I'll have the preacher fixed and waiting.
And here's another idea. You bring your riding togs in a suit case.
And as soon as the ceremony's over, you can go to the hotel and change.
Then out you come, and you find me waiting with a couple of horses, and we'll ride over the landscape so as you can see the prettiest parts of the ranch the first thing.
And she's sure pretty, that ranch.
And now that it's settled, I'll be waiting for you at the morning train day after to-morrow."
Dede blushed as she spoke. "You are such a hurricane."
"Well, ma'am," he drawled,
"I sure hate to burn daylight.
And you and I have burned a heap of daylight.
We've been scandalously extravagant. We might have been married years ago."
Two days later, Daylight stood waiting outside the little Glen Ellen hotel.
The ceremony was over, and he had left Dede to go inside and change into her riding-habit while he brought the horses.
He held them now, Bob and Mab, and in the shadow of the watering-trough Wolf lay and looked on.
Already two days of ardent California sun had touched with new fires the ancient bronze in Daylight's face. But warmer still was the glow that came into his cheeks and burned in his eyes as he saw Dede coming out the door, riding-whip in hand, clad in the familiar corduroy skirt and leggings of the old Piedmont days.
There was warmth and glow in her own face as she answered his gaze and glanced on past him to the horses.
Then she saw Mab.
But her gaze leaped back to the man.
"Oh, Elam!" she breathed.
It was almost a prayer, but a prayer that included a thousand meanings Daylight strove to feign sheepishness, but his heart was singing too wild a song for mere playfulness.
All things had been in the naming of his name—reproach, refined away by gratitude, and all compounded of joy and love.
She stepped forward and caressed the mare, and again turned and looked at the man, and breathed:—
"Oh, Elam!"
And all that was in her voice was in her eyes, and in them Daylight glimpsed a profundity deeper and wider than any speech or thought—the whole vast inarticulate mystery and wonder of sex and love.
Again he strove for playfulness of speech, but it was too great a moment for even love fractiousness to enter in. Neither spoke.
She gathered the reins, and, bending, Daylight received her foot in his hand. She sprang, as he lifted and gained the saddle.
The next moment he was mounted and beside her, and, with Wolf sliding along ahead in his typical wolf-trot, they went up the hill that led out of town—two lovers on two chestnut sorrel steeds, riding out and away to honeymoon through the warm summer day.
Daylight felt himself drunken as with wine.
He was at the topmost pinnacle of life.
Higher than this no man could climb nor had ever climbed.
It was his day of days, his love-time and his mating-time, and all crowned by this virginal possession of a mate who had said
"Oh, Elam," as she had said it, and looked at him out of her soul as she had looked.
They cleared the crest of the hill, and he watched the joy mount in her face as she gazed on the sweet, fresh land.
He pointed out the group of heavily wooded knolls across the rolling stretches of ripe grain.
"They're ours," he said.
"And they're only a sample of the ranch.
Wait till you see the big canon. There are 'coons down there, and back here on the Sonoma there are mink.
And deer!—why, that mountain's sure thick with them, and I reckon we can scare up a mountain-lion if we want to real hard.
And, say, there's a little meadow—well, I ain't going to tell you another word.
You wait and see for yourself."
They turned in at the gate, where the road to the clay-pit crossed the fields, and both sniffed with delight as the warm aroma of the ripe hay rose in their nostrils.
As on his first visit, the larks were uttering their rich notes and fluttering up before the horses until the woods and the flower-scattered glades were reached, when the larks gave way to blue jays and woodpeckers.
"We're on our land now," he said, as they left the hayfield behind.
"It runs right across country over the roughest parts.
Just you wait and see."
As on the first day, he turned aside from the clay-pit and worked through the woods to the left, passing the first spring and jumping the horses over the ruined remnants of the stake-and-rider fence.
From here on, Dede was in an unending ecstasy. By the spring that gurgled among the redwoods grew another great wild lily, bearing on its slender stalk the prodigious outburst of white waxen bells.
This time he did not dismount, but led the way to the deep canon where the stream had cut a passage among the knolls.
He had been at work here, and a steep and slippery horse trail now crossed the creek, so they rode up beyond, through the somber redwood twilight, and, farther on, through a tangled wood of oak and madrono.
They came to a small clearing of several acres, where the grain stood waist high.