Mmph!" With a drowsy scornfulness he added this. Ten seconds later he _mmphed_ again, then again. But the third one merged into a snore. Undeniably Mr. Hector Gatling could be one of the most aggravating persons on earth when he set out to be. Any husband can. * * * * * Speaking with regard to the ripening effect of summer nights upon the spirits of receptive and impressionable youth, Mr. Gatling had listed the cumulative possibilities of three moonlit ones hand-running. Specifically he had not included in his perilous category those languishing soft gloamings and those explosive sunrises and those long lazy mornings when the sun baked resiny perfumes out of the cedars, and the unseen heart-broken little bird that the mountaineers call the lonesome bird sang his shy lament in the thickets; nor had he mentioned slow journeys through deep defiles where the ferns grew with a tropical luxuriance out of the cinders of old forest-fires and, in a paradoxical defiance, shook their fronds toward the never-melting snow-caps on the _sierras_ across the cañon; nor yet the fordings of tumbling streams when it might seem expedient on the part of a thoughtful young man to push up alongside and steady a young equestrian of the opposite sex while her horse's hoofs fumbled over the slick, drowned boulders. But vaguely he had lumped all these contingencies. Three more nights of moon it was with three noble days of pleasant adventuring in between; and on the late afternoon of the third day when camp was being made beside a river which mostly was rapids, Miss Shirley Gatling sought out her father in a secluded spot somewhat apart from the rest. It was in the nature of a rendezvous, she having told him a little earlier that presently she desired to have speech with him. Only, her way of putting it had been different.