“Selah!” he laughed contentedly.  “We seem to lack only the book of verses, the loaf and the jug; the wilderness is here, all right, and that’s a perfectly good bough up there, and, of course, you could furnish the song; I might recite ‘The Boy Stood on the Burning Deck,’ but, alas! we haven’t even a flask and biscuit.”

“What a pity that you should be so near and yet so far from paradise!” she retorted quickly.  Then she added, with a mischievous smile, “It just happens that I have a sandwich in my saddle pocket.”

“Won’t you sing?  Please do,” he returned, with an eagerness that amused her.

But she shook her head reprovingly.  “We would still lack the jug of wine, you know, and, really, I don’t think that paradise is for cow-punchers, anyway, do you?”

“Evidently not,” he answered.  And at her jesting words a queer feeling of rebellion possessed him.  Why should he be condemned to years of loneliness?  Why must he face a life without the companionship of a mate?  If the paradise he had sought so hard to attain were denied him, why should he not still take what happiness he might?

He was lying flat on his back, his hands clasped beneath his head, watching an eagle that wheeled, a tiny black speck, high under the blue arch of the sky.  He seemed to have forgotten his companion.

Kitty leaned toward him, and held a sprig of water-cress over his upturned face.  “I haven’t a penny,” she said, “but I’ll give you this.”

He sat up quickly.  “Even at that price, my thoughts might cost you too much.  But you haven’t told me what you have done with our dear friend the professor?  Haven’t you a guilty conscience, deserting him like this?”

Kitty held up both hands in a gesture of dismay.  “Don’t, Patches, please don’t.  Ugh! if you only knew how good it is to be with a man again!”

He laughed aloud in a spirit of reckless defiance.  “And Phil is over in Granite Basin.  I neglected to tell you that he knows the location of the Mannings’ camp, as well as I.”

Kitty was a little puzzled by the tone of his laughter, and by his words.  She spoke gravely.  “Perhaps I should tell you, Patches—­we have been such good friends, you and I—­Phil—­”

“Yes!” he said.

“Phil is nothing to me, Patches.  I mean—­”

“You mean in the way he wanted to be?” He helped her with a touch of eager readiness.

“Yes.”

“And have you told him, Kitty?” Patches asked gently.

“Yes—­I have told him,” she replied.

Patches was silent for a moment.  Then, “Poor Phil!” he said softly.  “I understand now; I thought that was it.  He is a man among thousands, Kitty.”

“I know—­I know,” she returned, as though to dismiss the subject.  “But it simply couldn’t be.”