"Holy Mackerel!" laughed Endicott. "Just like that! Little things don't matter at all--like the fact that we haven't any ranch yet to invite her to, and that she might not come if you did invite her, and if she did come she might not like the country or Tex, or he might not like her. And last of all, we may never find Tex. We've both written him a half a dozen times--and all the letters have been returned. If we had some ham, we'd have some ham and eggs, if we had some eggs!" "There you go, with your old practicability! Anyhow, that's what we'll do--and if Tex don't like her I'll invite someone else, and keep on inviting until I find someone he does like--and as for her--no one could help loving the country, and no one could help loving Tex--so there!" "I hope the course of their true love will run less tempestuously than ours did for those few days we were under the chaperonage of the Texan," grinned the man. "Of course it will! It's probably very prosaic out there, the same as it is anywhere, most of the time. It was a peculiar combination of circumstances that plunged us into such a maelstrom of adventure. And yet--I don't see why you should hope for such a placid courtship for them. It took just that ordeal to bring out your really fine points. They were there all the time, dear, but I might never have known they were there. Why, I've lived over those few days, step by step, a hundred times! The wreck, the celebration at Wolf River--" she paused and shuddered, and her husband took up the sequence, mercilessly: "And your ride with Purdy, and Old Bat thrusting the gun into my hand and urging me to follow--and when I looked up and saw you both on the rim of the bench and saw him drag you from your horse--then the mad dash up the steep trail, and the quick shot as he raised above the sage brush--and then, the fake lynching bee--only it was very real to me as I stood there in the moonlight under that cottonwood limb with a noose about my neck. And then the long ride through the night, and the meeting with you at the ford where you were waiting with Old Bat----" "And the terrible thunder storm, and the bursting reservoir, and the dust storm in the bad lands," continued the girl. "Oh, it was all so--so horrible, and yet--as long as I live I will be glad to have lived those few short days. I learned to know men--big, strong men in action--what they will do--and what they will not do. The Texan with his devil-may-care ways that masked the real character of him. And you, darling--the real you--who had always remained hidden beneath the veneer of your culture and refinement. Then suddenly the veneer was knocked off and for the first time in your life the fine fibre of you--the real _stuff_ you are made of, got the chance to assert itself. You stood the test, dear--stood it as not one man in a hundred who had lived your prosaic well-ordered life would have stood it----"