The Polly Page Ranch Club
Date: 2018-03-18T00:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Vacations -- Juvenile fiction; Girls -- Juvenile fiction; African Americans -- Juvenile fiction; Ranch life -- Juvenile fiction; Wyoming -- Juvenile fiction; Private schools -- Juvenile fiction

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Title: The Polly Page Ranch Club

Author: Izola L. Forrester

Illustrator: Faith Avery

Release date: March 18, 2018 [eBook #56773]

Language: English

Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/56773

Credits: E-text prepared by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team (http://www.pgdp.net) from page images digitized by the Google Books Library Project (https://books.google.com) and generously made available by HathiTrust Digital Library (https://www.hathitrust.org/)

*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE POLLY PAGE RANCH CLUB ***

E-text prepared by Roger Frank
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from page images digitized by
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(https://books.google.com)
and generously made available by
HathiTrust Digital Library
(https://www.hathitrust.org/)

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THE POLLY PAGE RANCH CLUB

For Miles and Miles the Only Spot of Human Life Was the Ranch

THE POLLY PAGE RANCH CLUB
BY
IZOLA L. FORRESTER
AUTHOR OF “THE POLLY PAGE YACHT CLUB,” ETC.

PHILADELPHIA
GEORGE W. JACOBS & CO.
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1911, by
George W. Jacobs & Company
Published October, 1911
All rights reserved
Printed in U. S. A.

CONTENTS

I | First Call for Action
II | A Shortcake Parley
III | Crullers’ Parole
IV | Jean Murray, Rancher
V | The Guest of Honor
VI | Polly Aims at a Star
VII | Lawless Devices
VIII | Westward, Ho!
IX | The Homeseekers’ Special
X | Tourist Neighbors
XI | The Ride to the Ranch
XII | Dreaming on Spruce Boughs
XIII | Crossbar Ranch
XIV | Five Tenderfeet
XV | The Chant of the New Moon
XVI | Lost Chance Gulch
XVII | The Sheep Camp
XVIII | Zed’s Treasure Trove
XIX | “Mrs. Sandy”
XX | The Bishop’s Visit
XXI | A Day at the Alameda
XXII | Safe Convoy
XXIII | The Cave of the Dinosaur
XXIV | The Long Trail
XXV | Heart’s Content

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

For miles and miles the only spot of human life was the ranch

Stony smiled a broad welcome

“Where did you come from?” he demanded

They never forgot that picture

“Isn’t it beautiful, Polly?”

THE POLLY PAGE RANCH CLUB

CHAPTER I

FIRST CALL FOR ACTION

“Oh, girls, Crullers can’t come.”

Sue Warner ran down the flight of stone steps that led from the side entrance at Calvert Hall to the garden, her face full of perplexity. Waiting for her were three of the girls, Isabel Lee, Ruth Brooks, and Edwina, or rather, “Ted” Moore.

“But why?” demanded Ted. “Is she behind on classes? I’ll help her out to-morrow, tell her. She must go. Polly said so.”

“But she can’t, Ted, don’t you understand? She would if she could. Why, her face looked as if she’d swallowed a lot of tacks when I passed her just now. Miss Murray was with her.”

“That accounts for said tacks,” Ruth put in, gravely. “Bonnie Jean has very likely hurt Crullers’ feelings.”

Sue laughed, as she gathered up a pile of books from the old Roman seat at the turn of the path, and led the way out of the garden.

“Perhaps this time it’s Crullers who has hurt Bonnie Jean’s feelings. Crullers stumbles over other people’s feelings the same as she does over stools or steps or anything. Where’s Polly? Why didn’t she wait for us?”

“The Admiral drove by, and called her to ride home with him,” Ruth explained. “Oh, girls, isn’t it getting pretty and summery? Look—the vines on the old stone wall are leafing out.”

“Polly said four sharp. No time for landscape gazing.”

“Ted, you never see what’s happening right under your nose.”

“Can’t when you carry a perpetual spy-glass on coming events,” laughed Ted, with a gay toss of her head.

“Since Ted went into psychics last fall, she hasn’t touched real ground to speak of.”

“And a good thing too,” protested Ted, shaking her head at them. “If Polly and I did not keep a level outlook on the business side of things, where would the club be? As secretary I’ve had my spy-glass leveled all winter at the coming summer. Polly and I figured and studied over the whole plan while you girls were noticing old vines on stone walls, and ‘sech like,’ as Aunty Welcome says. Now, wait till you hear what she has to say.”

Down the beautiful old street they started. It was the end of April, and never did Queen’s Ferry show to such advantage as when springtime scattered blossoms everywhere. The horse-chestnut trees were showing feathery plumes of gold and white. Over gray garden walls catalpas lifted masses of bloom, and fruit trees stood in orchards like brides in their snowy loveliness. The air was heavy with fragrance of white lilac and cherry blossoms.

It was Friday. Only Calvert Hall girls knew just what that stood for in the calendar of events. It was the one day when discipline relaxed, when books and lessons went into desks, when Miss Calvert herself partook of the general relaxation, put aside her gown of stiff gray silk, and, garbed in white lawn, with a black lace shawl draped about her slender shoulders, went out into the garden with a book of poetry.

Strangely enough, the girls could always tell just how the week had affected her nerves, by her choice of books on Friday night.

“It’s Tennyson to-day, girls,” Sue had told the rest, when she came through the garden after seeking Crullers. “Spring calls to the Lady Honoria. She’s reading ‘The Princess’ with a bunch of red and yellow tulips on her lap.”

“Just as sure a sign of summer as ripening buds,” Isabel had added, happily. “All through the winter, don’t you remember, girls, she read Whittier and Milton, and now she’s put all the old chilly poets back into the library, and has her own small, handy volumes of Browning and Burns and even Whitman. She says she likes the poetry in springtime that makes you think of freshly turned earth and upspringing buds.”

“What a good old darling she is,” Ruth said in her serious, grandmotherly way. “I found her this morning standing before the old painting in the hall, and I’m sure there were tears in her eyes, girls.”

The girls were silent. The Calvert spirit towards its principal was very peculiar. The girls loved and honored her, but mingled with both sentiments was a curiously protective feeling too. The story of Calvert had passed into the realm of romantic tradition with its students, and they held it sacred. Every new girl was taken apart by Polly and Ruth and solemnly initiated into it. They were told how Honoria and her younger sister had been left well-nigh penniless at the death of their father, old Orrin Calvert, thirty years before. They had been brought up in seclusion, and fed on all the old traditions of Queen’s Ferry as it had been from the days that followed on the Jamestown settlement. The main teaching they had received was that no Calvert should work for a living. But after the old gentleman’s passing, and a long talk with the family lawyer from Richmond, Miss Honoria had felt tradition and sentiment slip from her like a worn-out garment.

All that was left of the old estate, when her father’s obligations were canceled, was Calvert Hall; and the excellent education both young women possessed was their sole capital. Yet the two had faced the issue contentedly and courageously, like other Dixie girls of the newer generation, and had turned the old Hall into a home school for young girls.

Later Miss Diantha, the younger sister, had married. She lived in the West, but the Hall remained the same, a landmark at Queen’s Ferry.

Sometimes it seemed to the girls in the great, somber stone house, as though the tender spirit and influence of Diantha still lived there, and made her stately sister more tolerant in dealing with the merry, youthful natures over which she ruled.

At the foot of the broad oaken staircase, was a full-length oil painting of the sisters, when they were girls. Quaint, old-fashioned portraits they were, too, with Honoria in white mulle with pink rosebuds, and Diantha in white mulle with forget-me-nots scattered over its flounces. Honoria’s chin was up, and she looked right ahead, just as calmly and as serenely as she did to-day in the classroom. But Diantha’s head was half averted, and she was smiling shyly, and the little rows of short up-and-down curls around her head seemed ready to bob and tremble at any moment with a laugh.

“Do you know, girls,” Polly would say, after a fresh inspection of the painting, “I think the old darling hung it there so that all her girls would try to pattern themselves after it. I only wish we could.”

Polly’s own home, “Glenwood,” was about half an hour’s walk from the Hall, down along the river bank. As they drew near, they caught sight of Polly herself, watching for them from the veranda railing, with old Tan, the Gordon setter, beside her.

“Oh, I’m so glad you’re here,” she exclaimed, running to meet them; “I was afraid something had happened, and you know we’re going to have a feast.”

“That’s the very first thing Polly thinks of—something good to eat,” laughed Ruth, dropping down into the nearest garden chair.

“So do all good generals,” retorted Polly, calmly. “It makes people friendly to eat and enjoy the same kind of food at the same time.”

“Bread and salt in the Arab’s tent, Polly?” queried Ted.

“Yes, only this time——um-m-m. I promised not to tell. The bread and salt gave out, so we have other supplies.” She laughed, and counted heads. “Where’s Crullers?”

“Unavoidably detained,” Sue replied. “Now, it’s no use asking why, Polly. None of us can even guess. Crullers never would miss a good chance at a feast, you know, unless there was a vital reason for her absence. And she wouldn’t tell. I hunted everywhere for her, and finally caught her just coming out of the upper recitation room with Miss Murray.”

“Bonnie Jean?” Polly’s forehead puckered doubtfully. “What has Crullers been doing?”

“I think she’s broken her parole,” Isabel said.

“What parole? We didn’t know she was on parole.”

“I did,” Polly added, quickly. “Wait till we get settled down in the arbor, and I’ll tell you about it. That’s just about what has happened if she has Miss Murray on her trail.”

She led the way around the broad veranda, down the short flight of steps that led to the garden, and out to the arbor that stood on the terrace. Every one who loved Polly knew her garden, and the old arbor. It overlooked the river, and faced the sunset, and was thickly covered with rose vines. They were just leafing out now. The seats that encircled it were Polly’s private invention. Beneath them were lockers, in boat fashion, for cushions, books, hammocks, and all kinds of things which Polly found necessary to comfort or happiness when she took possession of the arbor.

“Let’s put up a couple of hammocks, girls,” she said. “Sue, you and Ted might do that, and Ruth and Isabel can set the table. I’m going to pick over strawberries while we talk. Aren’t they beauties? Stoney just got them for me out of the garden.”

The girls gathered around the rustic table for a peep at the generous-sized basket filled with red fruit, piled high in a nest of green leaves.

“Oh, let’s eat them that way, Polly,” Isabel cried. “They look so tempting and pretty.”

“Can’t,” said Polly, briefly. “Against orders. These are to be hulled, mashed, and sweetened.”

“Now, we know,” exclaimed Ted. “Short—”

“No fair telling.”

“But only think how poor Crullers would have loved a piece of it!”

“We’ll send her some. Yes, and girls,”—here Polly’s brown eyes twinkled with the merry glint of mischief,—“we’ll send Miss Murray a nice share too. To-night. I’ll take it to the Hall and find out what’s the matter with Crullers. Did we ever desert a comrade in distress?”

“Never,” came back the swift and hearty chorus, just as Stoney came down the walk from the kitchen garden.

CHAPTER II

A SHORTCAKE PARLEY

He smiled a broad welcome at Miss Polly’s guests, as he set down the tray from his head, and uncovered the contents, his brown face fairly glistening with importance.

“Whipped cream in de blue jug, Mis’ Polly, and—and sho’tcake in de deep dish, and gran’maw says you’re to eat it while it’s hot.”

“We will, Stoney,” promised Polly. “Now, girls, gaze on this.”

Back went the snowy linen towel, and there lay disclosed to view one of Aunty Welcome’s famous three-layer shortcakes, all ready for the “fillin’s,” as Stoney would say. It was hot and crisp from the oven. The girls spread the layers with the berries and piled them up.

“I just love this kind of shortcake,” said Ted, as she poured cream from the blue jug over the cake. “Sometimes it’s only plain layer cake with some whole berries laid on the frosting.”

“I knew you’d like it.” Polly leaned her arms on the table with a happy disregard of formalities. As Aunty Welcome had expressed it once, “Dar’s a little laxity permissible in yo’ own backyard, honey chile.” Polly went on. “I wish Crullers were here, too. What new scrape do you suppose she has managed to tumble into?”

“The last one isn’t cold yet,” laughed Ted. “She was sorry for a stray cat, and smuggled it up to the dormitory, and hid it in the closet there. Then Annie May, the cook, gave her some milk for it, and she took that up when she went to bed. But the closet had a spring lock, and Crullers couldn’t open it. Tableau at ten o’clock. Miss Calvert roused: appears in nightgown and kimono, hair in crimpers, dangling a bunch of keys like Fatima. When closet is opened, poor kitty is scared out of its wits, makes a flying leap past the girls, out the nearest window, and disappears. Annie May says she doesn’t believe it was a cat at all. She says it must have been something with an unquiet spirit.”

“Probably poor Crullers had the unquiet spirit when she saw it dash out,” Sue said. “But it really was funny, Polly. The dormitory girls told us about it. Crullers had the milk under her bed, and all at once the cat started to yowl awfully. Then Miss Murray heard it.”

Stony Smiled a Broad Welcome

“Her room’s right over the dormitory in that wing,” Ted put in, eagerly.

“Too bad,” Polly said, judicially, “but it’s Crullers all over. What did Miss Calvert do?”

“Paroled her on good behavior for a week, to report nightly to Miss Murray.”

“And she’s probably forgotten all about her parole, and broken it. I’ll find out when I take up the offering of shortcake to-night. Only I wish it were one of the regular teachers, because I don’t know Miss Murray very well.”

“Don’t you like our Bonnie Jean, Polly?” inquired Ted, happily. “She hasn’t distinction, of course—”

“Distinction! Ted Moore,” cried Sue, indignantly. “She hasn’t as much distinction as Buttercup, the Hall tabby. I don’t know why it is, but she never seems friendly to us girls. She’s so abrupt.”

Here the girls broke in with laughter at Sue, for surely if anyone at the Hall could be dubbed abrupt, it was Sue herself, who always thought out loud, and never knew by any chance what she was going to say next.

“Well, I don’t care if you do laugh at me,” Sue declared. “It’s true. She comes from the far West, and I don’t see how she ever got into Calvert Hall as teacher.”

“I’ll ask her to-night, Sue,” promised Polly, gayly.

“But, really and truly, Polly, how did she? Isn’t she unresponsive and ordinary looking? I’ve tried to talk to her ever so many times, and all she says is, ‘Perhaps,’ or ‘I should judge so.’ I don’t think she has any imagination at all.”

Sue pronounced sentence in a very grieved tone of voice, but the girls only laughed at her.

“Miss Murray is in earnest, though,” Ruth said, finally. “She has always seemed strange to us girls, but maybe we’ve seemed so to her. She surely is in earnest, girls, and Miss Calvert says that’s the very first quality a teacher needs. Maybe if we knew her better, we’d like her.”

“Eat your shortcake, children, and stop criticizing your elders,” Polly ordered. “This meeting is not called to discuss Miss Murray or Crullers either. This is the first call for action on the part of the vacation club.”

“Isn’t it pretty early even to think of vacation, Polly?” asked Isabel, with a sigh. “It’s weeks and weeks ahead of us.”

“Don’t groan, good pilgrim, over the hills ahead. They lead to glory,” chanted Polly. “Indeed, it isn’t too early; not if we expect to accomplish anything worth while. Haven’t we planned for it ever since last December, when we gave the first outing bazaar? How much did we glean that time, Ruth?”

“Thirty-four dollars and seventy-two cents,” replied the treasurer, proudly.

“Do you know, Polly,” interrupted Sue, “I think that was a dandy idea; to take the spoils of one vacation, and make them help out on the coming one. We sold off all the frames of seaweed Isabel made, at twenty-five cents each, remember, and the shell curtains went at five dollars each. That’s what swelled the fund.”

“They were not too high,” Isabel said, with a sigh of recollection. “It took pecks and pecks of those pink shells to make the curtains. Kate and I worked on them for two months at odd times.”

“And the tableaux helped out besides. Wasn’t Crullers funny?”

“Forget the past,” Polly ordered. “The future is bobbing right up under our noses, and says ‘attend to me.’ We gave four entertainments—”

“I don’t think they were entertainments, Polly, do you? I think they were fantastic gatherings,” interposed Isabel in her precise way. “The Friendship Fair, where we sold everything that friends could possibly think of—”

“You’re exaggerating, Isabel,” Ruth put in, stolidly. “We just sold airy trifles that people buy to show other people they are remembering them.”

“Same thing,” pronounced Polly. “Have some more shortcake, children, and don’t waste time arguing.”

“The long and the short of it all is this,” said Ruth, who was treasurer of the outing club, and could therefore speak with authority. “Out of the monthly entertainments, fairs, and other things that we have given through the winter, we have cleared about $124.00. Of course Kate Julian helped out too, before she went home, and all the mothers helped, and Polly’s grandfather, but I think we’ve done mighty well.”

“It won’t fill the toe of the stocking when it comes to paying for a real vacation for us girls, Ruth,” Polly returned. “It’s April now, and we must make up our minds where we wish to go, and then work for it with all our might.”

“Now then, how’s the board of lady managers to-day?” demanded a deep voice outside the arbor, and the gray head of the Admiral looked in at them smilingly.

CHAPTER III

CRULLERS’ PAROLE

“Oh, grandfather, dear—” exclaimed Polly, holding up a slice temptingly on a plate, “Shortcake?”

“No, Polly, don’t coax me. Not a bite to eat. I’ve just been riding along the river. And girls, that reminds me.” The Admiral sank into one of the deep-seated garden chairs, and held up his finger at them all mysteriously. “I have seen her again.”

“The same girl?” asked Polly eagerly, bending forward and even forgetting the shortcake.

“The same one. I never saw a girl ride so splendidly in all my life. She is the admiration of every one along the river road. I heard Senator Yates telling somebody about her at dinner last evening, and bless my heart, she isn’t any larger than Isabel here. Yet, she must be older, but she does not appear so mounted. I can always rely on meeting her Friday afternoons about this hour. Never have I seen her on the street, mind—but ride! Polly, if you could sit a horse like that, and take the road as she does, I’d—why, I don’t know what I would do as a reward of merit.”

Polly leaned back, puzzled, and thinking hard.

“I don’t see who it can be, girls. Grandfather says he sees her every Friday afternoon, and has for weeks this spring, and I don’t know her at all. Maybe it is a guest at one of the houses outside of Queen’s Ferry.”

“Maybe it’s the ghost of the Lady Kathleen,” Ruth suggested gravely. “Don’t you remember her?

