“Buy him, by all means,” Lute said, dismounting. “He is a bargain. I could dare anything on him. I never in my life had such confidence in a horse’s feet.” “His owner says that he has never been known to lose his feet, that it is impossible to get him down.” “Buy him, buy him at once,” she counselled, “before the man changes his mind. If you don’t, I shall. Oh, such feet! I feel such confidence in them that when I am on him I don’t consider he has feet at all. And he’s quick as a cat, and instantly obedient. Bridle-wise is no name for it! You could guide him with silken threads. Oh, I know I’m enthusiastic, but if you don’t buy him, Chris. I shall. Remember, I’ve second refusal.” Chris smiled agreement as he changed the saddles. Meanwhile she compared the two horses. “Of course he doesn’t match Dolly the way Ban did,” she concluded regretfully; “but his coat is splendid just the same. And think of the horse that is under the coat!” Chris gave her a hand into the saddle, and followed her up the slope to the county road. She reined in suddenly, saying: “We won’t go straight back to camp.” “You forget dinner,” he warned. “But I remember Comanche,” she retorted. “We’ll ride directly over to the ranch and buy him. Dinner will keep.” “But the cook won’t,” Chris laughed. “She’s already threatened to leave, what of our late-comings.” “Even so,” was the answer. “Aunt Mildred may have to get another cook, but at any rate we shall have got Comanche.” They turned the horses in the other direction, and took the climb of the Nun Canyon road that led over the divide and down into the Napa Valley. But the climb was hard, the going was slow. Sometimes they topped the bed of the torrent by hundreds of feet, and again they dipped down and crossed and recrossed it twenty times in twice as many rods. They rode through the deep shade of clean-bunked maples and towering redwoods, to emerge on open stretches of mountain shoulder where the earth lay dry and cracked under the sun. On one such shoulder they emerged, where the road stretched level before them, for a quarter of a mile. On one side rose the huge bulk of the mountain. On the other side the steep wall of the canyon fell away in impossible slopes and sheer drops to the torrent at the bottom. It was an abyss of green beauty and shady depths, pierced by vagrant shafts of the sun and mottled here and there by the sun’s broader blazes. The sound of rushing water ascended on the windless air, and there was a hum of mountain bees. The horses broke into an easy lope. Chris rode on the outside, looking down into the great depths and pleasuring with his eyes in what he saw. Dissociating itself from the murmur of the bees, a murmur arose of falling water. It grew louder with every stride of the horses. “Look!” he cried.