They were as good as their word, and when rode up the narrow on the day and hour appointed, they were waiting, fresh and neat as abundant water and their worn garments would permit.  
Sonny wore a shade less and a little shirt with sleeves. His face shone like the rising sun from behind Fair’s shoulder as they sat decorously mounted on Diamond.
 
“The out-riders wait the Princess,” said Fair, “good morning, Miss Allison.”
 
“Did you bring cookies?” the boy eagerly, “we’ve got the fish!”
 
“Good morning,” answered Nance, “sure I did, Sonny. And other things, too. We’ll be good and hungry by noon time.”
 
The sun was two hours high outside, but here between the towering walls the shadows were still blue and cold. The of the stream seemed louder than usual, heard thus in the stillness of the early day. The mystery of the great cut was , its charm a thousandfold to Nance. There was a strange excitement in everything, a sense of holiday and joy. Her face broke into smiles as helplessly as running water dimples, and when the two riding ahead turned from time to time to look back she was fair as “a garden of the Lord,” her bronze head shining bare in the blue light, her eyes as wide and clear as Sonny’s own.
 
This was adventure to Nance—the first she had ever known, and its heady wine was stirring in her .
 
She did not know why the tumbling stream sang a different song, or why the glow of light creeping down from the rimrock along the western wall seemed more golden than before.
 
She only knew that where her heart had lain in her breast calm and content with her and her environment of hills and river, there was now a strange surge and thrill which made her think of the stars that sang together at the morning of creation. Surely her treasured Book had something for each phase of human life—comfort for its sorrows, divine approval for its happiness.
 
So she rode, smiling, her hands folded on her pommel, listening to Brand Fair’s easy speech, watching his shoulders moving under the blue shirt, comparing him to the men she knew and wondering again why he was not like them.
 
They followed the stream sometimes, and again across flat, hard, sandy spaces where the floor of the cañon widened, and passed now and again the mouths of smaller cuts from the main one.
 
“About two miles from here,” she told Fair, “we leave Blue Stone and take up Little Blue to the left. At its head lie Grey Spring and the Circle. We’ll make it about noon.”
 
The sun was well down in the great when they reached the opening of Little Blue, and in this smaller cañon which sharply at right angles, its golden light flooded to the dry bottom.
 
“Little Blue has no water to speak of,” said Nance, “only holes here and there—but they are funny places, deep and full, and they seem to come up from the bottom and go down somewhere under the sand. They have current, for if you throw anything in them it will drift about, slow, and finally go down and never come up.”
 
“Subterranean flow,” said Fair, “I’ve seen other evidence of it in this country. Must have been sometime.”
 
The gorge lifted and widened and presently they passed several of these strange pools, set mysteriously in the shelving floor.
 
The towering walls fell away and they had the feeling of coming up into another world. Soil began to appear in place of the abundant blue sand, and trees and grass clothed the floor in ever increasing beauty.
 
Fair drew Diamond up and waited until Nance rode alongside and they went forward into a tiny country set in the ridging rock of the shallowed cañon to where Grey Spring whispered at the edge of the Circle.
 
“See!” cried Nance waving a hand about at the smiling scene, “it is a magic place—no less!”
 
The spring itself was a narrow above sands as grey as cloth, a never-ceasing flow of water, clear and icy cold, and beyond it was a round little flat, thick with green grass beneath spreading mush-oaks, a spot for fairy .
 
“Yes,” nodded the man, “it is magic—the true magic of Nature in gracious perfection, unmarred by the hand of man.”
 
“Are we going to have the cookies now?” came the anxious pipe of the boy, and Fair laughed.
 
“Can’t get away from the deadly commonplace, Miss Allison, with Sonny on the job. Poor little kid—he’s about fed up on untrammeled nature. I’m afraid I owe him a big debt for what I’ve done to him—and yet—I am trying to pay a bigger one which someone else owes him. Let’s camp.”
 
They dropped the and turned the horses loose to graze, and Fair built a little fire of dry wood which sent up a straight column of smoke like a signal.
 
Nance her bundle from the saddle and Fair unrolled a dozen , firm and cool in their sheath of leaves. He hung them to the flames on a green and Romance danced attendance on the hour. He was expert from long experience of cooking in the open, and when he finally announced them done they would have delighted an . Nance laid out a clean white cloth and spread upon it such plain and things as cold corned beef, white bread and golden butter, home-made cucumber and sugared cookies.
 
They were poor folk all, the man and boy, the girl who knew so little beyond the grind of work, but they were richer than Solomon in all his glory, for they had health and youth and that most priceless thing of all—a clear conscience and the eager expectation of the good the next day holds.
 
They sat cross-legged about their board and forgot such things as work and hardship and the bitterness of threatened , and—mayhap—vengeance.
 
They talked of many things and all the time Nance’s wonder grew at Fair’s wide knowledge of the outside world, at his gentle manners, his quiet in some ways, his freedom in others.
 
He told her of the cities and the sea, of Mexico and this and that far place, but mostly he brought her pictures of her own land—the rivers of the Rockies, the Arizona mesas—and the girl, starved for the unknown, listened open-lipped.
 
They cleared away the cloth and Nance took Sonny in her lap, while Fair stretched out at length smoking in contentment.
 
The child slept, the sun dropped down the cloud-flecked , and it was Fair himself who finally put an end to the hour, rising and up the horses.
 
“You have far to go, Miss Allison,” he said as he stood beside her smiling down into her face, “and Sonny and I must be careful not ............