“Along the dark highway, at night there is seen,

The ghost of a horse and its rider, Kathleen.

And when some stray traveler calls out a hail,

Upon the bleak nightwind is borne back a wail.”

“I think you made that up, Ruth,” Polly cried, merrily. “Is the Lady Kathleen blonde or brunette, grandfather dear?”

“I should say she was rather sorrel,” remarked the Admiral judicially. “But I strongly advise this board of lady managers to discover her identity, and gather her into your circle. I can usually tell a thoroughbred, can’t I, Polly?”

“What color are her eyes, Admiral Page?” asked Isabel.

“Bless my heart, child, I did not get near enough for that. But if you will watch the river road about five any Friday afternoon, you will find her. Now, I must go and dress for dinner.”

“How can we find out who she is?” asked Isabel, when the Admiral left them for his late stroll by the river. “I don’t know anybody around Queen’s Landing that looks like that.”

“We’ll ask Miss Calvert on Monday,” Ruth declared. “She knows everybody who is anybody in this vicinity, and their pedigree back to the days when the first English ship sailed into Jamestown harbor. We must be going, Polly, and your shortcake was dandy. Next Friday it is my treat, girls. Don’t forget.”

Polly walked with them to the tall green hedge that separated Glenwood from the road, and waved good-bye. Then she hurried back to the arbor, and called Stoney up from the garden.

“I want the little green basket, Stoney, and a nice fresh pitcher of whipped cream, and then you and I will go for a walk up to the Hall.”

Aunty Welcome’s turbaned head appeared at the side door as the two started away.

“Whar’ you-all gwine to, Mis’ Polly chile?”

“Just up to the Hall, Aunty dear. I won’t be late for dinner, truly. And I’m taking some of your lovely shortcake to Crullers.”

Aunty smiled and shook her head.

“Nevah did see sech a chile for squiggling out of trouble. Yo’ jes’ think yo’ done cotched her safe and sound, and if she ain’t a-dancin’ away, and always leavin’ yo’ feelin’ so good, too. Stoney, you hold that basket steady, boy.”

Polly walked on up the broad, beautiful old street, Stoney in the rear. She had stopped to gather a great bouquet of lilac blossoms, white and purple. Those were for Miss Calvert, and when she reached the Hall, she left Stoney to carry them out into the fragrant old garden, while she went upstairs with her offering for Crullers the unfortunate. Polly was first and last a believer in diplomacy. As the Admiral was fond of remarking, she had inherited that trait from him.

There were two dormitories at Calvert Hall, one where the younger girls slept, the other for the Seniors. But even the dormitories had distinctive features. Each girl had her own cot, chair, washstand, and chiffonier. Around each individual corner were horizontal poles, from which hung long curtains that could be swung back, or enclosed, as the occupant saw fit. This gave privacy to each girl, and yet they were all in the same room.

The curtains hung soberly all about Crullers’ nook this day, just like a yellow and white catafalque. It was too early for the other girls to come upstairs, yet. Polly went softly to the curtains, and called gently.

“Crullers!”

There was no response.

“Crullers, I have brought you some shortcake.”

“I’ll be right out, Polly, dear,” called back Crullers, with a hasty change of heart. “Or, no, you may come in. I’m not even allowed to get out of bed.”

Polly pushed back the curtains, and there was Crullers, her hair braided in two long pigtails, one over each shoulder, undressed, with her pink kimono over her nightgown, and her face full of utter misery.

“You look just like somebody in history, and I can’t think who it is,” laughed Polly. “Somebody who sat up in bed at the last minute, and told everybody just what she thought of them before she died. Was it Catherine de Medici, or Queen Katherine?”

“Oh, Polly, don’t, please. Give me the shortcake quick. My heart is broken.”

“And your poor ‘tummy’ is all empty.” Polly handed her the basket, and sat down beside her. “Half of it is for Miss Murray.”

“Miss Murray!” Crullers pushed the cake from her indignantly. “Then I won’t eat a bit of it, Polly Page. How could you?”

Crullers turned right over, and buried her face in the pillow, sobbing, while the green basket barely escaped being capsized.

“How could I what?” asked Polly in astonishment. “Don’t you like Bonnie Jean?”

Then she stopped short, because, all at once, down at the far end of the dormitory, she saw Miss Murray, the teacher from out West, coming towards them with her quick, easy walk, and she was in riding habit.

“How are you, Polly?” she called, pleasantly. “Isn’t it a gem of a day?”

Polly looked at Crullers, doubled up beneath the blankets, and rose determinedly. But she left the shortcake in the basket within easy reach. If anything could take away Crullers’ trouble, it would be that.

“Could I talk with—you, Miss Murray please?” she asked. “I came expressly to see you.”

“Won’t it keep until Monday, Polly?” smiled back Jean, unpinning her black sailor hat, and letting down her long skirt. “I’ve only half an hour to dress for dinner. You know on Fridays I run away after the girls are through. This is my one weekly holiday.”

Polly leaned forward, looking up at the tall, slender figure in unconcealed admiration. Dearly did Polly love blow-away hair, as she would have called it. Curly, fluffy masses of blonde hair just verging on red, swept back from Jean’s low, broad forehead. Her face was rather broad, and her mouth was broad too, but so was her smile, and her teeth were even and white as new corn. There was a fine sprinkling of freckles over her nose. Her eyes were blue, not gray, nor hazel, but blue as forget-me-nots, and they always looked straight at you without blinking.

“I don’t want to bother you,” Polly said doubtfully. “It’s only about Crullers,—I mean Jane Daphne Adams. You know we girls always call her Crullers.”

“Jane Daphne is on my mind too, Polly,” Miss Murray rejoined. “Come up to my room, Polly, and we’ll talk it over.”

As they left the dormitory, Crullers’ tousled head and red moist face appeared from beneath the quilt, and she reached for the green basket and its contents with a sigh. She knew she was in the wrong, and that even Polly would not uphold her, when she heard the truth. And it troubled her, for Polly’s opinion was her court of last appeal in all things at Calvert Hall.

Ever since she had come there as a pupil the previous year, she had been under Polly’s wing, for none of the other girls could put up with her slow ways and blunders. And yet, as she sat up in the bed now, eating the shortcake with sad and deliberate relish, and dropping salt tears on the whipped cream, she could not see why everybody should have “jumped on” her just because she had rescued a stray cat, and hidden it in the dormitory closet. It was a live cat. She had fully intended feeding it. And it wasn’t her fault that the lock had snapped. She had been told to appear for sentence in Miss Calvert’s study the following morning, and there she had faced both the principal and Miss Murray. The latter was in charge of the dormitory Tuesdays and Fridays, and it was on a Tuesday night the cat had been found.

“Jane Daphne Adams,” Miss Calvert had said, in her stateliest manner, “you will bring my gray hair in sorrow to the grave. Ever since you came to the Hall, there has been trouble.”

“I didn’t mean to, Miss Calvert,” Crullers had said, helplessly.

“That is the only excuse you ever make for anything you do, Jane,” returned Miss Calvert with dignity. “You are totally irresponsible. I shall have to put you on parole for a week, and you are not to leave the grounds under any pretext whatever. Miss Murray will report to me nightly on your good behavior.”

After that it had seemed to Crullers as though she had a prison guard mounted over her. She was in disgrace. All the girls knew of it. It was tacitly understood at the Hall that no pupil was to associate with another pupil on parole. They were sent to Coventry and lived a life apart. The girls dreaded it more than any other form of punishment, and Crullers had dared to break her parole. That was the worst of it. Dearly did Crullers love pickled limes and doughnuts as a combination lunch, and there was one little cozy shop in Queen’s Landing where the best of both were found. So Crullers had slipped out the side gate of the kitchen garden, and had tried to get to the shop and back at noon. And she had been caught red-handed, with the warm doughnuts in one bag, and the pickled limes leaking out of another.

Polly heard all about it now. She followed Miss Murray out of the dormitory, and up to the third floor of the old square mansion. On each side of it, a wing stretched out. The west wing that overlooked the river, was the prettier, and the large room on its third floor had been given up to the young teacher from the West. Compared with the spacious rooms below, the ceiling seemed rather low, and the windows opened outward, lattice like. As they came in, the breeze from the river was blowing back the short, frilly muslin curtains.

“Here we are, Polly,” said Miss Murray, happily, laying aside her hat, and smiling at her guest. “This is the nearest approach to home that I have here. Sit down while I change my dress for dinner, and we will talk about poor, careless Jane Daphne. This room used to be Diantha Calvert’s nursery when she was a little girl—did you know that? She used to tell me all about it, and I always hoped that some day I might see it, but I never thought I should live in it myself.”

Polly turned quickly from the window, where she had been admiring the wide-spread view.

“Why, Miss Murray, I didn’t know that you knew Miss Diantha,” she cried, “I didn’t even know that she was still alive. You know Miss Calvert never talks to us girls about her at all. We always wondered if there was a mystery about her. Do you know?”

CHAPTER IV

JEAN MURRAY, RANCHER

For a minute or two there was silence in the quiet old room. Jean Murray drew the shell pins from her hair deliberately, and shook out its thick, curly waves. Then she went to the wardrobe, and took out her dinner dress before she answered. And Polly noticed that this was the simplest dinner gown she had ever seen. In fact, to Polly’s practiced eye, it was made of cream cotton voile, with a yoke of baby Irish crochet lace, and the same around the short sleeves. That was all. Yet when Jean slipped it on, and puffed up her hair, with a wide bank of black velvet tied about its reddish gold waves, and a narrow band of black about her girlish throat, Polly thought that she looked every inch a thoroughbred as the Admiral had declared.

“Miss Diantha lives on the next ranch to ours out home,” Jean said finally, and there was a curious note of rebellious contradiction in her voice, as if she were offering apologies against her will for Diantha Calvert. “She is my mother’s dearest friend, and we all love her more than I can say.”

“But why doesn’t she ever come back home to Queen’s Landing?” asked Polly wonderingly. “Grandfather has told us what a dear girl she was years ago, and how she was one of the belles here and up at Washington in those days. But that must be thirty years ago.”

“It surely was, and do you realize how old that makes her now? She is fifty her next birthday, I know, and she lives at the Alameda Ranch, about seven miles from us.”

“She does!” Polly’s brown eyes opened wide in amazement. “What’s her name, Miss Murray? What will the girls say?”

“Her name is Mrs. Alexander MacDowell, but we call her Mrs. Sandy,” and as Jean said it, even a casual observer could have told from the little tender smile on her lips, and the light in her eyes, what one member, at least, of the Murray outfit thought of Mrs. Sandy.

Polly pushed back her hair from her forehead quickly, as she always did when she was a little bit excited or surprised, and sat down on the window seat.

“Oh, dear, I came expressly to talk about Crullers, Miss Murray, and now I’ve found out about Miss Diantha. And it’s so interesting, I don’t know which to talk of first—and it’s getting late, and Aunty Welcome said I must hurry home.”

Jean laughed.

“Well, you are in a tangle, aren’t you?” she said. “I can tell you of Jane Daphne in a minute, but it would take days and days to make you understand our Mrs. Sandy. That is what we all call her out home.”

“Where is your home, please, Miss Murray? I don’t believe I ever heard you say.”

“I don’t believe that any of you girls ever asked, did you?” Jean’s blue eyes looked quizzically at Polly. Then she, too, sat down on the window seat, and looked out towards the West, where the sun was reddening the distant hills, and her face caught some of its radiance, as she went on, quietly. “My home is yonder, Polly, west of the hills. It is away, ’way out West in Wyoming, up in the northeastern corner, under the shoulder of Bear Lodge.”

“Is there a large family?” asked Polly, wistfully. “I love lots and lots of children in a family.”

“We think it is large. Let’s count up. There’s mother and father, first of all. Then I am the eldest, and I am twenty-eight. Neil is next to me. He is taking a post-graduate course at the State University. Then come Archie and Don. Arch is in his Soph year, and Don is only sixteen, so he helps father on the ranch, and goes to school winters. Then Margaret is the baby. She is twelve, and we call her Peggie. That is all of the real family, but besides there is old Sally Lost Moon, a half-breed Shoshone woman that mother took in one winter, and she has stayed ever since. Then father has about five men who work for him. They are mostly out on the range with the cattle. That is all the humans we have, as Sally would say. But there are horses, and dogs, and Prometheus, Don’s pet bear—”

“A real live one?”

“Yes, indeed, he is very much alive. I guess you would think so if you lived there. He is only a youngster now, but so full of mischief, you never can tell where it will crop out next. We have called him ‘Prometheus Unbound’ ever since the Sunday when the Missionary Bishop came to the ranch to dinner, and to hold service. That bear got loose somehow, Polly, and found his way into the cook house, and ate up everything in sight, and when Sally and mother went to set the table for dinner, you should have seen their faces!” Jean stopped and looked at her watch. “Child of mortality, as Miss Calvert would say,” she cried, “do you know the time of day? It’s after six now. Don’t ask me another question about home or Mrs. Sandy. I must hurry down to dinner, or I’ll be late for grace, and Miss Calvert never forgives that.”

“May I come and hear some more after school Monday?” asked Polly, as she followed the figure in white downstairs.

“Why, of course you may, and I shall be ever so glad to have you, Polly. Sometimes, this winter, I’ve wondered whether you girls really liked me or not.”

“We’ll like you better if you give us a chance to get acquainted,” said Polly, with her merry frankness. “I think the ranch is the most interesting place I’ve heard about in a long time. Oh, I forgot all about Crullers, Miss Murray.” She stopped short outside the dormitory door. “What did she do this time, please?”

“Broke her parole. She must stay in bed until to-morrow as a punishment. Just at noon to-day, she was found climbing out of the back hall window to the porch roof, and she dropped down to the other side of the garden wall, and made for the side street. Oh, she confessed. It was for pickled limes and doughnuts. Good-bye, Polly.” She went down the staircase, and turned to wave her hand at the bottom. And all at once an idea occurred to Polly.

“Couldn’t you come down to Glenwood to-morrow, and have dinner with grandfather and me, Miss Murray?” she asked eagerly. “We’d love to have you.”

“Would you, truly?” Jean paused, and smiled back at her. “Then I shall be glad to come. And I will have a chance to tell you more about the ranch, and Mrs. Sandy, bless her.” She turned, and made a low curtsy before the two girls in the oil painting, before she hurried down the wide old hall to the dining-room.

Polly went on out into the front garden where Stoney waited for her. He was half asleep on the grass by the gates, but roused up, and trudged after her down the broad, shady street towards Glenwood. Polly could hardly wait to reach home, and tell the Admiral that she thought his “thoroughbred” was Jean Murray.

The dinner hour was always a ceremonial period, partly because Aunty Welcome insisted on adhering to tradition in this regard, partly because both Polly and the Admiral enjoyed this time most of all the day.

There were long, delicate sprays of flowering almond in tall, slender vases at each end of the dining table, the only bright spot of color in the quiet, high ceiled old room.

“Am I late, grandfather dear?” Polly asked contritely, pausing a moment at the open doors. There was no reply, so she crossed the hall to the study, and tapped gently.

“Come in, child, come in,” called the Admiral’s deep, cheery voice, and she obeyed. There was some one in the room besides the Admiral. At first she could not tell who it was, but when the person put out his hand, and said, “Now, Miss Polly, have you forgotten your ‘smuggler’ so soon?” all at once, Polly remembered.

“Oh, it’s Doctor Smith.”

It was indeed, the genial, merry doctor who had been the girls’ neighbor at Lost Island on their vacation trip of the previous year. As Polly laid her hand in his, she remembered all the fun of that summer, how the doctor had lived alone at “Smugglers’ Cove,” and the girls had discovered him, and thought him a pirate or a smuggler. How they had gone to the Orienta Club’s reception, and had found that their smuggler was no less a personage than Doctor Penrhyn Smith, the great naturalist from Washington, D. C.

“Grown a trifle taller, Admiral, that is the only change. Where are you to spend the summer this year, Commodore Polly?”

“Not as a Commodore,” Polly replied, shaking her head, and sitting down on the broad arm of the Admiral’s chair. “We haven’t really decided yet, but we want to do something different from last year.”

“The Doctor is on the same trail,” said the Admiral. “Why can’t you be content, like I am, to let the summers drift along like the blossoms the wind is blowing off those fruit trees yonder?”

“Because we are children,” returned the Doctor promptly, quite as though his fifty-seven years were fifteen. “Last year I hunted a certain kind of polypus, remember, Polly? This year, I am seriously thinking of skipping away to Wyoming on a still hunt after a dinosaurus.”

“Oh, Doctor,” cried Polly, eagerly. “Are you? Those are the lizards that were running around before the Flood, aren’t they? And they’re terribly long, hundreds and hundreds—”

“Now, Polly,” warned the Admiral.

“Of inches,” finished Polly, mischievously. “Ruth was telling us about them. Ruth reads all that kind of stuff, you know. She’s walked right through a whale—I mean through the skeleton. She told us of some museum of natural history where there is a whale hanging in mid air, and a nice little gang plank is built through him so you trot across and feel like Jonah.”

“Preposterous, Polly!” laughed the Doctor.

“Truly,” Polly insisted earnestly. “I think it was at Charleston. Ruth’s been all around seeing interesting things, and she always remembers the most interesting of all to tell us girls.”

“I should say she did,” said the Doctor, gravely. “Polly, that whale story shall be preserved, and passed down to posterity. Now, I am really going up to Wyoming, and I sincerely believe that I shall tap the foothills and the buttes, and discover the long-buried remains of a dinosaurus, yet I feel that Ruth has gone me one better as a naturalist.”

“Wyoming,” repeated Polly, pushing her hair up from her forehead. “Grandfather dear, there’s another sign-post.”

“What do you mean, child?”

“Why, don’t you know, when you are undecided about something, if you watch, you will find sign-posts pointing the right way to go.” Polly’s brown eyes sparkled with eagerness, as she explained one of her pet ideas. “We want a good vacation this year, and a different kind of a one, and this is the second sign-post that has said Wyoming.”

“What was the first?”

“Jean Murray, ranch girl, thoroughbred, Wyoming.” Polly counted off the different heads on her finger-tips. “She is one of the Freshman teachers at Calvert Hall, grandfather dear, and she’s coming to dinner to-morrow, and we’ve got a wonderful surprise for you, I think.”

“Sign-posts?”

