Page:The New Arcadia (Tucker).djvu/200

190 he gave to his high-spirited son-in-law as to cultivation of temper and tact. True as steel, open as the day, honest as the light, he knew Larry to be. Unless unforeseen difficulties arose, all should go well.

"Now, my charmer," cried the Irishman a few weeks later at the door of the house he was leaving for ever, "give me your dainty foot. There," as Hilda sprang, not quite as lightly as heretofore, into the saddle, "dry your eyes, my girl. You'll want them undimmed. Chestnut's fresh, you know. If fortunes are broken, our hearts are not. And I don't mean my wife's neck to be either.

"Hang the gates, let's take the fences. Across the country once more with the wind whistling in our ears to blow out all the nonsense."

So saying he touched the chestnut on the shoulder with his whip, and "made believe" to press spurs to "Mooroobool's" sides. Hilda caught one glance of the chickens she had reared running about motherless, of Mrs. Rails, the boundary rider's wife, crying, with a dirty apron to her face; and away the two sped, over the fences, across the creek; she, as if flying from her destiny; he, as if hastening to meet his; and the blood rushed again to the girl-wife's white face, and the thought of past disappointment with sense of impending trouble passed away as they bounded in mad career across the hollow-sounding plains. The wild Irishman shouted meanwhile—

"Larry, you must be steady now; we are just turning into Kokiana. You seem in good spirits at leaving our first home behind you."