Their midday meal over, a ride was in order; first around the Fort among the men--Captain Wayne, Osier Mike, Scout Al Rennie--then out over the sagebrush flat. "Here's the old battle ground of the horses; here's where you chased the coyote, and here's where Blazing Star took you over the single stringer bridge on that black night." It was less than a year he had been away, and yet Jim felt like one who was coming back to the scenes of his boyhood, long gone by. His real boyhood in far-away Links was of another world. Fightin' Bill Kenna, Whiskey Mason, the Rev. Obadiah Champ, the stable and the sawmills, his mother--they were dreams; even Chicago was less real than this; and he rode like a schoolboy and yelled whenever a jack rabbit jumped ahead of his horse and jerked its white tail in quick zigzags, exactly as its kind had done in the days when he lived in the saddle. After dinner, by the log fire in the Colonel's dining room, Mrs. Waller raised the question of their plans. "Now, children" (she loved to be maternal), "what do you want to do to-morrow?" There was a time when Belle would have spoken first, but there had been a subtle, yet very real, change in their relationship. Jim was a child three years before, dependent almost entirely on her; now she was less his leader than she had been. She waited. Gazing at the fire, his long legs straight out and crossed at the ankles, his hands clasped behind his head, he lounged luxuriously in a great arm chair. Without turning his gaze from the burning logs he began: "If I could do exactly what I wished----" "Which you may," interjected Mrs. Waller. "I'd saddle Blazing Star and Red Rover at seven o'clock in the morning and ride with Belle and not come back till noon." "Ha, ha!" laughed Mrs. Waller and the Colonel. "You children! You two little, little ones! Well, we must remember that Belle is still a bride and will be for another month, so we'll bid you Godspeed on the new wedding trip and have your breakfast ready at half past six." Early hours are the rule in a fort at the front, so the young folk were not alone at breakfast. And when they rode away on their two splendid horses, many eyes followed with delight the noble beauty of the pair--so fitly mounted, so gladly young and strong. "Now, where, Jim?" said Belle, as they left the gate and thundered over the bridge at a mettlesome lope. And as she asked, she remembered that that was the very question he used always to put to her. "Belle" (he reined in Blazing Star), "I have been waiting till it seemed just right--waiting for the very time, so we could stand again at our shrine. Sometimes I think I know my way and the trail I ought to seek, and sometimes I am filled with doubt; but I know I shall have the clear vision if we stand again as we used to stand, above our world, beside the Spirit Rock, on the high peak of our mountain."