“Maybe.” Polly looked over at the doctor, and suddenly began to laugh. “Oh, I do believe—I’m almost sure—that even the Doctor is a sign-post pointing the way to Wyoming.”

“I am thankful it was not Kamchatka, for I verily think you would have had a try for it, Polly.” The Admiral rose, one hand on Polly’s young shoulder, and they went in to dinner, Aunty Welcome bowing and smiling in the wide hall outside the door as though she were trying to live up to her name.

And through the dinner, Polly listened with deepest interest to the conversation between her grandfather and the doctor, all about the recent researches throughout the Yellowstone valley, and following the glacial drift, and about dinosauri and other prehistoric animals until Wyoming seemed a veritable land of hidden enchantment. If it could be managed, then and there Polly made up her mind, the vacation club should have its summer outing in that far-off land of wonders.

CHAPTER V

THE GUEST OF HONOR

On Saturday mornings, Polly had two important duties to perform, dusting the Admiral’s study and her own room. Then came an hour’s practice on the piano, and after that she was free to walk around the garden and consult Uncle Peter.

As far back as Polly could remember, Uncle Peter had been as much a part of the garden at Glenwood as the old elms that bordered the garden, and she had always considered him a remarkable authority on all subjects. In fact Uncle Peter justified her opinion of him.

He was not tall and stately like Aunty Welcome, but a little, stoop-shouldered old man, with a face like a wrinkled russet apple, and it wore a perpetual smile. Polly used to believe sincerely, when she was a little girl, that when Uncle Peter walked along the garden paths, all the flowers turned their heads and bowed to him deferentially.

To-day, as she watched him transplanting seedlings along the borders, she asked thoughtfully:

“Uncle Peter, do you know what sort of flowers grow out in Wyoming?”

“Whar’s dat, Mis’ Polly?” asked Uncle Peter, gently. “I don’t jest recollect any sech locality.”

“It’s ’way out west, and kind of northwest, too, up next to the two Dakotas.”

“Oh, suttinly, suttinly. I s’pose geraniums mought grow dar. Dey’ll mostly take a holt any ole place. Dey’ll grow upside downside, geraniums will. Maybe pansies grow dar, too, and phloxes and most any no-account plant dat ain’t perticklar.”

“Do you think so?” Polly pondered. Her only impression of Wyoming was a place filled with mountain ranges, and vast wastes of sage brush, and most of all, a place that was wholly wild—wild flowers, wild animals. And yet, come to think of it, Jean Murray did not act like a ranch girl who had run wild. Polly veered to a new tack.

“Did you ever see Miss Diantha Calvert, Uncle Peter?”

“I suttinly did.” Uncle Peter always used his own thumb to make nests in the soft earth for his baby seedlings, and the thumb went in a bit more forcibly as he spoke. “She’s stood and watched me work in dis yere very garden, when she wasn’t much taller’n you be, Mis’ Polly, and I was a lil’ shaver like Stoney.”

“You’ve always lived here at Glenwood, haven’t you, Uncle Peter?” asked Polly wonderingly. “Years, and years, and years.”

“And I don’ want to live in no better place ’ceptin’ Paradise, possibly Paradise,” smiled back the old man, happily. “I was born down yonder in de ole quarters, yo’ know. We don’ use ’em no more nowadays, ’ceptin’ for storehouses. Miss Diantha, she’d come visitin’ with her sister, and her lady mother. Dey was quality, now I’m tellin’ you. And Miss Di, she allers liked de time when de lilies come troopin’ along, de big lilies, gold with ruby hearts.”

“Did she know my own mother?” Polly asked the question slowly, and softly, as she always spoke of the young mother whom she had never seen, who had died when she was only a few days old.

“Land, no, chile. She knew yo’ grandma. Mis’ Car’line. Dat’s de Admiral’s lady. Why, your own daddy warn’t no more’n born. What you all askin’ questions for? Jes’ like a darby bird.”

Polly forgot to ask what a darby bird was, in her eagerness to get at the truth of this matter about Miss Diantha.

“Why, I heard only last night, that she was married, and lived ’way out west in Wyoming, and I wondered how it had happened.”

“Like enough, like enough,” Uncle Peter rejoined placidly. “When folks move away from Virginny, after being blessed enough to be born hyar, dey’s liable to have all sorts of misconveniences happen to ’em.”

“Yes, sir,” Polly said meekly. Not for worlds would she have directly contradicted Uncle Peter. Next to the Admiral and Aunty Welcome, he stood in authority. On her way back to the house she gathered flowers to decorate the broad old hall, great clusters of purple and white lilac that filled the air with fragrance. As she was arranging them in the low, plump jardinières in the hall, she thought of that other girl, years and years ago, who had loved to visit beautiful Glenwood when the lilies were in bloom. She wondered whether Mrs. “Sandy” of the Alameda Ranch, ever longed to see some of these same golden lilies with the ruby hearts, just to make her think of dear old Queen’s Ferry. And most of all, perhaps, she wondered how it had all happened, why Diantha had ever married, why she had gone to live so far west, and why Miss Calvert never mentioned her name, yet loved her memory dearly.

It was about five that afternoon when Miss Murray arrived.

“Am I too early, Polly?” she asked, as Polly ran to greet her. “It is only five, but you know you said to come early.”

“Oh, and I’m so glad that you did, Miss Murray,” cried Polly. “Grandfather has gone up to the Capitol to meet Senator Yates this afternoon, and is going out home with him to Fair Oaks, so I am all alone. We’ll go out in the garden, and talk.”

“This is my first visit anywhere since I came east,” Jean remarked, as she laid aside her hat and coat, “so you can guess how much I enjoy it.”

“Why is it your first?” Polly had a natural gift for hitting the main point on the head.

“Because no one has asked me, I think.” Jean’s mouth was full of expression. It had a way of closing, and then smiling in the most knowing sort of way, Polly thought, as she watched it now. Somehow, it made her feel nonplussed, but she went ahead frankly.

“Maybe no one dared to. I know I never did. You always act—so—oh, I hardly know how to say it. As if you didn’t care really whether anybody liked you or not, as if you were so sure of yourself, and so well acquainted with yourself, don’t you understand, Miss Murray, that you did not need other people for company.”

“Ah, but I do need them, and very badly, too, sometimes,” protested Jean, slipping her arm around Polly’s waist, as they went down the broad, old-fashioned hall to the open doors at the back. “I have been more lonely since I came east than I dare to confess. You may be sure, though, I never wrote home that I was. We are Scotch, Polly, and you warm-hearted Southerners will never know all that that means. When anything is in your heart, it bubbles out like a spring, doesn’t it, sorrow or happiness? But when we are happiest or saddest, well, we just can’t say anything. It is all here, ’way down deep in our hearts, but we can’t seem to lift it out, and exhibit it. So you see, girlie, while I may have seemed independent and self-sufficient all winter long, I was really eating my heart out for very lonesomeness. Can you understand?”

Polly nodded sympathetically. She always could understand the other person’s point of view.

“That is why the girls never became really acquainted with you, then. I tried to. You see, I always liked you, Miss Murray, and when I like anybody without trying to like them—when it just happens all by itself, I know it will last.”

Jean leaned back her head, and laughed merrily.

“Polly, you are a joy. You think aloud, don’t you? And what a dear, quaint old garden. I love these winding paths, and arbors, but how oddly some of the flowers have come up, how unexpectedly, I mean.” She stopped before a clump of tall flag lilies, unfolding purple and golden banners to the soft air.

“Yes, I know,” Polly replied, happily. “I planted those bulbs there last fall. That turn of the path seemed sort of bare all through the summer, so I remembered it, and when fall came, I tucked some bulbs in there. I’ve always planted things where I’ve wanted to out here. At first Uncle Peter—that’s our gardener—didn’t like it, but as soon as he saw the effect, he said that I ‘suttinly had good intentions.’ I like to take a lot of seed in my sweater pockets in the early spring, and wherever I find a good place, just plant some. It’s so interesting and surprising, too, because I never know exactly what it is I’ve planted till they start to come up.”

“It must be fun to watch for the surprises.”

“Oh, indeed it is. Why, once,” Polly’s eyes were brimful of mischief at the sudden memory, “once I put a bulb down in that corner by the hedge, and watched the next spring to see what it would be. It came up all right, with green spikes, but it never bloomed at all. And it grew and grew so tall. I called it the Mystery Lily. At last, one day last fall, it did bloom. Right at the very top of the single stalk was a cluster of queer, starry flowers, all bunched together. Uncle Peter didn’t know what it was, and grandfather came out to take a look at it, and what do you suppose it was, Miss Murray? Just a plain, every-day onion gone to seed.”

“Polly, Polly,” exclaimed Jean, shaking her head, “I shall always think of you after this, like Millet’s Sower, with a peck of mixed seed, going around planting seed as the wind does.”

Someway, she began to feel happier and more relaxed than she had since her coming to Queen’s Ferry. The long winter’s work at the Hall had been very confining, and she was not used to that. Out here, in Polly’s garden, all her nature-loving self responded to the growing things about her, and most of all, to the growing girl, whose soul and personality were unfolding, too, in her springtime of youth, with all the unknown possibilities and promises of her random seed.

“I would love to see you out on the range, Polly,” she continued. “They say, you know, that Johnny Appleseed went through the wilderness planting apple trees back in colonial times, and in California to-day, up at ‘The Heights’ above San Francisco, the dear old poet of the Sierras plants roses through the cañons.”

“Does he?” Polly thought for a minute. “I think that is splendid. I shall tell Ruth about it. You know how old-fashioned and motherly she is, Miss Murray. Sometimes, I almost think she is my dearest friend, although I like the other girls, too. Ruth says that my way of planting is an allegory. She says we all of us sow kind deeds and happy thoughts broadcast, and trust to the winds that blow, and the rains that fall, and the sun that is sure to shine sometime, to make them take roots and grow, even in strange hearts. Let’s sit on this stone seat, and talk about the ranch. I wish that our outing club had a chance to go to some place like that.”

“Why not make the chance?” Jean reached out her hand to the bush of flowering quince beside the seat. The branches were heavy with the rich, red blossoms. “I used to talk about waiting for chances, too, long ago, until mother taught me to make my own chances. You see, Polly, it is different with us at the ranch. Nearly all of you girls at Calvert do not have to fret or care about the future. You have beautiful old homes like this—”

“Not Ruth, Miss Murray,” interrupted Polly, soberly. “Her father’s dead, and she is studying, to support her invalid mother—didn’t you know that? I think she’s so strong and brave. She says she loves to even think that she is able to. And beautiful homes, even like Glenwood, can’t make up to a girl for mothers and fathers. I haven’t any, myself, you know.”

The two looked at each other with new-born understanding, and Jean’s strong, freckled hand was laid over Polly’s, as it rested on the bench beside her.

“I know, dear. But it usually makes a girl more self-reliant and helpful to others, if she does have to think of her own future, and to lend a helping hand towards feathering the home-nest. That is what we three older children have done, and it binds us in a closer tie of love, each helping the rest to get along as soon as he himself can fly alone, so to speak.”

“Helping how?”

“Well, for instance, I am the eldest at home. Father and mother worked hard to push me through school, and I had two years at the University besides, but had to leave to help. I began to teach, then, and my earnings helped launch the boys on their schooling. Don and Peggie come last of all, but they will have their turn the same as the rest. Don’t you see?”

Polly opened her eyes wider, and nodded her head. She did see, a little bit clearer. Life and happiness had been made so easy for her that she hardly ever thought how hard a path to travel it might be for the boy or girl who had no home like Glenwood, and no grandfather like the Admiral. Somehow, this quiet chat by the river bank, in the soft glow of the late April afternoon, brought new conceptions to her mind, and new vistas of life. Love that was strong enough to make willing sacrifices for those it loved even though it involved hardship and self-denial, was quite new to her.

“I’d love to know them all at your ranch,” she said, finally.

Just here the Admiral came pacing along the path towards them, fresh from his ride over to Senator Yates’ place. Whenever he missed Polly, he always knew where to find her, but this time, he stared thoughtfully at the young woman with her.

“God bless my heart and soul, Polly,” he exclaimed, “if you haven’t captured my thoroughbred! Present me, Polly, present me.”

Polly did so, happily, and the old gentleman bowed low over Jean’s hand with all the old-time courtly grace that he was famous for.

“My dear child, you must pardon an old chap’s enthusiasm,” he said, “but you certainly ride a horse more inspiringly than any girl I ever saw. It is a joy to watch you. I have reined up several times to look after you as you took the river road at a dead gallop—and Polly, she sits her saddle like an Indian. None of this modern rising and falling, if you please. Where did you learn, Miss Murray, if I may ask?”

Jean laughed, and blushed. Praise was new to her.

“I don’t remember learning to ride, Admiral Page,” she said, doubtfully. “I’m a ranch girl, and we learn to sit in a saddle almost before we can walk.”

The Admiral regarded her admiringly, stroking his thin gray imperial slowly.

“You must teach my Polly. And mind, while you remain here at Queen’s Ferry, the gates of Glenwood stand wide to you as guest of honor—a girl who can ride like that.”

Jean could hardly reply, except to smile at him. During the long winter of close work, she had made no new friends, and had not come in contact with Southern hospitality. Now, as she walked back through the lovely old-fashioned garden, between Polly and the stately old gentleman, she began to feel the charm of it stealing over her. It seemed so strange, though, that she, Jean Murray of the Crossbar ranch, should be guest of honor at Glenwood. She lifted her chin a little bit higher than usual, not from pride, for there was precious little of personal vanity in her make-up, but just at the thought of what her mother and the boys and Peggie would say if they only knew.

CHAPTER VI

POLLY AIMS AT A STAR

The next letter that Jean sent home contained a full description of the dinner that evening. There were four very large rooms that took up the ground floor of the old mansion at Glenwood, the two great drawing-rooms on either side the hall, and back of these were the Admiral’s study on one side, and the dining-room on the other.

“And there are two kitchens, mother,” Jean wrote. “Polly showed me them after dinner, and it made me think of home. I am sure some Southerner started the fashion in ranch life, having the kitchen away from the main house. Here, the winter kitchen is the first story at the back of the house, where the builders allowed for the slope of the land riverward. But in the summer-time, they cook in an old stone house down the garden, and there is a vine-covered walk leading to it from the house. From where I sat, I could see the little colored boy, Stoney, going back and forth, bearing covered dishes in state, just the way Sally does at the ranch.”

It was very pleasant being guest of honor, she discovered. Both the Admiral and Polly were interested in hearing about the ranch, and her girlhood out there.

“Weren’t you lonesome?” asked Polly.

“We never had time to be lonesome. We all had to do our share in helping mother and father, and besides, there were so many of us, that I suppose we were company to each other.”

“But how did you go to school?”

“We rode horseback, or drove over. It was about six miles from our place.”

“How could you all ride?”

“We each have our own horse, or rather pony, as we call them out home. When I heard them say pony East here, I thought you meant a pony like our Indian ponies, and it seemed so comical to see just the little Shetlanders. I don’t know what we should do without them. Every summer in the slack season, father takes us for a long cross-country trip on horseback, and we camp out for a week or more.”

Polly leaned back from the table, her eyes shining with excitement as she listened.

“Grandfather dear, do you suppose there is any way at all by which we girls could go up there for our vacation?”

The Admiral laughed, and shook his head.

“I’m afraid not, matey. It would be too expensive a trip for five or six girls to undertake. Last year the way was made easy for you through the kindness of the Senator and Mrs. Yates. When you have all your traveling expenses clipped off your list of expenditures, it is a heavy item disposed of.”

“There are summer rates out West,” Miss Murray remarked, hopefully, seeing the look on Polly’s face. “And the board at home would be very, very little.”

“Would there be room for us?”

“We would make room,” laughed Jean. “We would send the boys all out to sleep in the bunkhouse, or even in tents. Once you were there, it would be the easiest part of the trip looking after you. But it’s the traveling ’way out there.”

“Well, you see, Miss Murray dear, we have a little towards it even now,” protested Polly eagerly. “Grandfather has laughed at and teased us, and called us the board of lady managers, but last year we had such a perfectly dandy time up in Maine that we formed a regular outing club just among us girls at the Hall. Kate Julian dropped out when she left for college. She’s at Bryn Mawr now. And Crullers is rather uncertain. I am sure she could not go. But that leaves Ruth, Isabel, Sue, Ted, and my own self to reckon. And we’ve every one of us been looking forward to this summer, and saving towards it. You don’t know how much we have denied ourselves.”

“Pin her down to facts, Miss Murray,” insisted the Admiral. “I have not noticed any deprivation at all.”

“Because I never ’fessed up,’ grandfather dear. It was a secret.” Polly’s face was so serious, and yet so full of suppressed enthusiasm that both Jean and the Admiral had to laugh at her. “If I dared, I would tell facts—” she hesitated.

“But you’d better not, Polly,” Jean interrupted. “Not if it concerns the other girls, too. Talk it over with them, and come to see me any afternoon after class. I will write and find out about the summer rates, and the dates. And it doesn’t cost anything to find out, at all events. The very cheapest architecture in the world is building air castles.”

It was on the tip of Polly’s tongue to say that she knew the Admiral would help them, when all at once, she remembered what Jean had told her of the family at the Crossbar ranch, where every one relied on his own efforts, and worked to help the younger ones. Perhaps it would be a wholesome undertaking for the girls to have to earn their own pleasure trip themselves.

It was the happiest and most interesting evening she had spent in a long while, and Jean pronounced it the best during her entire winter East.

“Don’t give up the idea, Polly, until you have to,” she called, last of all, as she went out the front door with the Admiral.

“Oh, I never give up a hope until it is really out of sight,” Polly replied, happily. “Aunty Welcome always says it is better to aim for a star and hit the fence-post, than to aim for the fence-post and hit the ground. All of my arrows point right up at the sky.”

“And the fence-post is badly scarred, believe me, Miss Murray,” said the Admiral.

“I’ll tell the other girls anyway,” Polly declared. “You may expect us after class Monday, if you don’t mind.”

Miss Murray was very certain that she should not mind. Polly never knew how full of expectancy the following Monday was to the teacher from the Crossbar. It had been a lonesome winter there at the Hall amongst strangers, and she did not make friends readily. Several times during class on Monday she met Polly’s glance, and smiled back at her.

