He patted her hand approvingly.  “That trip to Wyoming did you a lot of good,” he observed.—­“Or something did.”

“They’re wonderfully easy people to live with, Olive and Bob,” she said.  “They’re immensely in love with each other I suppose, but without somehow being offensive about it.  And they have such a lot of fun.  Olive has a piebald cayuse, that she’s taught all the haute ecole tricks.  He does the statuesque poses and all the high action things just as seriously as a thoroughbred and he’s so short and homely and in such deadly earnest about it that you can hardly bear it.  You laugh yourself into stitches but you want to cry too.  And Bob says he’s going to train a mule the same way.  If he ever does that pair will be worth a million dollars to any circus.—­Well, we’ll be doing things like that out at Hickory Hill some day.  Because there is such a thing as fun left in the world.”

“We’ll have some of it this week,” he agreed, and in this rather light-headed spirit they arranged details.

The only building at Hickory Hill that had been designed for human habitation was the farm-house and it was at present fully occupied and rather more by a camp cook and his assistant, the farm manager and half a dozen hands.  The partners themselves slept in a tent.  There was also a cook tent near the house where three meals a day were prepared for everybody, including the carpenters, masons, concrete men and well diggers who were working on the new buildings.  They drove out in Fords from two or three near-by towns in time for breakfast and didn’t go home till after supper.  The wagon shed of the old horse barn served as a mess hall.

There were some beds, though, two or three spare ones, Rush was sure, that had never been used.  Given a day’s start on his guests, he would promise some sort of building which, if they would refrain from inquiring too closely into its past, should serve to house them.

“A wood-shed,” she suggested helpfully, “or a nicely swept-out hennery.  Even a former cow stable, at a pinch.  Only not a pig-pen.”

“If our new hog-house were only finished, you could be absolutely palatial in it.  But I think I can do better than any of those.  You leave that to me.—­Only, how about Aunt Lucile?  She’s—­essential to the scheme, I suppose.  Can you deliver her?”

“She’ll come if it’s put to her right,—­as a sporting proposition.  She really is a good sport you know, the dear old thing.  You leave her to me.”

“Lord, I feel a lot better than I did when I sat down to dinner,” he told her when they parted for the night, and left her reflecting on the folly of making mountains out of mole-hills.

CHAPTER XIII

LOW HANGS THE MOON

He broke his promise to be waiting for them Friday morning at the farm.  It was Graham who caught sight of their car, as it stopped in front of the farm-house, and came plunging down the bank to greet them and explain how unavoidable it had been that Rush should go to Elgin.