Marylyn let drop her bonnet and the cow-horn that hung by a thong to her wrist. Then, with folded hands, she looked up and around her, sniffing the warm air in delight. The Texas home had never offered such a lovely retreat. There, the arid _mesa_ had grown thorny mesquite, scraggled cypress, or stunted live-oak for a shade; sand had whirled ceaselessly before a high, hot wind; no flowers had bloomed but the pale toadflax and the prickly-pear; and beside the salt lakes of that almost waterless waste had nested only the vulture. But this! It was like the blossom-strewn plain that burst upon them as, desert-wearied, they travelled into Central Texas; like the glimpses of April woodland in the Upper and Lower Cross Timbers. It made generous return for the long, merciless winter; more--in one glance, in one breath, it swept away a whole winter of hateful memories! She caught up bonnet and horn and chose a seat close to the river. Before her was a gap in the knotted grapevine heaps that clung along the brink of the bank; through it, veiled only by some tendrils that swung wishfully across, lay a wedge-like vista of muddy water, bottom-land, bluff, and sky. The mid-morning sun glinted upon the treacherous current, upon the wet grass of the bottom-land, upon the green-brown bluff and the Gatling at its top, upon the far, curving azure of the sky. Against the dazzle, her blue eyes winked harder than the breeze-tossed anemones; stretching out upon her back, she rested them in the shifting canopy of foliage. A startled kingbird flashed past her, coming from a tree by the cut. She got up, and saw a man in uniform standing near. He was a young man, with a flushed face and wildly rumpled hair. In one hand he held a tasselled hat; in the other, a rifle. He leaned forward from behind a bull-berry bush, and his look was guiltily eager and admiring. As startled as the kingbird, she grasped the cow-horn and lifted it to her lips. But she did not blow a warning. The uniform retreated in cowardly haste, the tasselled hat lowered, and the eyes beseeched. A moment. Then, the man smiled and shook his hat at her roguishly. "A-ah!" he said--in the tone of one who has made a discovery--"I didn't know before that a fairy lives in this grove!" Marylyn glanced over a shoulder. "Does there?" she questioned, half whispering. He took a forward step. "There does," he answered solemnly. "It's Goldenhair, as well as I can make out. But where on earth are the bears?" Instantly, she had her bonnet. "My! my!" she said. "_Bears!_ Indians is bad enough." She peered into the long heaps of tangled grapevine. "Oh, now!" he exclaimed self-accusingly. He whipped a knee with the hat. "Now, I've gone and scared you! Say, honest! There isn't a bear in a hundred miles--I'd stake my stupid head on it." "But Golden----" she began. "Goldenhair?" He smiled again, by way of entreaty. "Why, Goldenhair is--you."