“I think we had better tell Miss Calvert, don’t you?” she asked her, when she came from the classroom and found the girls awaiting her in the lower hall. “She might wonder what plot we were hatching up in my room.”

“I have just told her,” Polly answered. “I had my French history to paraphrase, and was a little late handing it in, so I told her we were going to hold a council of state with you over our summer outing, and she said it was all right.”

“Then we can go upstairs. I have some snap-shots of the ranch I want to show you, and some of the children too. And after we talk it over, if it does seem possible, we’ll get down to real business methods, and see just what it will cost, and how you can manage it.”

“It isn’t as hard as last year, because we won’t have to learn how to swim or sail yachts,” Sue said, hopefully. “Isn’t it too bad we are not boys. We might tramp it, or ride on freight trains.”

“Yes, dearies, or fly, or do a cross-country race over the mountains to Wyoming. Anything for novelty and diversion. Sue, sometimes you talk like Crullers.” Ted threw a rebuking look at her chum, but it passed straight by Sue.

“I didn’t mean that so much. I mean that boys always seem to find out a way, or make a way.”

“It only seems that way, Sue,” said Miss Murray, putting one arm around her shoulder. “I have three younger brothers, so I know something about their ways and habits.”

“Doesn’t that sound zoölogical?” put in Polly.

“I wish it were as simple. Any one who tries to classify boys along zoölogical lines will find his hands full.”

“I know why, because animals have no personality,” Ruth announced. “And boys are full of it.”

“Indeed, you’d think they were if you had any brothers,” returned Miss Murray, laughingly. “But I sometimes think animals have personality too. I wish you girls could see some of our pets out home. There seems to be as much difference in disposition between the ponies, for instance, as between the boys themselves.”

They had reached her own room now, and “settled down for a serious conference,” as Polly said.

“I’m not going to show you any photographs of the ranch, or tell you about it until we talk over the business end of this expedition.” Jean sat down at the small table beside the double windows, and laid out paper and pencil. “Tell me exactly what your intentions are.”

“You tell, Ruth,” said Ted, urgently. “When Ruth tells about anything, she puts things just the way they are, and when Polly tells anything, she puts it the way she wants them to be.”

“What kind of costumes would we need if we did go out there?” asked Isabel, hesitatingly.

“Listen to Lady Vanitas, Polly,” Ted exclaimed. “Do you remember last summer? Oh, Miss Murray, Isabel never dared to go in swimming even without her class pin, and her bathing slippers had pink bows on them.”

“Don’t mind her, Isabel,” Polly interposed. “This will be just a ‘roughing it’ party. If we have shirtwaists and good strong khaki shirts, it is all we shall need excepting for traveling suits. One suit-case apiece will be allowed. See how much expense that cuts off, girls. Laundry bills and summer dresses.”

“The kit is the smallest part you have to think of,” Miss Murray interposed, cheerfully. “It is so small, that I never even thought of it in jotting down probable items. You will live at the ranch, and father can supply us with everything we need out there, fishing tackle, riding outfits, and camping supplies.”

“What’s the fare?” asked Ruth, leaning forward, her chin on one propped-up hand, her brown eyes wide and inquiring behind their spectacles. “It seems to me as if that’s the worst thing we have to figure on.”

“It is, Ruth. I only wish you were all small so I could cuddle you under my wing on half fares. But I can’t. You’re fearfully ‘over twelve.’ The best we can do is to hunt half rate tickets, and summer excursions. The way I came down last fall, I took a train from Carlile to Omaha, then east to Washington, and then down here to Queen’s Ferry. Miss Calvert paid half my fare or I could not have come so far from home. As nearly as I can figure it out roughly for you, the summer rate is about sixty or seventy dollars for the round trip.”

“That isn’t so much,” Polly cried hopefully.

“It’s so much that it shuts me out.” Ruth accepted the decree with philosophy, but the other girls knew how much the chance of a vacation always meant to her, and Polly added hastily.

“It must not shut out any of us, Ruth. We are an outing club, and if one goes, the rest go. No picking or choosing. What have we been saving our money for all winter, I should like to know—paying dues each week, and giving entertainments?”

“Are you really an organized club, girls?” Jean’s face brightened with quick interest. It seemed so strange to find her quiet room filled with happy young faces, and merry girlish voices. A thought flashed through her mind, as Polly spoke, of how much pleasure it would mean all around, if the girls could spend a month out on the Crossbar ranch that vacation.

“Really and truly we are,” Polly replied. “We formed a vacation club. All last winter, each one paid in twenty-five cents a week dues. Ruth is our treasurer. And she’s just as good as a safety-deposit bank, too, the little home toy kind that won’t open till they are full, you know. Sometimes, when we almost despaired, and were on the point of disbanding, she would refuse positively to give us back our money, so what were we to do?”

“Stand pat, as you should,” retorted the treasurer, calmly. “I knew they’d change their minds again. We have a little over one hundred and twenty-four dollars in the treasury now, thanks to my safety-deposit system. That’s a pretty fair start, isn’t it, even towards Wyoming?”

“But how little it seems when we need five hundred.” Polly puckered her forehead anxiously, as she leaned her chin on her palm, and bent forward. “I’m afraid that I have really aimed for the gate-post this time.”

“Maybe somebody that we know, or our fathers know, knows somebody else who has a private car bound for Wyoming,” suggested Isabel, meditatively. “I’m sure I don’t see why you girls should laugh at that. It might happen.”

“And then again it mightn’t,” Ted put in vigorously. “I only wish that we knew a good way to earn our fares outright without asking any one’s help. Maybe if we did our best, girls, we could. Don’t you think so, Miss Murray? I know that we could get some portion of the expense money at home, of course. A hundred each doesn’t seem much for a lot of girls like us. I think it is very, very cheap.”

“Well, ladybird, just you wait till we try to earn it,” protested Sue. “My hair begins to feel gray along the edges just thinking about it. Show us some of your snap-shots, please, Miss Murray, just to keep up our courage.”

Jean smiled, and got out her home pictures for their inspection.

“This is our Peggie girl, with her pets around her,” she explained.

“Oh, they’re sheep,” cried the girls.

“Lambs. They were born early in the spring, and father was afraid they would die, so Don brought them down to the house, and gave them to Peggie.”

“Where was their mother?”

“She died, Polly. Peggie had to mother them, and they are still home pets. She calls them Punch and Judy.”

“What funny pets,” Ruth remarked, in her grave, speculative way, looking up through her spectacles at them.

“Do you think so? Then see here.” Jean handed over another picture. “That is the kind of pets the boys have, instead of lambs. That one is a cub bear, Prometheus. You know I told you about his eating up the Bishop’s Sunday dinner, Polly.”

“What are those things on the boy’s shoulders?” asked Ted. “And who is the boy?”

“That’s only Don, my youngest brother. Those are his pet ’coons. He has a tame crow, too, that is a highway robber. It steals everything it can lay its claws on, and hides it. Don tried to catch a magpie up in the hills, but they are too wary.”

“I shall like Don,” Ted said firmly. “I love animals.”

“If you win his trust, he may allow you to help Peggie take care of his pets. During the summer months, we hardly see the boys. They go out with the men at the harvesting, and eat either at the mess wagons with them, or out of doors some place.”

“Is it a real ranch, Miss Murray?” asked Sue, suddenly. “I mean with great roving herds of cattle, and cowboys, and Indians. I’ve been to a wild-west show once, so I know pretty well what to expect.”

Here Jean did laugh heartily.

“You poor, dear heathen of the Far East,” she exclaimed. “You won’t find that sort of a ranch around where we live, anyhow. I don’t think there are many of them left, except perhaps through Texas. You see, since the vast free ranges have been cut up into homestead plots by the government, and irrigation has been introduced, the old ranches have had to give way perforce. Why, father was a settler himself, years ago, a homesteader, I mean. The old ranchers called them ‘nesters,’ and despised them thoroughly. But I like the name. It stands for so much—‘nester.’”

“Why didn’t the big ranchers like them?” asked Ruth.

“Well, where the old-time rancher who had almost limitless land at his disposal, neglected it, and let nature do all his work for him, the ‘nester,’ cleared land, and improved it, and cultivated it. They took advantage of every chance Uncle Sam held out to them to irrigate, and clear their timber out, and build fences. It is getting late, or I could tell you more. The first important thing is to be sure you want to go, and then raise the money for the trip. Shall I write to mother to-night, and ask her what she would charge to feed and shelter five pilgrims from Virginia?”

The girls rose too, and stood about her, Sue and Polly with their arms around her neck, and all agreed with the suggestion. Never before had Jean Murray found herself so popular at Calvert.

“We’ll find a way out. Polly always finds one,” said Isabel, hopefully.

“I think I can see the tip end of one even now,” Polly replied, her brown eyes full of suppressed excitement. “Girls, Dr. Penrhyn Smith is going to Wyoming this summer, too, to dig for a—a—oh, what do you call those long, prehistoric things, Ruth. I know, a thesaurus.”

“Dinosaurus, goose,” Ruth corrected. “The other’s a dictionary.”

“Is it? It sounds awfully antediluvian, somehow, as if it had a ten-yard beak, and bird-claw feet, don’t you know? Don’t you get the full force of what I’m trying to tell you? Our Dr. Smith, of Smugglers’ Cove, is going to Wyoming this summer.”

“Polly, you’re looking wise,” laughed Sue. “I know that you see a procession of us girls trotting along after the Doctor, and carrying all his little spades and shovels and things for him, and getting weekly salaries for it to cover all expenses there and back.”

“Just you wait and see,” prophesied Polly, serenely, and not another word would she say that night of her plan.

CHAPTER VII

LAWLESS DEVICES

That night Polly consulted the Admiral. Sitting opposite him in the study after dinner, she went over her plans very carefully.

“Each of the girls can give something different. I want to have a birthday party, grandfather dear.”

“But your birthday is in December—” began the Admiral, in faint protest.

“This will be a universal birthday party, everybody’s birthday party. We will have very good refreshments to start with. Crullers always says the success of anything depends on the food. And we’ll decorate the lawn and veranda, and have music too. We won’t charge any admission at all, but every one who comes in, will be handed a nice little silk bag, and told to put in it as many pennies as they are years old.”

“Highway robbery,” exclaimed the Admiral. “Think how it will beggar me, and let everybody know how old I am too.”

“Oh, no, it won’t, because we shall not tell,” Polly promised laughingly. “Isn’t it a good idea? Nearly everybody’s over twenty, and some are even over fifty. We’ll invite all the nice old people in Queen’s Ferry.”

“And treat them as if it were their birthdays, I presume.”

“Oh, yes. And don’t you see, grandfather, if I give that kind of a party, and Isabel has the strawberry lawn fête, and the others plan other things, we’ll have quite a lot of money for the trip.”

“It’s worth something to parents and guardians and grandfathers to get rid of you during the summer,” said the Admiral, gravely, but with twinkling eyes. “If this is to be strictly on a business basis, I think that item should be counted in. There should be a sympathy meeting called amongst us to discuss that phase of it. I will give fifty dollars towards a relief fund to send girls away on vacations, myself.”

“Will you?” Polly regarded him with interest, her head a little on one side like a robin as she thought over the proposition. It was a tempting one, but she remembered the code of honor at the Crossbar. “Maybe we’ll have to appeal for help before we get through, but we want to try first, and earn it ourselves. You understand, don’t you, grandfather dear? We don’t want it to happen so—oh, so easily.”

The Admiral declared it was much better to take the cash outright than to wheedle it out by birthday parties, and strawberry festivals, and other “lawless devices,” but Polly went ahead just the same.

Every day, whenever there was a chance, the five met to talk over ways and means. Sue wrestled with the problem for some time, and finally she and Ted put their heads together, and decided to hold an auction.

“You can’t hold an auction unless you have something to sell,” Ruth remonstrated.

“We’ll sell things,” the two promised, and they surely did when the time came.

Isabel held fast to her strawberry fête, and Ruth pondered over how she could do her share. Miss Murray had been attracted from the first of the term to this quiet, old-fashioned girl, with the big brown eyes, and spectacles, and serious yet whimsical way with her. She knew that while the other girls had nice homes, and sure prospects, Ruth was dependent on her aunt, and had to make her own way as soon as she left school. Perhaps this bred a sort of kinship in sympathy between them. At all events, Ruth found that nearly every day she would have a talk with Jean.

Finally, they took Miss Calvert into their confidence, and she had a suggestion to make at once.

“Why, Ruth, child, don’t you think you could bring the little lame Ellis boy up in his lessons so he could take the examinations,” she said, hopefully. “Mrs. Ellis was asking me only Sunday how she could manage with him, and he is quite convalescent now. The doctor says his worrying over falling behind will retard his recovery.”

Ruth’s face brightened. The little lame Ellis boy, as every one in Queen’s Ferry called him, was the only child of Payne Ellis, the senior warden at Trinity Church. She knew him well at church. He had been ill with measles for several weeks, and would be certain to miss all of his examinations.

“He wants so much to finish his grammar work this year, and start in the fall at St. Stephen’s Military School, and if he fails, it means another year of eighth grade work,” added Miss Calvert. “I do think you might be able to bring him up in time, Ruth. I will speak to Mrs. Ellis to-night, and let you know.”

The next day Ruth’s face fairly shone with satisfaction.

“Oh, girls, isn’t it good?” she said, as they were going up the broad stairs at noon. “I’ve heard from Mrs. Ellis, and I am to give two hours every day after school, teaching Phil. She says she will give me fifty cents an hour. That’s six dollars a week, and there’ll be five weeks anyway, up to the end of school. The doctor says he mustn’t attempt to go back on account of his eyes.”

“Lucky grandma,” Sue said, emphatically. “That comes of being a walking encyclopedia, while the rest of us must pick strawberries, and auction off all our pet belongings. By the way, we are going to hold our auction, Ted and I, on Saturday next. Ted has the first poster all made for it. She hung it beside the looking glass in the hall, where no one could possibly miss it.”

It was a hand-made poster. Ted was the artist. She had used the plain ecru-tinted “scratch paper,” as the girls called it, that they all used in class for scribbling. An original drawing of Sue weeping over the sale of her treasures occupied the top space, while Ted stood on a chair, holding out articles invitingly. Underneath it read:

AUCTION!!!

To be held on Saturday forenoon, at the residence of Miss Sue Warner, 35 Elmwood Road. The personal belongings of Miss Warner and Miss Edwina Moore will be sold at a great sacrifice at ten o’clock sharp. The sale includes,

ANTIQUES! MYSTERY BOXES! BOOKS!

BEAUTIFUL POMPS AND VANITIES!

RARE CANDIES! ONE KITTEN!

Various toilette articles, and all the interesting and valuable objects of art which made Miss Moore’s room in Calvert Hall, the past winter, a place of diversion and envy.

“The resident girls are all coming to the sale,” Ted announced, happily, shutting one eye, as she looked at the announcement. “I think that is very enticing and mysterious, don’t you, Polly?”

“It’s lovely,” Polly declared, delightedly. “Let’s send out copies of it to everybody.”

“I’ll help letter them, Ted,” Crullers said, anxiously. “I wish you’d let me help, girls, even if I can’t be in on the fun.”

“Well, so you shall, dear,” Polly promised, and after school hours, they all went up to Ted’s room, and made copies of the placard. It was Ted’s first year as a resident pupil, and she had felt somewhat divided from the others at first. Her father and mother were away from Queen’s Ferry, at the town house in Washington, and it necessitated Ted’s occupying a room at the Hall.

“We would have held the auction here,” Sue said, “but nobody would have come except the girls. This way, I shall sell pink popcorn and peanuts, while Ted is the auctioneer.”

“I don’t see what you’re going to sell,” Ruth put in, soberly. “You’ll destroy public confidence in all of us if it’s a joke.”

“A joke. Listen to her, Ted.” Sue shook her head sadly. “Indeed it is not a joke. We’re giving up all we dare to, aren’t we, Ted? Mother says she has to keep a watch on everything in the house for fear it will be auctioned off. But she’s donated a few things too, to help us out. She made the mystery boxes.”

“Never heard of such things,” said Ruth.

“That’s the charm,” smiled back Sue. “Just you wait till Saturday. I do hope we’ll have a good crowd.”

“We must send these to all our friends,” Polly said, and each girl took a supply home with her.

But it remained for Crullers to spring the grand surprise of Saturday. Not until the fateful hour of ten did the girls discover what Crullers had done with her poster. Sue’s home was a beautiful, old-fashioned house set far back from the main river road, and surrounded by trees. The auction was to be held in the music room, and well-filled it was too, by ten, with the girls from Calvert Hall, and a lot of Queen’s Ferry girls besides, and even some of the mothers and grown sisters. But suddenly Ruth glanced out of the broad bay window, and cried:

“Here come a lot of the choir boys, Polly. How on earth did they know about it? Rehearsal is just over, and they’re all coming here.”

Polly hurried to the window. It was quite true. Coming innocently and interestedly up the broad walk from the road, were about fifteen of the older boys from St. Stephen’s.

“How did they ever find out,” she exclaimed, and then all at once, she caught sight of Crullers’ face. It was quite red, and a little bit frightened too.

“Polly, Polly,” she faltered, “I did it. I tacked one of the posters on a fence near the Parish House.”

“Double penalty,” said Ted, under her breath. “First for giving us away, second, for tacking notices on fences.”

“You cannot help it now, girls, anyway,” said Jean, smiling over the mishap. “And boys are not so terrible, anyway. I’ll manage them. They will probably buy up all the candy, and that will help out.”

So with dignity, and all cordial courtesy, the boys were received, and ushered into the music room, and while their eyes fairly danced with fun and mischief, they soon forgot all but the excitement of the sale, and became, as Jean had prophesied, the best and most spirited bidders.

The candy sold first, boxes of fudge, and nut creams the girls had made themselves, and nut glacés. Also, Sue did a thriving business at her stand near the door, in popcorn and peanuts. Ted stood on a chair, and was auctioneer, and she made a good one. Tactfully she chose things that she knew certain girls had set their hearts on, and ran rival bidders against each other. Even the cushions from her couch at the Hall went, and last of all, the girls put up the historic chafing dish of the old Hungry Six, the original club that had preceded the Vacation Club. It was bid in by one of the Senior girls, after a spirited fight for it, and brought three dollars and seventy-five cents.

The Mystery Boxes were bid in lively by the boys too. All were very much interested in the small Japanese boxes. They promised so much just by keeping closed tightly, as Polly said.

