In the clear, thin air of that altitude the occasional voices
of what bird and animal life was abroad in the wild broke into the
evening hush with astonishing distinctness--a lone goose winged above
in wide circles, uttering his harsh and solitary cry. He had lost his
mate, Bill told her. Far off in the bush a fox barked. The evening
flight of the wild duck from Crooked Lake to a chain of swamps passed
intermittently over the clearing with a sibilant whistle of wings. To
all the wild things, no less than to the two who watched and listened
to the forest traffic, it was a land of peace and plenty.
"We ought to go up to the swamps to-morrow and rustle some duck eggs,"
Bill observed irrelevantly--his eyes following the arrow flight of a
mallard flock. But his wife was counting audibly, checking the days
off on her fingers.
"This is July the twenty-fifth, Mr. Roaring Bill Wagstaff," she
announced. "We've been married exactly one month."
"A whole month?" he echoed, in mock astonishment. "A regular calendar
month of thirty-one days, huh? You don't say so? Seems like it was
only day before yesterday, little person."
"I wonder," she snuggled up a little closer to him, "if any two people
were ever as happy as we've been?"
Bill put his arm across her shoulders and tilted her head back so that
he could smile down into her face.
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