A coyote flashed out of a copse of brush and raced down the Trail. With a spontaneous whoop that startled her momentarily, Ellis was after it. Barbara reined her horse to a slow walk and watched, her eyes shining. Ellis rode his big horse as though he were a part of it, with every move of horse and rider perfectly coordinated. She watched the coyote outdistance him. Laughing, he came back. Barbara laughed, too, and suddenly it seemed that all the ice between them had melted. "Didn't anyone ever tell you that a horse can't outrun a coyote?" "King could. I was holding him back. Didn't want to frighten the poor little coyote to death." They laughed wildly, as though at some huge joke, and the horses bobbed happy heads as they went down the Trail at a fast walk. Ellis turned to watch six elk disappearing into a pine thicket. Barbara stole a covert glance at his profile. She'd given Ellis a great deal of thought. Certainly she wanted to get married. But there should be more to marriage than the simple act of a man and woman exchanging vows and living together. Her own parents' marriage was far different, she reflected, than other marriages she had seen among their neighbors in Missouri. Her parents had a special kind of feeling for each other that was much more than physical, more even than their satisfaction in sharing their home and their children. They laughed together and they worried together, and one could be happy for no reason except the other had enjoyed himself, the way Emma was happy when Joe would come back refreshed from an evening at Tenney's store. It was a kind of blending and merging, with each one willing and eager to give up his own private world in order to build a sort of combination world. She couldn't quite get it into words, but it did seem like a real melting and fusing of two destinies into one destiny. Barbara herself had never met any man who made her feel like blending and merging her life that way, and she wondered whether something might be lacking in her. Barbara remembered vividly the night Ellis proposed to her. When they'd first arrived at Snedeker's, she had heard Jim Snedeker refer to Ellis as a woman chaser and she had thought little about that or about Ellis. Most of the boys she knew chased girls. But as day followed day, unaccountably she had found herself watching for Ellis. Working in the cabin, she would glance out the window to see if he was around. When he asked her to go walking with him, she was happy to go. They were strolling on a dark, moonless night when--and she still did not know how it happened--she was in his arms and his lips were on hers. Ellis's embrace was not like Hugo Gearey's and his lips had a different meaning in them. She could yield to this kiss and still feel safe, and somehow deeply stirred in a new way, a mysterious way. Barbara felt her knees tingle, and her body went strangely limp. A thousand times since, in memory, she had heard his whispered,