Mrs. Warner had prepared these herself, as her share in the auction, and as one by one they were opened, the contents made the next lot go at a still higher figure. Inside each were quaint Jap novelties, little fortunes and mottoes on crepe paper, animals made of bamboo shoots and wisps of tinted cotton, puzzles, tiny dishes, and trinkets, all from the far islands of cherry blossoms.

When it was finally over, and the last buyer had passed down the walk, the five girls gathered in the harvest at the little tea table, and counted it over jubilantly.

“Thirty-two dollars, and twenty cents,” announced Ruth triumphantly. “Isn’t that fine, girls?”

“Who bid in the kitten?” asked Sue.

“Crullers,” said Polly. “Fifty cents. Wish we had thought to raise a lot of kittens, and sell them. Maybe for really trained kittens that could do tricks, we could have charged a fancy price like they do for polo ponies, don’t you know, girls?”

“Pocahontas was trained,” insisted Sue. “I trained her myself. She could eat ice-cream out of a saucer without getting into it, and she could play ball. Crullers got a bargain.”

“Shall we have the strawberry fête a week from to-day?” asked Isabel. “That is my share, you know.”

“Won’t it cost a lot for berries and cream, Isabel?”

“All donated by the Lee family for the good of the cause. Father says it is worth a full spring crop to see me taking an interest in outdoor sports.”

“Instead of pomps and vanities?” queried Ted, dodging as a cushion hurtled past her.

“Be good, please, Ted. This is strictly business. I do think that each of the girls should bring a cake, anyway,—a very large cake—”

“How can I bring a cake when I am a resident pupil at Calvert, goose?” Ted demanded. “I shall bring store doughnuts.”

“I tell you, Ted—coax Miss Calvert to donate a lot of Annie May’s macaroon bars. They are delicious. I think cards will do for invitations to that, don’t you, girls? Isabel, you write better than the rest of us. You just write a nice little invitation announcement card—you know what kind I mean—and I’ll make out our social list.”

“Indeed, I’m not going to do that, Ruth,” protested Polly. “It costs too much in postage. I sent Stoney out to deliver the invitation to my birthday party. All persons under fifty were undesirable, I told grandfather.”

“Listen,” exclaimed Isabel suddenly. “I wonder if any one of you girls has thought of this. Mother was talking over summer dresses with Miss Gaskell, the dressmaker who sews for us fall and spring. I heard her saying something about this dress for me, and that one, and it gave me an idea. Of course, we girls won’t need much up there in the wilds, and I said one white dress would do, and cut out the fluffy-ruffly ones—”

“You never gave up the fluffy ones, Lady Vanitas!” cried Sue.

“Yes, I did, Sue,” Isabel said, quite seriously. “And when I told mother of my plan, she said she would help me. I asked if she would give me half of everything I gave up—”

“What is the market value of flesh pots, Polly?” asked Ted, teasingly.

“Just you try it yourself, Ted, and you’ll be surprised. I was. Mother says it will be twenty to thirty dollars to add to my summer outing. It’s worth while giving up things at that rate.”

“Isabel, you’re a wonder,” Polly laughed. “I’ll try that with grandfather to-night, and coax Aunty Welcome to tell just what it costs to dress me. Couldn’t we all wear khaki and gunny sacks?”

“What are gunny sacks, Polly?”

“I don’t know. I heard Stoney say once that all he wore till he was ten years old was a gunny sack, and I thought it must be awfully comfy. Say, Ruth, did you write to the railroads to find out about summer rates?”

“Miss Murray said she’d attend to that. Don’t forget that I will have a bunch to hand in to the treasury too, from teaching. And I’m also getting in an extra hour taking Jack Ellis out in a wheel chair, after his lessons.”

“If we get as far as the ranch, we’ll be all right,” Ted exclaimed. “If we haven’t enough to come home on, all our lonely friends and relatives will be glad to get us back at any cost.”

“But we’ll have enough—” began Ruth.

“Don’t trouble about it, girls,” Mrs. Warner spoke up, as they all gathered at the door for a last good-bye. “We are in hearty sympathy with you, especially since you have developed this independence. Every ten or fifteen dollars that you raise is a good help westward, and also strengthens your self-respect, and self-reliance. It is one of the happiest surprises in life when we suddenly find out we can swim alone.”

“Or fly from the home nest,” added Sue.

“Well, we’re trying hard to flutter,” Polly called back merrily, as they went down the walk. “It will be a wonderful flight—maybe.”

“But it’s the season for May bees,” answered Mrs. Warner, smiling. “Keep up your courage, and the good fight.”

CHAPTER VIII

WESTWARD, HO!

The days passed too slowly, it seemed to the girls, eager as they were to get started westward. What had seemed only one of Polly’s balloons, as Ruth called them, had developed into a very tangible possibility. As Ted said, when one is afraid of anything, you must not run. You must turn about, and hit it hard. Ted was a splendid smasher of windmills.

All Queen’s Ferry knew that five of Miss Calvert’s girls were to spend their vacation on a ranch out in Wyoming, but it took the strawberry festival, and Polly’s birthday party to make it understand likewise that they were earning their own way out there. Steadily, the sum in Ruth’s treasury mounted higher and higher. Mrs. Yates, the Senator’s wife, who had been so kind to them the previous year, offered her help at the birthday party, and it was gladly accepted. Polly was radiant as she stood beside her, receiving guests, and likewise birthday donations, and her eyes were brimful of fun as she handed back a five dollar bill to the Senator.

“You’re not telling the truth about your age, Senator Yates,” she said, rebukingly. “It’s only a cent a year.”

“We’ll count in something on the extra Sundays and holidays,” the Senator returned. “I’m always doubly glad to have a birthday on a Sunday or a holiday, and mine comes on the Fourth of July. Isn’t it worth ten cents extra and more too, to have the same date as your country?”

“Then I ought to pay more, Polly,” whispered Crullers, as the Senator went on. “My birthday is on Easter.”

“How can it be on Easter, goose, when that’s a movable feast?” laughed Polly. “Crullers, you old stupid dear!”

“I think, Polly, I can give you a little chance to make some money on your trip,” Mrs. Yates said, later. “I am anxious to buy some Indian novelties. Marbury has his den fixed up like a tepee this year, and he wants to make things for it, not pretty beadwork, or birch-bark ornaments, but the real things an Indian boy would naturally have in his tent. If you want to buy them on commission, that would help too. You must think of every possible way.”

“Indeed, we’re very glad to,” said Polly, heartily.

And they were too. After the first struggle was over, there was a literal charm in seeing the little treasury fund grow day by day, and in adding to it. It was astonishing how many urgent duties the Admiral discovered which needed to be performed.

“Upon my word, Polly, my books show up badly in this sunlight,” he would say. “I don’t like to trust Mandy in here, or Welcome. Now if you had the time, and felt like it, it would be worth a dollar to me to have those books all dusted, and straightened—a whole dollar.”

The books were dusted, and Polly pocketed the dollar proudly. This gave the rest a hint, and one day Miss Calvert found herself approached by four determined young persons, after class. They offered to clean the library thoroughly, they assured her they would take out all the books, dust them, wash the glass doors, straighten everything up right, send the rug down to old Jim, the gardener, to be beaten, and make the whole room look like new.

“Bless my heart, girls,” exclaimed Miss Calvert, laughing in spite of her dignity. “How did you ever guess that the cleaning of the library is my one bête noire of the springtime? I will give you each a dollar if you can do it right.”

It was accomplished, and the four dollars added to the “main pile,” as Ruth called the growing hoard.

Miss Murray heard from the railroads, and it was a more encouraging outlook than she had hoped for. After the end of May, the summer rates went into force, she found, to encourage a western exodus of “teachers, poets, homeseekers, invalids, and all of summer’s sweethearts,” as Polly said later. The round trip tickets from Washington out to Deercroft, Wyoming, would be $67.50 apiece.

“And mother writes that she will board you at four dollars a head weekly, and at that figure you must do your own laundry, and take care of your own shack. How’s that, girls?”

“It seems too little,” Ruth answered, with her quick judgment on things material.

“But it is not, Ruth. Board at five dollars can be had up where we are and this is only one less. That will be twenty a week for all five.”

“We plan to stay a month,” Polly interrupted. “Do you think we can manage it, Miss Murray?”

“How much is there in the treasury so far, Ruth?”

Ruth figured hastily.

“About two hundred and forty-six dollars, I think. Polly handed in thirty-seven dollars from the birthday fête, and the auction brought thirty-two, and Isabel made eighteen out of her strawberry festival, besides what we had, and my money that isn’t all earned yet, you know.”

“It shows what you can do if you try,” Ted remarked, loftily.

“Yes, and that doesn’t include Isabel’s commission on summer clothes from parents,” Polly added. “I think we can make it all up in time. And if we are truly vacation seekers, we won’t bother over luxuries. I think we could even fix up lunches of canned goods that would carry us over the trip.”

“What about berths, Miss Murray?” asked Isabel, somewhat plaintively. “Don’t they cost a good deal?”

“Yes, they certainly do. Five dollars, I think, it is, out to Chicago, and we have one night on the road after that.”

“I shall not go to bed at all,” declared Ted. “I never like to sleep on the train anyhow. I like to watch for lights in the dark out of the car window.”

But Ruth, who had forgotten about the berth problem, glanced up at Miss Murray in despair.

“It might be economy in the long run, girls, to take a stateroom—”

“We couldn’t possibly afford such luxuries, Miss Murray,” Polly said, flatly. “Those things are for the nobility, not for hard-working vacation seekers like us. We will take the ‘homeseekers special’ out from Chicago, probably.”

“What’s that, Polly?” asked Sue, suspiciously.

“It’s a train for people who are in real earnest, and want to go some place, and don’t care how they go as long as they get there,” pronounced Polly, gravely.

“I’m in that class,” Ted put in, blithely. “Let’s all be jolly good travelers, girls, and start in ‘roughing it’ from this end. Why, we’d have a good time even if we went on a plank through the air.”

“I don’t quite approve of that picture, Ted,” laughed Miss Murray. “I think we’ll go by the regular route. How does it seem to you, girls, to be counting the pennies and dollars?”

“Good discipline,” Polly said, nodding her head emphatically.

It surely was. Even the Admiral, who had rather regarded the western trip as one of Polly’s air castles, was forced to admit that she was a good general. By the time school closed in June, there was $336.00 in the treasury, and the girls had earned it all, practically, themselves. What they had not earned, they had acquired through self-denial, giving up pretty summer gowns, and hats, and “accessories,” as Isabel said, rather mournfully—“specially those ‘accessories.’”

“But Polly, you’re giving us only these rough, straw outing sailors, and the little caps,” Sue protested. “What shall we wear to church?”

Jean smiled at them over the top of her book. They were in the garden at the Hall during noontime.

“The nearest church to us is thirty-five miles,” she told them. “If we are very fortunate, we may have service once in a while from the missionary bishop, or some of his priests, but usually father reads it Sunday mornings for us all, and we like to hold it out of doors. You won’t miss your hats, girls.”

“How you must love your father, Miss Murray,” Polly said later, when they were alone. “I always hear you speak of him as though you—oh, I don’t know,—as though you believed he always did the right thing. He must be very nice.”

“He is splendid,” said Jean, simply. “At least we think so. And so is mother. But you girls will love Captain Sandy, Miss Diantha’s husband.”

“Why?” asked Polly.

“Wait until you visit the Alameda ranch, and then you’ll know why. Nobody can explain it.”

Miss Calvert knew where they were going, and Polly wondered and wondered why she never spoke of it, never talked about her sister, or sent messages out to her. But she did not ask questions, much as she longed to.

Finally, after eight strenuous and industrious weeks, school closed, and they could turn with free hearts to the journey. Each girl had followed Miss Murray’s advice, and bought a pair of stout, high boots for rugged walking and climbing, and a short khaki skirt, buttoning on the side, with pockets, and bloomers of the same material.

“These are what all the girl-scouts wear, with shirtwaists, and belts,” Jean told them. “And from now on that is what you must be, girl-scouts and ranchers.”

Each girl took a suit-case, and Polly was rigid in her inspection rules on the contents. Unnecessary articles were strictly tabooed. Underwear, kimonos, one best dress apiece, toilet articles, a few favorite books, and that was about all she permitted them.

“Land, I should suttinly say you chilluns were going to rough it,” said Aunty Welcome, indignantly, as she looked over Polly’s outfit. “What you-all gwine to do if a big snake gets you by yo’ hind heel?”

“Dance, Aunty,” Polly answered, merrily. “I’m sure we’d dance. Maybe that’s how the Snake Dance first started. Don’t you wish you were going along with us?”

“Mis’ Polly chile, I declar’, I wouldn’t go wanderin’ an’ a-mousin’ ’round de face ob de earth like dat, not for de world. But it makes mah ole heart ache when I think how mah lamb’s going away for de first time in her natural life from her ole mammy.”

“Don’t you cry, dear,” Polly begged, putting her arms around Aunty’s neck in a vigorous hug of sympathy. “I’ll be so careful, and I’ll remember everything—not to climb trees, not to hunt bears, not to get too friendly with Indians, not to—”

“Go ’long, you’s jest laughing now. Ah ain’t got a mite ob confidency in yo’. Go ’long, chile.”

The night before they left Queen’s Ferry, Polly was feeling subdued, as in fact she always did, after the fight was won on anything she started. It was a beautifully clear June night. She stepped out on the broad veranda, and hesitated. The high, white pillars seemed so tall and strange in the bright moonlight, and the shadows seemed almost like living things, so black and clearly outlined they lay all about. Out in the garden, humming birds darted about the dewy flowers. She could catch the delicate whirr of their wings. Tan, the Admiral’s big tawny-haired setter, lay stretched out before the door, asleep. She had to step over him on her way out to the Admiral’s chair.

“The world just seems all moonshine and roses to-night, grandfather dear,” she said, sitting down on the cushioned seat that swung from two heavy chains. “Aren’t they sweet?”

“Mighty sweet,” agreed the Admiral. “When you are in Wyoming, will you think of your poor, lonely old grandfather sitting here by himself?”

“In peace and quiet, with nobody to bother him?” Polly finished up. “Yes, sir, I will. And I’ll miss you so much.”

The Admiral leaned forward, his hand on her brown braids.

“Fifteen in November, isn’t that right? Your aunts seem to think Glenwood’s no place for you, Polly, with an old codger like myself. Betty wrote in to-day, and declared if I did not let you live under her wing, or one of the other aunts’, I must get a governess for you. What do you think of that?”

Polly regarded him thoughtfully.

“They don’t understand how happy we are, do they, dear?” she said softly. “We never bother each other, do we? And I mind every word you say—”

“Yes, you do,” interposed the Admiral, gruffly. “You’d persuade a Nantucket skipper that he was off his course.”

“But wouldn’t you miss me terribly if I ever had to leave Glenwood?” Polly rested her head against his knee, her lips pressed to the dear old hand that had never shown her anything save kindness and sympathy in all her life.

“Miss you? I wouldn’t stay here without you, child,” protested the Admiral. “Do you think that Glenwood is preserved for a worn out, retired old salt like myself? It is only a garden spot for the rearing of my rose, Polly; remember that. Now, to bed with you, or Welcome will scold me for keeping you out too late. If you should get into any trouble, or need a relief expedition, remember it is always here ready to start West.”

Polly rose, and hesitated a minute, as Aunty Welcome called her indoors. Then she said softly:

“I sometimes think that I am the luckiest girl in the world.”

“Why?” asked the old Admiral, his eyes twinkling with merriment. “Because you are Polly Page?”

“No, not that, dear,” replied Polly, seriously. “Because I am Polly Page’s grandfather’s granddaughter.”

And before the Admiral could reply to that parting shot, she had run up to bed, laughing.

CHAPTER IX

THE HOMESEEKERS’ SPECIAL

When the 8:35 local for Washington left Queen’s Ferry, the morning of the tenth of July, it carried Miss Murray and her five girl charges, westward bound. The Admiral went down to the station to see them off, together with Mrs. Warner, and Mrs. Lee.

“Don’t worry about them one bit, please,” Jean said, as she clasped each of the mothers’ hands. “It is not a wild-west affair at all. Ours is a dear, home ranch, and we will keep the girls out of any trouble.”

“I won’t worry as soon as I am sure you are really there,” Mrs. Lee replied, “but I am afraid the trip will be wearisome without any special privileges.”

“Never mind about special privileges for this club,” Polly declared as she settled down in the car seat finally. “We’ll have the best time yet, making believe we are homeseekers and land-tourists, won’t we, girls?”

“You’re crowing at the wrong end of the journey, Polly,” Jean warned, but it surely seemed, from the first, as if the trip promised well for all of them.

At Washington, they waited in the great, marble depot for the train to be made up, and the girls found plenty to occupy the time. The very first outlay in cash was for post-cards. Polly bought some even for Aunty and Mandy and old Uncle Peter.

But it was not until they found themselves fairly settled on the train for Chicago, and actually moving west, that they felt themselves true travelers. As Ruth declared, it was a proud moment when the Polly Page Ranch Club paid its own way, with money it had earned through its own efforts. However, the fares lowered their principal so much that they finally had decided to forego sleepers.

“Real summer tourists never take sleepers; not if they can get out of it,” Ted said, happily, as she bolstered her suit-case up on a rack in what they called the Tourists’ Special. Jean had the brakeman turn the seats over, so that they could all sit together. “I think I’d be nervous with a sleeper berth over my head, wouldn’t you, Polly?”

Polly laughed.

“Surely would.” She looked about her at all the different faces. There were many people with children in this day coach, and they looked tired and worn out even before the journey had fairly begun. “Like wilted flowers,” Ruth said.

Polly watched the group across the aisle as long as she could stand it. The mother was weary and flustered, with two toddlers bumping into everything, and a baby crying in her arms.

“Can’t we amuse the twins?” she asked, suddenly.

“Oh, yes, if you would, thanks,” exclaimed the mother, gratefully. “Baby is teething, and is fretful, and she won’t go to sleep.”

“How did you know they were twins?” asked Ted, when she helped Polly trot them down to the wash-room to cool their hot little faces.

“They just looked that way,” Polly said cheerfully. “Sue, why don’t you get that old lady a drink of water from the cooler? She’s tried twice to go, and she can’t walk alone with the train jolting.”

