“I want to see our ponies with their bridles hanging loose!  I want the great silence!  I want company, with imagination speaking from the sky and reality speaking from the patch of green out on the sea of gray!  Will you?”

Their steps ran rhythmically together.  His look was eager in anticipation, while she kept on running the leaves of the austere Marcus through her fingers.  Her lips were half open, as if about to speak, but were without words; the thin, delicate nostrils trembled.

“Will you?  Will you, because I kept the faith of callouses?  Will you go forth and dream for a day?  We’ll tell fairy stories!  We’ll get a pole and prod the dinosaur through the narrow part of the pass and hear him roar his awfullest.  Will you?”

Her fingers paused in the pages as if they had found a helpful passage.  The chin tilted upward resolutely and he had a full view of her eyes, dancing with challenging lights.  She was augustly, gloriously mischievous.

“Will you go in costume?  Will you wear your spurs and the chaps and the silk shirt?”

The question said that it was not a time to be serious.  It sprinkled the crest of the barrier with gleaming slivers of glass, which might give zest to words spoken across it, but would be most sharp to the touch.

“I will wear my spurs around my wrists, if you say, tie roses in the fringe of my chaps, bind my hat with a big red silk bandanna, and put streamers on P.D.’s bits!”

“That is too enticing for refusal,” she answered, playfully.  “I particularly want to hear the dinosaur roar.”

They had come to the opening of the Ewold hedge, and they paused to consider arrangements.  There was no one in sight on the street except Jim Galway, who was approaching at some distance.

“Shall we start in the morning and have luncheon at the foot of the range?” suggested Jack.

She favored an early afternoon start; he argued for his point of view, and in their preoccupation with the passage of arms they did not notice Pedro Nogales slipping along beside the hedge with soft steps, his hand under his jacket.  A gleam out of the bosom of Pedro’s jacket, a cry from Mary, and a knife flashed upward and drove toward Jack’s neck.

Jack had seemed oblivious of his surroundings, his gaze centered on Mary.  Yet he was able to duck backward so that the blade only slit open his shirt as Pedro, with the misdirected force of his blow, lunged past its object.  Mary saw that face which had been laughing into hers, which had been so close to hers in its persistent smile of persuasion, struck white and rigid and a glint like that of the blade itself in the eyes.  In a breath Jack had become another being of incarnate, unthinking physical power and swiftness.  One hand seized Pedro’s wrist, the other his upper arm, and Mary heard the metallic click of the knife as it struck the earth and the sickening sound of the bone of Pedro’s forearm cracking.  She saw Pedro’s eyes bursting from their sockets in pain and fear; she saw Jack’s still profile of unyielding will and the set muscles of his neck and the knitting muscles of his forearm driving Pedro over against the hedge, as if bent on breaking the Mexican’s back in two, and she waited in frozen apprehension to hear another bone crack, even expecting Pedro’s death cry.