Jean said nothing, but she noticed everything behind her new book. This trip in the day coach was helping the girls in a way they hardly realized as yet. On all sides of them were opportunities for lending help to people less fortunate than themselves, and they responded readily, and far more willingly than she had even dared to hope. In a way, she had looked forward to the trip under these conditions as a test for the girls, accustomed as they were to home comforts and utter lack of responsibility. Not even Isabel complained, as the day wore on.

When dinner time arrived, they secured two small tables from the porter in the forward parlor cars, for a quarter tip, and made the first raid on their lunch baskets and boxes. These had been planned directly under Jean’s supervision. The perishable things were to be disposed of the first day, and the canned goods saved over for the rest of the journey.

In the beginning, space economy had been the first consideration, but the lunches had been made very inviting nevertheless.

“It is just as easy to have a lunch look nice as not,” Jean had said, and these were surely a success, for they were both tempting and attractive. All sandwiches were wrapped in waxed tissue paper. Jars of pimento cheese, and olives were opened handily, and there were plenty of Saratoga chips to help out, and some of Aunty Welcome’s famous hermits.

“We’ll keep the fruit until breakfast,” said Miss Murray. “And we’ll probably come to some station where we can buy chocolate, or malted milk. It’s more fun than a dining car, isn’t it?”

“It’s like starting in to camp out, even now,” Polly declared. “And we’ve all got our traveling duties mapped out, too. I’m to look after the twins, and Sue has charge of the old lady. Isabel has been loaning her fan and some magazines to a young girl who is going West for her health. She sits in the last seat on our side, Miss Murray; you can just see her hair as she leans back. How much more entertaining everything is when you forget about yourself, and feel interested in what the rest of the world is doing?”

“Are you just finding that out, Polly?” Jean asked, her gray eyes full of amusement at Polly’s earnestness. “That is only the sweet old motto of ‘noblesse oblige,’ set to modern music. We learn it with our riding out home.”

“Oh, that makes me think of something,” Ted broke in. “Will there be enough ponies for all of us girls, Miss Murray? I mean for us to ride on.”

“I think there surely will be. Father has about six, besides the work horses, and we each have our own pet pony besides. The boys broke theirs in, I know. In Colorado they use the burros for mountain climbing, but our roads are not so rough, at least up around Deercroft. As you travel westward through the Big Horn country, it is very rocky and wild.”

“Doesn’t it seem queer to think we are really on the way there, girls?” Sue sighed, contentedly. “I’m not worried over anything in the world just at this minute except how on earth we are all to sleep on these seats.”

“Six dollars for three berths to-night, and all double up?” Isabel suggested reflectively.

“Now, never mind glancing over the flesh pots of Egypt, Lady Vanitas,” Ruth retorted, placidly. “We will hand that same porter some more quarters, and get pillows and blankets from his private cupboard—”

“Locker,” interrupted Isabel. “I heard him call it that.”

“That is a good plan, Ruth; I’d never thought of it,” Polly exclaimed. “We haven’t six dollars to spend on berths, goose. We’re self-supporting globe trotters now.”

When bedtime came, they watched the preparations of others interestedly. Polly helped put the twins to bed on seats, and even hushed the baby, while the mother got a chance to go and bathe her warm, dusty face. The passengers were settling themselves as comfortably as they could for the night, and good-hearted Ted slipped her pillow to the girl who had been ill.

“I can double up my coat and make a pillow of it,” she explained, when Sue discovered what she had done.

It was not nearly so uncomfortable as they had anticipated. As Polly announced sleepily, “Nothing is ever so bad as you expected it to be, anyway.” They had taken Jean’s advice, and worn pongee silk waists, that hardly showed any creases. Before they knew it, the motion of the train had lulled them all into good healthful slumber.

Jean stayed awake longer than the girls, thinking of the coming vacation on the ranch, and what it would mean to them. What a surprise it would be to Mrs. “Sandy,” when they all rode over to the Alameda ranch to call; girls from her own home town, and Calvert Hall, Virginia. She wondered what Peggie would think of Polly’s merry club—shy, low-voiced Peggie, who was shy even with her own family, and only seemed to feel at ease with dumb animals. Most of all, she thought of her mother, quiet, and gentle like Peggie, but always the one who saw farthest ahead down the trail, as Captain Sandy said. She had assented willingly to the coming of the girls. Practically, it would help Jean, she knew, to have them with her, and financially it would also benefit the ranch where every dollar seemed like five, with the growing brood of hearty youngsters, and never-ending expenses.

“And it will do the poor lassies a deal of good, too, Jeanie,” she had written East, “just to be seeing how people manage to live happily and wholesomely away out here in the hill country. It is not best always to sit on a cushion, and sew a fine seam, and feed upon strawberries, sugar and cream. How you always wanted to be Curly Locks when you were a bairnie, though. And you may be yet. But even if you should you will make a better mother and wife, dear, for having lived here at the Crossbar year after year. Bring your Virginia roses out West here, and we’ll show them prairie flowers, and mountain wild-pinks that God’s hand tends as lovingly as he does his roses.

“I kiss you good-night, daughter.

“Mother.”

Sometimes, when Jean read over those home letters, it made her more tender towards Polly, brought up between the Admiral’s happy indulgence and Aunty Welcome’s frantic admonitions. She looked forward with interest and some curiosity to watching the effect of life at the Crossbar on all of the girls, but mostly on Polly herself.

CHAPTER X

TOURIST NEIGHBORS

The crying of the baby across the aisle awakened Polly at dawn the next morning. At first she could hardly think where she was, with the motion of the train still lulling her, and her body somewhat cramped from the night’s reclining on the seat.

The other girls were still sleeping, but she met Jean coming from the wash-room.

“I found out from the conductor that we stop at Fort Wayne long enough to get some cocoa and fresh fruit, if you girls want it,” Jean told her. “We can get more in Chicago, when we change cars.”

By the time the train pulled into the Fort Wayne depot, the girls were dressed and “freshened up,” as Ruth said, and had even helped to “freshen up” the twins.

“Are you going ’way out to Chicago, too?” asked Sue, of the mother.

“We’re bound farther than that,” she smiled back tiredly. “We’re homesteaders. My husband is to meet us at Omaha. His health broke down two years ago at the wood-pulp mills down in Virginia, so he went West, and took up a claim in Wyoming, and he’s got along so well. First he stayed out six months, then came back home for the winter, and his brother worked the claim. Then he went back in April. That’s a year ago. He hasn’t even seen the baby yet, and she’s so smart! She’s got five teeth, and can stand all by herself if you just steady her a little bit.”

“My, won’t he be surprised,” Sue said, happily. “We’re going to Wyoming too, just for a vacation. We go as far as Deercroft.”

“That’s northeast, isn’t it? Our place is farther along towards Cody. Seems good to talk to somebody. I haven’t seen a soul I knew since we left Washington. I’ve enjoyed you girls being so close to me. I like to hear you all laughing.”

“Don’t you know any one out West here?” Polly leaned forward to say.

“Nobody except my husband and his brother Joe.”

“Aren’t women terribly brave people, Miss Murray?” Ruth said softly, over in the far seat. “Think of her making this long trip just because it’s the best thing to do for her husband.”

Jean smiled, and there was a dreamy look in her eyes, as she remembered tales her own mother had told of the women who followed the long trail West for love and duty.

“For better, for worse, Ruth,” she quoted, gently.

“Like Miss Diantha,” Ruth replied.

“Mrs. Sandy, you mean. Nobody ever calls her Miss Diantha now.”

“Don’t you suppose it would please her if we did? Maybe she still loves Queen’s Ferry and the old Hall, Miss Murray.”

“But she loves ‘Sandy’ better, Ruth.”

“Do you know,” interrupted Isabel suddenly. “I don’t think this scenery is so very different from ours.”

“I do,” Ted said flatly. “There are no blue mountain lines banked up against the sky, and the earth looks kind of yellow. And where it is dry it seems very, very dry, and where it is swampy, it is awfully swampy. I never saw such swampy looking swamp as we passed going through these Indiana woods.”

“Wait until we find ourselves out in the prairie lands, and the corn fields rise around for miles and miles, and the wheat looks like a golden ocean.”

“When will we be there, Miss Murray?”

“When you open your eyes to-morrow morning, and cross Iowa and Nebraska. We’re cutting across Indiana now, and will reach Chicago about eleven-twenty.”

“It all seems like a dream,” Polly exclaimed. “Isn’t it queer, the feeling you have when things come true that you’ve always hoped might? I love to talk to Mrs. Timony—that’s the mother of the twins, you know.”

“We didn’t know. Thank you, Polly,” murmured Sue. “Doesn’t it just suit the twins? What are their names? I’ve been calling them Sis and Buddy ever since we left Washington.”

“Name’s Lafayette,” explained the boy twin, soberly. “Her name’s Columbia,” pointing a moist forefinger at his sister.

“They sort of went together,” Mrs. Timony said, peacefully. “But we do call them Sis and Buddy ’most all the time. The baby’s name’s just Faith.”

“I like that,” Ruth put in gravely. “I think people should be careful how they name children. Suppose one of the twins got on a track, and you wanted to call it away quickly. How could you say, ‘Come, Lafayette, Lafayette, Lafayette!’ It would be run over before any one could get the name all out. A short name is much better.”

“Maybe, but it’s something to have a name to live up to,” answered little Mrs. Timony, smiling restfully.

“She won’t mind living out on a new three hundred and sixty acre claim,” Miss Murray said, as they watched the little mother stroll down the aisle, when the train halted at a station. “She will take a world of comfort out of sentiment, girls. She will forget entirely the bother little Buddy is, as she thinks what sort of a State Senator he’ll be when he grows up. It’s beautiful to be built like that.”

Isabel had struck up a pleasant friendship with the invalid girl, who was bound for Colorado, and was to change cars at Omaha. Isabel promised to help her with her two suit-cases, when they reached Chicago, and Sue said she would carry Isabel’s in exchange.

“Why do the little pools of water, and even the brooks, look blue and purple along the edges?” asked Ted, who spent most of the time looking out of the window. “They look like a gas flame.”

“We are getting into the gas country, Ted,” Jean said. “Gas and oil wells stretch all along this northern edge of Indiana and Illinois. If it were night, you would see the huge oil torches blazing here and there in the darkness like the old Roman flambeaux. Wait till you see the Big Sea Water to the north in a little while.”

“Lake Michigan?” Sue asked, eagerly. “That was what Hiawatha’s people called it, wasn’t it? Oh, Polly, that makes me think, are you sure you can buy those Indian baskets and things for Mrs. Yates up where we are going?”

“Probably not around us,” Jean replied, when Polly had explained. “We have no near-by Indian villages. You know that is all done away with now, girls. You are coming to the new West. But Sally Lost Moon will know about it. She is our cook at the ranch, and is an old Shoshone squaw. Our Wyoming tribes are not as artistic as the Adirondack Indians and the Navajos, but we may find some good bead work. It was nice of her to offer, was it not, girls?”

“She is interested in us because she used to be a Calvert girl herself.”

“But, Polly,” protested Ted, suddenly, “she must be about forty. Maybe she knew Miss Diantha Calvert.”

Jean laughed.

“You girls will persist in weaving a romance and a mystery about Mrs. Sandy, and I honestly think the only trouble is her marrying a westerner against her sister’s wishes.”

“There’s more than that,” Polly declared, over the curly tousled hair of Columbia. “I’m going to find out.”

“You won’t from Mrs. Sandy,” Jean said. “She’s a Calvert, you must remember, and they never tell secrets.”

“But I’ll find out from Mr. Sandy himself,” Polly returned buoyantly.

Chicago was reached and passed almost before the girls realized it. There was the first vivid flash of the blue waters of Lake Michigan, and its flat, rockless beaches, with bunches of willow and sand-cherry trees here and there, and patches of the tall, sharp-pointed sword grass. Then they slipped into the city, and there came the rush and jostle of crowds at the changing of trains. Isabel helped her invalid girl, and Polly and Ruth were with Mrs. Timony and the babies, and Sue and Ted helped the excited old lady who wasn’t sure whether her son Dan lived at Keokuk or Osceola.

“It must be Osceola,” declared Sue, finally, “because Keokuk’s the other way.”

“Ain’t any business a-livin’ in any such outlandish place anyhow,” declared Dan’s mother, stoutly, as she fanned herself, and smelled at a bottle of lavender salts. “And he should have met me here too. He never did have any consideration for his mother.”

“Didn’t you say you were going out to live with him?” asked Ted. “Doesn’t that prove he loves his mother?”

“Well, mebbe it does. Danny’s sort of pindling in small matters, and rises to the heights in others. You can depend on him. I guess it was Osceola, after all. He wrote it down for me. It’s in that handbag—no, ’tain’t. It’s in that basket, or—, wait, here it is right in my pocketbook. Osceola. Kind of a pretty name, ain’t it, now?”

“Girls, you must make haste,” called Miss Murray, and they hurried the old lady on her journey, while all she did was talk about Danny at Osceola, and alternately blame and praise him.

“It looks as if all Illinois were turned into corn and wheat fields,” said Polly, that afternoon, after miles and miles of the tender green, and beautiful, feathery corn tassels had been passed. “There’s so much of the same thing on one place out West here, isn’t there, Miss Murray?”

“Now, girls, isn’t that just like Polly!” laughed Jean.

“But I mean it. Down in Virginia the land is in patches. A corn field here, over there rye, and then a break of woodland. But out here it’s all the same thing for miles and miles.”

“Polly Page,” exclaimed Ted suddenly, coming back from the water cooler at the end of the car, “I’ve just been talking to the conductor, and he says that we took on three coaches of real homeseekers in Chicago. I didn’t know that. I’d love to see them.”

“There’s nothing to see, Ted, dear,” Jean told her. “If we could look in the hearts and read the stories there, it would be worth while, but this way you’d only see a lot of ordinary travelers.”

“Aren’t they immigrants?”

“Immigrants? Ted! How much you girls have to learn. I don’t know how I can tell it to you in a few words, but if you had lived out in a large, new, unsettled State, you would know that the hope of its future lies in its blessed homeseekers. Where do they come from? Where don’t they, you mean, Polly. They are people who really need a home, who love the open, and the new land, and the chance of making good, as we say out West here. It is hard for you who have lived in the old States to get that point of view, but there lives to-day in the hearts and souls of our western homeseekers the essence of the old pioneer spirit.”

“Are they farmers?” asked Ruth practically.

“Farmers! Oh, Ruth, listen. Father and Arch and myself were at the great land-drawing in South Dakota, several years ago, and I wish you could have seen the ‘nesters’ then. A little girl like my sister Peggie drew the numbers, and I know a young girl got the best of the lot. Up in our section even, there is one school-teacher from New York State, who is making a success out of her homestead. Her mother and two younger sisters are with her. Right next to her is old Rattlesnake Bill Perkins. He used to be a scout, and then a trapper, in the old days. Now, he has settled down, and has a sugar-beet farm, and is raising sheep too.”

“Seems to me as if out West here, you never stop to fret,” Polly exclaimed. “When one thing changes, you just change too.”

“We have to, or be left behind in the race,” said Jean simply. “But we’re all of us pretty wide awake, Polly. We have not had time to sleep as much as you do when in the Old Dominion.”

It was the next day when they began to see hills, and even before the gray and violet shadows along the western horizon took shape, the train turned into the rolling prairie land. For miles there was not a single tree; nothing but the limitless, billowy sea of sunburnt yellow grass, with now and then a bleaching skull. Sometimes, they would pass a grazing herd, with a solitary figure on horseback. If it happened to be a boy, he would rise in the stirrups, and let out a whoop of welcome at the train as it flashed by.

The towns seemed like villages, so small were the houses, and all of wood, and brightly painted. “Like Noah’s Ark towns,” Ted said, laughingly. Even the trees looked new and precise, set out along the newly paved streets. But finally, the shadows that trailed low like clouds took form, and here and there a cone separated itself from the mass, only to be lost again in the blue distances.

Mr. Timony joined his family at Omaha. He was a tall, lean, sunburnt looking man, with happy eyes, and a habit of rubbing his bare chin. The baby seemed to know her father by instinct, and Mrs. Timony was like a busy mother robin, showing off her brood.

The invalid girl got off at Omaha, to change for the Colorado line, and Isabel made her promise to let them know how she progressed. At Osceola, Sue and Ted helped their charge off the train with all her bundles and satchels, and she landed plump into Danny’s arms. Danny turned out to be about forty, and weighed over two hundred pounds.

“Oh, Miss Murray, aren’t real people splendid?” Ted said, finally. “I think they’re more account than anything else. They’re books and music and everything, all at once. I’ve had so much fun on this trip, just getting acquainted, and being interested.”

“Have you, Ted?” Jean smiled. “That’s because you have found out what my mother calls the brotherhood of common folks. She says that when life is all sifted down, we’re only a lot of little children holding hands, and we must hold tight, or the next one to us falls down.”

“An endless chain of kindness,” Ruth added.

The lamps in the tourist car were being lighted. It was their last night on the train. Outside, the country looked bare and scorched. Ted stared out thoughtfully. And Polly began to sing softly under her breath.

“Guide me, oh, thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land,
I am weak, but thou art mighty,
Hold me in thy powerful hand.”

“That should be the homeseekers’ hymn, I think,” said Isabel; “that, and ‘Lead, Kindly Light.’”

“I like ‘Onward, Christian Soldiers’ better,” said Ted. “It must take a lot of courage and hope to come out here and start all over again.”

“Faith, most of all, Ted,” Jean put in. “Mother says she used up pecks of mustard seed before she caught sight of the promise fulfilled. That’s a parable, so don’t look puzzled, Sue. But to those who really love it and believe in it, our new West is more than a promised land. It is like a great, brooding motherland, I think.”

“The twins are crying,” broke in Polly. “Let’s put them to sleep, girls. It’s our last chance. Come on, Buddy boy.”

Buddy trotted across the aisle sleepily, and Ruth held out her arms to Columbia.

“That’s real neighborly, thanks,” said Mr. Timony, with his slow, surprised smile, and he settled back for a quiet chat with the baby’s mother.

“It’s fun being neighborly, isn’t it, Polly?” Ruth said under her breath. Polly only looked her answer. She had had more fun being neighborly on this trip West as a second-class tourist than ever before. She wondered what Aunty Welcome and the Admiral would say if they could have seen her now.

CHAPTER XI

THE RIDE TO THE RANCH

“We reach Deercroft at four forty-five,” Jean had said; but long before the scheduled time, suit-cases were strapped and waiting, and hats pinned in place, while the girls watched from the open windows eagerly, as the train swung out over the broad stretches of land.

“Who was it said, ‘My heart loves wide horizons’?” Ruth asked once. “They’re out here, aren’t they, Miss Murray? I just think we’ve caught up with one range of hills, and we make a turn and find a lot more waiting for us.”

Now, it was long, swinging miles of rolling land without a living thing in sight; then suddenly they would pass a hill-slope covered with masses of sheep, yellow and gray like time-worn rocks, and as motionless, apparently. Then again, the train would dip into a bit of sparse woodland, unlike the forests back in Virginia. As Polly said, the trees out here all looked lonesome.

“They don’t seem to be friendly, or even related to each other. Each has its own little patch of earth, and stands alone.”

“I think they are all settlers,” Ruth declared.

“How far must we travel after we reach Deercroft?” asked Ted. Jean smiled and shook her head.

“Miles, and miles, Ted. We won’t be home before ten anyway, and perhaps it will be later. The roads are dry and good, and father or Don will meet us with the surrey, or maybe with two teams. It’s moonlight, too. You don’t know how near the sky seems out here in Wyoming; the night sky, I mean, when the moon shines, and you are driving. Here we are.” She leaned forward suddenly, her gray eyes alight with happiness and expectancy. The train was approaching Deercroft. Lying in the valley below them was the little town. It looked small and barren, somehow, to the girls, accustomed as they were to the Virginia towns with their backgrounds of abundant verdure and foliage. But there was little time for any fixed impression. Before they fully realized that the journey was at an end, they were standing on the platform, and the westbound train was giving out its final call as it slipped through the hill break on its way to far Vancouver.

Jean marshaled her forces and the suit-cases, but before she had a chance to look around, there was a rush of somebody right into the midst of the little group, somebody who fairly flung herself on Jean, and held her in a royal bear hug.

“Jeanie, Jeanie, you dear old sis. Father and Don are here too. They had to hold the ponies. When the train came through the cut, they danced right up in the air,” she explained, too excited to be explicit.

“Girls, this is Peggie,” Jean said, as soon as she could get in a word. “Polly, Sue, Ruth, Isabel, and Ted, Peggie. You must pick them out for yourself, and get acquainted.”

“I’m glad to see you,” Peggie said, smiling rather shyly at the girls. She seemed like Jean at first sight, with her gray eyes, and quick smile, but her hair was short and curly and brown. “Jeanie’s stopping to say hello to Jim Handy, the station agent,” she added presently. “Let’s go to father.” She led the way around to the far side of the small pine depot, where two teams waited with a couple of ponies to each.

“These are Jeanie’s girl friends, father,” she said, happily. “Polly and Sue and Ruth and Ted and Isabel.”

“How could you remember our names so soon?” Ted asked impulsively.

“I’ve known them for a long time from Jean’s letters. I know the names, but I can’t fit them right yet.”

This made them all laugh, and Mr. Murray beamed down on the little group with a broad smile of welcome. He was tall and broad-shouldered, with a lean, tanned face, and eyes that twinkled out at the world from under shaggy brows.

“We’re mighty pleased to see you up in this corner of the land,” he said, heartily. “Where’s Jeanie, Peg? Whoa, there, Clip. Don, lad, put the suit-cases under the seats.”

“They’re both of them talking to the boys with Jim, father,” Peggie declared. “Jean’s holding a reception of honor.”

“She always does,” replied her father comfortably, lifting in the baggage himself. “She has the ‘come hither’ in her eye. Like this lass.” He smiled down on Polly’s eager, upturned face. “You needn’t blush over it, either, for it’s nothing one can be acquiring, nor can one say ‘shall one have it, or not.’ It’s born in some. Where I came from, in the north isles, they call it the kiss o’ the sun. Don, will you be coming soon?”

“He’s shy of the girls, maybe,” Peggie said merrily.

But just then Jean and Don, her youngest brother, came towards them. He was about fifteen, this tall, overgrown brother of hers, with a boyish, tanned face, and bright blue eyes. And Jean, knowing how embarrassed he was before this group of smiling Eastern girls, introduced him with a general motion of her hand.

“Girls, this is Don.”

“Are you all dressed warmly enough for the drive?” asked Mr. Murray. “There are blankets in the back of the wagons if we need them. It gets pretty cool as we go higher into the hills after dark. Your mother put in a lot of stuff to eat, Jeanie. She thought maybe you’d all be starved out by the time you got here. I had hard work keeping it for you, though. We left home about eight this morning, and Don and Peg almost finished it.”

“Don’t you believe him, Jeanie,” Peggie protested. “We had our own lunch.”

“Wasn’t it thoughtful and dear of mother to remember lunch?” Jean said. “Indeed, we will enjoy it. I am the only one who brought a trunk along, father. Can we take that with us, now?”

“I’m thinking we’ll leave it for Archie to bring up with him. He’ll be home day after to-morrow. We’ve got all we can manage to-night for the horses. Jeanie, you climb up beside Don, and I’ll take Peggie with me. Let three of the young ladies go with you, and we’ll take a couple and the suit-cases. Look after those groceries at your feet, Jeanie, or the mother’ll be having something to say to you if you spill out her sugar and oats.”

Laughing and calling to each other, the girls finally were packed away safely in the two wagons, and away they went, the ponies shaking their heads, and “sneezing,” as Peggie said, as they cut out of town into the open country.

“We have seventeen miles ahead of us,” Jean said. “Better take off your hats, and settle down to enjoy the drive.”

The girls took the suggestion, and, bareheaded, let the soft night breeze blow in their faces. Deercroft lay in the valley, and the road northward climbed the hills. Jean was busy talking to Don, not with him, but at him, as Polly said afterwards. Nobody ever really talked with Don, for he had nothing to say; but he was a splendid listener, and would smile, and nod his head, until you felt that he agreed with you perfectly. It was easy to see what close friends the two were. Polly, Sue and Ted were in the same wagon with them, so they could laugh and listen too.

“How fast the ponies go,” said Ruth, in the forward team.

“They know they’re homeward bound,” Mr. Murray returned. “Wait till you see them with Archie’s hand on them. He’s broken in nearly all of them. I suppose you’ll be riding, before many days. You will if you’re like our girls. Has Jeanie told you of the day she rode from Pegtop Mountain down to the ranch to give the alarm? No? I’ll wager not. She isn’t the kind to go about telling of her doings, and praising herself. Pegtop lies around yon knuckle.” He pointed with the whip at a jut of hillside ahead. “You’ll see it when we turn eastward again. The sheep grazed on that upper range those days, and we have no forest rangers up in our corner of the state. If there’s trouble in the hills, we get out and do our own fighting. This day in September, I know, it was dry as codfish, in the hills. The grass was burnt low, and every twig ready for the snapping. Somehow Pegtop caught fire on its southern slope, midway up where the spruces commence to fringe it. And around on its other side I had eight hundred or so sheep, and only one herder to the lot. Jeanie was a lass of fifteen then, about like this young lady,” pointing to Isabel. “The boys were helping me down in the valley, and she started out for a ride over Pegtop, and found the fire creeping through the brush. Have you ever seen one? No? First there’s the smell of it, and you can’t seem to find out where it belongs. Then you see the thin white streaks of smoke curl up and settle in a cloud above the spot, and you don’t waste time then.”

“But, what could you do way out here without anything to fight fire with, Mr. Murray?” asked Isabel.

“Do, lass? We did what we could, and no one can do more. Jeanie came riding back. You should have seen her, riding astride and laying over the pony’s neck like a slip of an Indian boy. Neil and myself went back when we heard her news.”

“To stop the fire?” asked Ruth.

He shook his head.

“To save the sheep, lass. We had no time to stop the fire. We rode straight around the crag there, and up to the hill range where the sheep were, then drove them down into the coulee, the cut in the hills, mind, and so to the valley.”

“And the fire just burned until it stopped of itself?” asked Ruth, again. “Think of all the young trees, and everything.”

“Ay, and we do think too, about it,” smiled back the old rancher, grimly. “My second lad, Archie, will be a ranger, some day. He’s swift after that sort of thing. Jean’s glad too. She’s like her mother. I can see my day’s work before me, and do it, but Mrs. Murray and Jeanie look out to the hill views, I’m thinking, and they see what the next generation will demand from us.”

“I know,” Ruth exclaimed, eagerly. “Miss Murray has told us that, too; how each of us adds our own little part to the building of the ages, and if it is weak, then the others suffer, more than we do, even.”

“That’s Jeanie,” he nodded his head slowly. “And it is a good builder she is herself.”

“Girls,” called Jean from the team behind them. “When we turn to the right next time, it’s the home road, and it used to be an old Indian trail, didn’t it, father?”

“Sandy will be telling them all about those things,” her father replied. “I’m a new settler when he’s about. I’ve only been here thirty years, and he came in the days of the gold digging up in the Hills. He was a scout with Custer, and long before. Get him well started any night, by the camp fire or just on the doorstoop with a good pipeful of tobacco, and it’s no sleep you’ll have for hours. He holds the stories of these hill ranges and mountain tops in his hand, and he loves a good audience, Sandy does.”

“Sandy? That is Miss Diantha’s husband, isn’t it?” asked Isabel.

“He is Mrs. Sandy’s husband, nowadays,” replied Mr. Murray, smilingly. “Nobody calls her anything but that. Mother told her you’d be coming out to us, and she will drive over next week some day. Ready for the fording, Don?”

“Ready, dad,” answered Don, and the ponies hit the down trail with a clattering of the swinging shafts and a thud of hoofs, as though they, too, enjoyed what lay ahead of them.

Every one of the girls gave a gasp of admiration and quick surprise, as the creek came in sight, winding, twisting here and there among the rocks. Before they knew what was coming, they were deep into it, up to the hubs, and more too.

“Oh, this is nothing,” laughed Jean, as they all called out, and held tightly to the seats. “We’ve been through here when the water surged up through the floor of the wagon, haven’t we, father?”

“Don’t be boasting that way, lass,” Mr. Murray called back to her, his gray eyes full of mirth. “Or I’ll be telling of the night when Neil and I left the wagon behind, and swam with the pony to the other side.”

“Father never likes to have me tell a bigger story than he can,” Jean exclaimed, merrily. They came up out of the water, the ponies with dripping flanks, and swung away again on the home road. This led more through the valleys, and was easier to travel. Once in a while they made a turn that brought out new vistas of beauty, quick glimpses into gullies, and deep, low stretches that were, as Jean said, almost like Scottish moorland. The sun vanished behind a distant range of mountains, lying like heaped up clouds against the western sky, and as the twilight deepened, the girls stopped their talk back and forth, for they began to feel the fatigue of the long journey.

“If Crullers were here now, she would fall sound asleep,” Sue said, sleepy herself.

“You will all feel sleepy until you get used to the air here,” Jean told her. “We are at a very high altitude, and the air is dry and clear. It will make you feel drowsy for a while.”

“It doesn’t make me feel that way, Miss Murray,” protested Polly, quickly. “It just makes me want to get out and run, and run. I love it all so.”

Peggie glanced at her with her quick, sideways smile of sympathy, over her shoulder.

“I love it too,” she said. “Do you like animals?”

“Dearly,” Polly answered. “You should see my dog, old Tan, and the cats. That is all I have, but I love them.”

“Maybe you’ll take more back home when you go,” said Peggie, seriously. “I’ll show you how to make them like you. And I think they would like you, and Ruth here too.”

“Why not us?” asked Ted.

“You’re too quick to move,” said Peggie, gently. “If you want animals and birds to like you, you have to keep quiet.”

“But I’m not quiet, Peggie,” protested Polly. “You don’t know what a flutterfly I am. That’s what my grandfather calls me, and he’s right.”

“But you don’t make a noise about it,” said Peggie. “I’ll show you what I mean when we get home.”

It was dark when they reached the ranch, but the moon was clear and cloudless overhead, with the stars about it like sheep, as Ruth said. All at once Don lifted his head, and smiled, and spoke for the first time during the long, weary drive.

“We’re home, Jeanie.”

CHAPTER XII

DREAMING ON SPRUCE BOUGHS

The barking of dogs sounded down in the valley, and a door opened, letting out a pathway of lamplight.

“That’s mother—there’s mother now,” cried Jean, and she sent out a long, clear call of happy greeting that was answered by the lamp, raised and lowered as a welcoming signal.

“Guess she’ll be glad to see us coming home,” Mr. Murray said. “She’s anxious to meet you after reading of you in Jeanie’s letters.”

“Just the same as we want to know all of Miss Murray’s family,” Ruth replied, eagerly. “You don’t know how we’ve coaxed her over and over to tell us about them and the ranch.”

“You’ll have to wait for daylight to get an idea of the place. Whoa, there, Peanuts.”

“Peanuts! Is that its name?” Sue asked.

“It sure is. Because of the most inordinate longing and yearning and hankering after peanuts that ever a horse had.”

Mr. Murray laughed, as he got out, and lifted down the girls. Jean was already in her mother’s arms, and trying to introduce the new guests at the same time.

“Well, come in, do, all of you, where the light is, and I can see you to tell you all apart,” exclaimed Mrs. Murray, happily. “Father, you and Don put the girls’ trunks down in the cabin there.”

“We didn’t bring any, Mrs. Murray,” said Polly. “Only our suit-cases.”

“They know this is not a summer resort, mother,” Jean put in. “I told them just to bring what they would need for roughing it.”

“’Tis more convenient traveling that way, I suppose. And what a journey you have had.” All the while Mrs. Murray talked she was bustling about the great kitchen, preparing supper for them. “Now, sit up, and eat, for you must be hungry. Jeanie, child, you may sit here in father’s place.”

Such a supper as the girls enjoyed that first night at the ranch! Brook trout that Don had caught that morning early, baked potatoes, and graham bread, and glasses of milk that were half filled with cream.

“You mustn’t eat too heartily, going to bed,” Mrs. Murray told them, “but to-morrow you can make up for it. I shall mother every one of you while you’re here.”

“We’ll be good,” Polly promised, and the others chimed in willingly enough.

“Where are you going to put us all to sleep, motherie?” asked Jean.

“And well may you ask me that, Jeanie,” laughed her mother, with the light burr to her speech giving it a delightful softness. “We have but three beds here in the main house, you must know, girls. There is the large bunkhouse for the men down below the corral, and the two cabins, as we call them. One was our first house here, when father and I took up the claim over thirty years back, and the other the boys built for themselves. So after talking it over, we thought it would be best to give you the home cabin, and then you’ll be by yourselves, and can have as good a time as you like. If you’re timid the first few nights, Jeanie or myself will stay with you.”

“Oh, we won’t be timid, Mrs. Murray,” protested Ted, with quick mental visions of royal good times in the cabin. “We’ll be ever so good. I think that’s a dandy plan, girls.”

“And so do we,” chorused the rest.

“Then gather up your belongings, and follow me,” called Jeanie, picking up a lantern that stood by the door. “Is there a light there, motherie?”

“Yes, child, on the table in the large room. Good-night, bairnies. And that’s all you are, too,” she smiled, “despite your height and weight. Just a peck of bairnies to be happy and enjoy life while you may. God bless you all.”

“Look out for the two steps as you go into the cabin,” Peggie called last of all, and they followed Jean out into the night. It was bright with moonlight. Every shadow was distinct and black, and for a minute they stood and looked about, at the near-by buttes, rising bluffs of rock and sandstone, back of the ranch, that blended into the shadowy foothills beyond; and these again, led upward against the clear night sky, until one could see far, far away, outlines of ranges where Bear Lodge lay.

“We will take long trips on horseback as soon as you learn how to ride well, and can stand the saddles,” Jean told them. “Father said he would give us a few days of camping before it was time to go back, and it is much better to ride than to take the wagons or surrey.”

“Indeed we will ride just as soon as we are allowed to,” declared Polly, fervently. “I wouldn’t dare to go back home, unless I could ride, after all the nice things that grandfather said about you, Miss Jean. It will be the first thing he asks me, I’m sure—whether I can ride or not.”

“It won’t take very long. The ponies are all well broken, and used to the youngsters riding them. Peggie is in the saddle half the time in the summer, between here and Mrs. Sandy’s, and up with the boys and father on the sheep range.”

There was the flash of a moving lantern down at the corral. They could hear Don whistling as he moved around, looking after the ponies. From some place up in the hills there came a strange, appealing cry at intervals. Isabel stopped to listen.

“Is it a wild animal, Miss Murray?” she asked, doubtfully.

“Why, Isabel, I’m surprised. Don’t you know a mountain lion when you hear one?” Ted exclaimed, reproachfully.

“It’s only a hoot owl, Isabel,” Jean said, merrily. “There’s nothing to hurt you at all up here, unless you go farther West. There used to be a great deal of game, but they have gone farther West towards the mountains, and into the national reserve. We hardly ever see anything here except a stray bobcat, or a deer. Even the brown bears keep away unless they are hungry.”

“B-r-r-r-r,” shivered Isabel. “Don’t let’s talk any more about them. There might be a hungry one around some place.”

“If you like, I will sleep down here with you,” Jean said, when they came to the two-room log cabin, “but it is truly safe, girls. You can shut the door, and drop this bar across it. See?” She set the light down on the floor, and showed them how to fasten the door with a broad bar of wood, “just like the pictures of Davy Crockett keeping out the wolves,” as Polly said.

“And when they broke the bar, he put his own arm through and kept them out. We’ll take turns being the bars if we have to, Miss Murray.”

“Then good-night all, and sleep well, and be sure and remember what you dream. Dreams in a new place are sure to come true, they say.” Jean kissed each sweet, upturned, girlish face, and went back to the house.

“Well, girls!” exclaimed Polly, once they were alone. She raised the lamp from the table, and looked about.

The cabin consisted of two long, low ceiled rooms, and yet, no ceilings of plaster, but only the natural wood for an interior; and soft and rich in tone it looked too. The foundation of the cabin was of rocks, and the roof projected far over in front, forming the top of the porch. Over-shadowing it were some spruces. So much they had seen as they had entered it. But the interior was best of all. There was a huge rock fireplace, screened with great spruce boughs. Above it was a hanging shelf of wood. Before each of the four windows was a rough wooden seat, covered over with Indian blankets, and on the floor were a few rugs.

“Girls, what a fine idea this is,” exclaimed Sue, standing where she could take in the whole interior. “Do you know this furniture is mostly homemade of just rough, barked wood. Look at this lovely big center table, and the chairs to match.”

“Maybe this is the first wedding outfit,” Polly suggested. “Wasn’t it Daniel Boone who set the style in honeymoon settler furniture?”

“How, Polly?” asked Ruth.

“He just went out and took the wood as he found it, and made furniture out of it, that’s all, and put pelts around for rugs. How pungent and sweet those spruce boughs do smell. Ruth, you be monitor of the light, won’t you, please, dear? I’m going to bed this minute. I just can’t keep awake. Do you feel the motion of the train even now? I do. Just as if we were going and going all the time.”

So Ruth put out the lamp, and they all went to bed, tired from the long journey overland, and happy in their new quarters.

“It is just as if we were real settlers, and had finally reached a resting place,” Isabel said sleepily.

“I wish that hoot owl would turn settler, and find his resting place,” grumbled Ted. “He sounds so awfully lost.”

But almost as she said it, she drifted away to dreamland, and the first night in Wyoming had begun.

CHAPTER XIII

CROSSBAR RANCH

Polly was the first to awake the following morning. She heard the oddest sound right under her window, a sharp cry of “Come back, come back, come back!”

Then came Mrs. Murray’s voice, hushed, but agitated.

“Get away from there! Shoo, with you, shoo!”

Polly jumped up from her cot, and looked out. A flock of speckled guinea hens fluttered away from a waving apron, and vanished behind the old blacksmith shop. It was early morning. Polly dressed quietly, and went out, leaving the rest of the girls sleeping, for she knew how tired they were after the long overland journey.

Once outdoors, she stood still, and looked around her. The Murray ranch lay in a pleasant valley, with foothills and buttes surrounding it. Polly’s first thought was, where could the trees be? Excepting for the cottonwoods that fringed the creek bed, and the spruces rising spire-like in every place they could find a foothold, there seemed to a Virginia-bred girl, to be a dearth of trees. The ranch was built facing the south, and almost backed into the buttes at the north for shelter. The main log cabin was only one story high, but broad and long, and home-like looking. A hammock swung under its porch shelter, and there were some flower borders around it, with geraniums and mignonette growing in them, and some pansies, but precious little else. Just across the valley rose a mountain. Patches of pines covered its sides, with here and there the white line of the wagon road showing around the slopes. Straggling away from the main cabin were various buildings, all low, and built also of logs. Farther back, under the shelter of the shelving sandstone butte, was the corral, a round enclosure of rails, and ponies within. Down in the valley where the creek wound in and out, were some sheep, their heads bent down as they grazed, their backs stone-gray like rocks.

Eastward, the sun was just showing above the hills, and everywhere was heard the songs of birds.

Polly hesitated between the main house, and the corral, but the call of the ponies was too strong to be resisted, and she went down to the corral. When Don and Jean came down from the kitchen, they found her perched up on the topmost rail, at one side, talking to the ponies, and trying to coax them to her.

“We thought you were still asleep,” Jean said. “Good-morning.”

“Good-morning,” answered Polly, happily. “The rest are. I wanted to get up and take a look out. Oh, Miss Murray, isn’t that pony over there a dear, the one with the white nose? He’s the only one that notices me, and when I call him, he lays back his ears, and shakes his head.”

Don went into the corral, and threw a halter over the pony’s head.

“This is Jinks,” he told her. “Used to be called High Jinks, but we cut it short to Jinks. Don’t you want to ride him?”

It was a temptation. Polly looked longingly at the pony, but someway, it did not seem loyal to the others to start the fun before they were ready.

“No, thank you, Don, I think I’ll wait,” she said. “But could I have that one to ride, when we start?”

“Guess so,” responded Don, in his stolid way. When he talked he got off each sentence first, and rested before he took up the next. “Father said he was going to let each of you have the use of the same pony all the time you stayed; then you’d get used to the pony, and the pony’d get used to you. He has five safe ones picked out, and Jinks is one of them.”

“Well, I’d love to have Jinks unless one of the other girls wants him too.”

“Finding’s keeping,” said Don, placidly. “I’ll put your brand on him, Miss Polly.”

“Father’s gone to Deercroft after the boys,” Jean said, as they walked back to the house. “Archie and Neil, you know. He is very glad to have them home to help him too. It’s hard to get good ranchmen on these smaller places, for they are nearly all snapped up by the large outfits. Oh, Polly, look here.” She stopped short, and pointed off at the mountain. “Can you see that great wooden cross way up there on the rock ledge, half way up the mountain. That is where the first church service was held here in Uwanda Valley. It was before father took up the claim even, when the Shoshones still wandered freely over these ranges. Now, they are all gathered into the same reservations with the Arapahoes. It seems strange, when they have always been hereditary foes, that now they have to settle down, and live in peace side by side as Uncle Sam’s good children.”

“But how did the cross come there?” asked Polly, eagerly, shading her eyes so that she might see it plainly. “It looks like a bare pine tree with a piece nailed across it.”

“That is just what it is. The Indians were encamped in the valley here, where the water was good and hunting fine, and one of our missionaries traveled on horseback over seventy miles to reach them. They wouldn’t allow him down in the camp, not even to enter it. So he went up the mountain to that rock ledge, where he could overlook them; put on his vestments, and read the service. Before he was half through, ever so many of the Indians had stolen gradually nearer and nearer until they were close to him. He stayed here after that nearly a week, as their guest, and always held the service on the same spot. They grew very fond of him, and when they left the valley, they erected that cross in memory of him.”

Just then Sue and Ted came out of the cabin, and joined them.

“Good-morning. Ruth’s waiting to button Isabel’s waist,” Sue explained.

“Button what waist? Is she daring to dress up out here? Wait till I find out.” Polly sped back to the cabin, and found Isabel just slipping on a fresh white blouse.

“Young lady, where’s your khaki skirt and blouse? If we are to ‘rough it,’ and not have a stack of washing, we must be careful. Put on that middy blouse, and come along.”

Isabel obeyed, but a bit ruefully. She stood before the little oblong mirror that hung on a nail above the washstand, and fluffed out her hair with her side-combs, while Ruth and Polly watched her, laughingly.

“I declare, Lady Vanitas, I do truly believe you’d stop to fix your hair if you were going to telephone,” said Polly. “Can’t you smell breakfast?”

“Did you all rest well, girls?” asked Mrs. Murray, smiling up at them from the kitchen table as they entered. “It’s only six now. I thought you’d be so tired you’d sleep late, but even Jeanie was out a little past five herself. Peggie, you may dish the porridge, and bring in the cream.”

Porridge. That sounded solid and Scotch, thought the girls, and they enjoyed it too, with plenty of cream, and fresh berries, and eggs. It was very pleasant in the long, low, ceiled kitchen. In the summer time, the cooking at the ranch was done at what they called the cook-house, a cabin half rock, half logs apart from the main house. This left the kitchen free from the warmth of the fire, and all its windows were open. The interior was unplastered. Here and there on the walls hung a pair of antlers, and over the fireplace was a pair of long, sword-like horns from a Rocky Mountain goat. On a homemade rack along one side of the room were several rifles, and one long, old-fashioned musket.

“That was father’s,” Jean explained, when the girls were examining the guns after breakfast. “He was in several of the Indian campaigns out here, along with Sandy MacDowell. Wait until you visit over at the Alameda ranch, and hear them talk together. Now, come out to the cook-house and meet Sally. She’s very anxious to see you all.”

“Who’s Sally?” asked Sue.

“Sally is Sally Lost Moon, mother’s standby on the work question. Sally wandered here years ago in a blizzard. She had lost her way somehow, trying to get over to Deercroft. She is a half-breed Shoshone squaw who worked at different camps as cook, until she came to us. If you want to hear all the old Indian legends of this part of the world, you want to start Sally talking when she has her supper work all finished, and is sitting out on the stoop resting.”

The girls trooped after Jean, as she led the way to the cook-house. Inside, they found Sally Lost Moon, and were formally introduced to her. She was very “blank” as Ted remarked afterwards, but scrutinized each young face with shrewd intent, and a curious, set smile, and shook hands deliberately with each one.

“Can she talk if she really feels like it?” asked Ruth interestedly, when they left her.

“Indeed she can,” returned Jean. “She is always very dignified with strangers. She has two little granddaughters at one of the mission schools, and sometimes they come out in vacation time to see her with their mother. Each time they bring Sally a gift, and she never uses it. She has everything that they have brought her sacredly put away. And she’s so proud that they belong to the Church, and are being educated. Nearly all the Indian women are that way. It is the men who sit back, and regret the days before the white men came and took away their hunting grounds.”

Peggie joined them, and said that Don was anxious for the girls to meet Prometheus. They went down past the corral, to the wagon sheds, and there they found Prometheus Bound, as Jean said. He was the most cheerful looking bear, with a way of holding his jaws open as if he were smiling, like a panting dog, and he sat up on his hind legs obligingly, and shook hands with each girl.

“What kind of a bear is he?” asked Polly. “I can’t tell the difference between the Rocky Mountain bears.”

“You would if you thought about it,” Don told her. “There’s four that we have up this way, Cinnamon, Silvertip, Grizzly and Common Brown bear. That’s what old Pro is, just a common brown Johnny bear. I got him when he was a cub. Some folks up at the Sweetwater ranch were out hunting, and they killed the mother, and right after it I found this little shaver trotting around looking for his mother, so I caught him, and brought him down home, and Peg helped me bring him up. He can dance, and walk on a pole, and play ’possum, and say his prayers, and do lots of tricks. We used to have him in the shed back of the house, but mother sent him down here after he’d eaten up the bishop’s Sunday dinner.”

“Poor old boy.” Sue sympathized with Prometheus, as she always did with a dumb animal. “I’d love to take you home with me.”

“I’d like to see your mother’s face when you appeared in Queen’s Ferry leading him,” laughed Ted gayly. “It would be worse than the tame crabs you caught at Lost Island last summer, Sue.”

“Oh, I don’t know, now. I think he’d make a very nice pet,” returned Sue reflectively.

“Let’s get Sue away from Prometheus right this minute, girls,” exclaimed Polly, “or he will surely go back home with us. Miss Murray, are there any real Indians around here nowadays?”

Jean slipped one arm around Polly’s waist, and they strolled up the narrow winding path that led to the buttes of sandstone back of the corral.

“We’ll go up to Council Rock, and there I can tell you about them,” she said. “And after that, we’ll have the first riding lesson.”

“Where’s Council Rock?” Ruth asked.

“It’s a great flat rock about half a mile up the trail, where the Indians used to meet under a flag of truce, and parley with the settlers, and hunters years ago. At one time, I believe it was the only neutral spot in this whole valley. That was long before Custer’s raid, back when they were trying to push the railroad through. Don’t you girls know anything at all about it?”

“Not a blessed thing,” the girls all chimed in.

“Then you must. For though our Wyoming is only one of the girl states as yet, she has been as great a heroine in her struggle for statehood and protection as any of the first colonies, I think. And if you are to love her and appreciate her, you must understand some of her history as well.”

CHAPTER XIV

FIVE TENDERFEET

The trail led upward from the valley over the buttes, winding in and out between rocks that formed natural buttresses and fortifications. Only the scrub pines and low spruces found a foothold on them, but the crevices were filled with mosses and stray flowers. Finally, they came to a small plateau, or stretch of tableland, and on its brink, overlooking the ranch and valley, was Council Rock. It was an immense, natural formation of stone, and as the girls stood there, they could almost see the circle of chiefs sitting around it, listening in stolid mistrust to the parleyings of their white brothers.

“There are steps in the rock on this side, girls,” Jean said, showing them how the stones had been hewn into stairs at one side. “Father has said he did not doubt that at some far-off age, the Indians offered sacrifices here to the Sun god. That was the highest worship up here in our corner of the State, the worship of the Sun god. They used to hold the great ceremonial here each year, over on Sundance Mountain. Isn’t that odd? Think how at almost the same time, nations were worshiping the Sun god in Persia, and Japan, and Peru, and here.”

“I think it was better than praying to three-faced images and totem poles,” said Ruth, in her grave, unsmiling way. “I suppose the sun seemed warm and good to them, and they thought it made the world beautiful.”

“‘And the Sun of Righteousness shall rise with healing in His wings,’” quoted Jean, softly. “It is a beautiful thought, Ruth. Let us sit down here like the old-time chiefs, and talk of our Wyoming.”

“Why do they call it that, Miss Murray?” asked Isabel. “I always like to know about names.”

“Do you? This name is a rather sad one. After the massacre of 1866, it was called Wyoming, in memory of the terrible massacre of settlers in the old Wyoming valley in Pennsylvania. The first white explorer who found us, was the Chevalier de la Verendrye, back in the early part of the eighteenth century. He took up fur trading with the natives, and lived eleven years among them. Later came John Colter—”

“He discovered the Yellowstone,” put in Ruth, “and then the trappers and traders all came up here. We had that, girls, in Irving’s story about Captain Bonneville, don’t you remember?”

“And the first white settlement was at Fort Laramie,” went on Jean, dreamily. Her chin was uplifted. She looked off over the valley with its winding creek bed, fringed with cottonwoods, and almost forgot the girls. Dearly had she always loved the story of Wyoming’s upward fight to statehood. “Then a few more settlements were made. But it was always hard and dangerous, because there was no protection from the Indians, and no guarded line of travel. Sandy loves to tell stories of the old Bonzeman trail, and Conner’s march in which he participated, back in ’65. But finally the needs became so urgent that the railroad decided to push through an overland route following the old trail.”

“What did the Indians say to that?” asked Sue, eagerly.

“They said little, but waited. Up this way, there were Sioux, and Arapahoes. South were the Cheyennes, and west the friendly Crows. They called them Upserokas, then, ‘from the land of the crows.’ And in 1866, these tribes all met at Laramie to hold a council with the government commission about the road. They seemed to be acting in good faith, and willing for the country to be opened up. Forts were established, and posts here and there, but in December of that same year, without warning, the Indians decoyed three officers and over seventy men into ambush, and killed them. And for years after that, it is one long story of brave men trying to hold point after point against odds, with long delays in government relief, until finally General Grant ordered the forts demolished for lack of troops to keep them up. Think of that, girls.”

“But there was Custer,” Polly broke in.

“Indeed there was, Polly,” agreed Jean, warmly. “You want to hear Sandy tell of Custer. He was one of his scouts. Custer gave his heart to Wyoming, and his life. I think that Sandy always feels he was most unjustly treated by fate because he did not go with Custer on his last journey, when the Sioux killed the entire command on Little Big Horn River.”

“All of them?” asked Ted, in almost a whisper, her gray eyes wide and startled.

“All, dear. So you see why Wyoming seems to me like the girl state. She is so young and so willing and eager, and she has suffered greatly. We who have been born here, and know her, realize her growth in the past twenty years. There, I see Don waving to us from the corral, now. Who wants to ride?”

“Riding skirts, girls, first,” Polly cried, and away they went down the path to the cabin to change for the first ride. It had been Jean’s first warning to them, the riding skirts. Out west, side saddles were a thing of the past, she told the girls. There must be divided skirts, made very much like their regular outing skirts of khaki, but giving perfect freedom in the saddle.

“I must remember and show you my buckskin skirt that Archie made for me when I was about your age,” she had said. “It was my first riding skirt, and I felt like a real squaw in it.”

Don had five ponies ready for them when they returned to the corral, and Jean’s own broncho besides. Saddled and bridled they waited, and Mrs. Murray came down from the main cabin to see the first try-out. Even Sally watched them from her cook-house, and smiled in her stolid, close-lipped way as Polly and Ted took the lead, and mounted their ponies.

Isabel and Ruth hesitated, but Sue followed the others, and Jean last of all, on Ginger.

“We named him that for two reasons,” she said, as they rode down the trail towards the creek. “He’s the color of ginger, and he has a temper that is gingery too.” She turned in her saddle to see if the last two girls were mounted safely. Very stiffly and anxiously they both sat in the saddles, Isabel with her back stiff as a poker, Ruth precise and resolute, her knees gripping the pony’s sides as though she had been on a pony express. “Don’t be afraid, girls,” she called to them. “They won’t bolt or kick a bit. Let them take the trail, and they’ll follow after the rest like sheep. Just hold them up a bit when you come to a steep incline, that’s all.”

“Don gave me a quirt,” said Polly, holding up the short braided whip.

“You’d better not wave it over Jinks’ head, young lady,” Jean laughed. “He objects strongly to violent persuasion of any sort. Just be content to jog along easily for a while.”

“Oh, where’s Peggie?” asked Sue suddenly. “I thought she was coming with us.”

“She started out long ago, goose,” Ted told her. “I saw something go ‘sky-hooting’ along this road right after breakfast, and at first I thought it must be a deer, or an Indian, but I saw Peggie’s pigtails flying, and knew it was just she. Does she always ride that way, Miss Murray?”

Jean laughed, and her eyes grew tender.

“I think she does. She rides to school all winter on that pony. Father gave it to her when she was about eight, for her very own, and she talks to it as though it understood everything. I presume it would seem strange to you girls to have the birthday presents we two have been accustomed to. Sometimes father gives us a pony, sometimes a yearling, or even a calf of our own, and we help look after them ourselves. He says that one of the finest ways to teach yourself self-reliance and responsibility is to have a living creature dependent on you. Take the turn to your left, Polly, where you come to the fork in the road over the bridge.”

Polly was leading, or rather Jinks was leading. He had a most authoritative way of throwing up his nose, and jerking the bridle as he went along, and a reckless swing to his gait that was enchanting, Polly thought. She only wished the Admiral might have seen her then. Down the road from the ranch, and over the plank bridge at the creek, they went. On the other side, at the fork, Jean told them one road led over the way they had come from Deercroft, and the other one led due west towards the Alameda ranch, where Mrs. Sandy lived.

“It is too far to go to-day, girls, when you are not used to riding, but we can try it in a few days, I think. Elspeth has gone over there now, to let them know you came yesterday.”

“I wonder, Miss Murray,” called back Polly over her shoulder, “why it was that Miss Calvert didn’t send any message to Miss Diantha by us.”

“I don’t know anything about it, Polly, any more than you do,” said Jean, simply. “Mother knows what the trouble is between the two sisters, because Mrs. Sandy told her herself, but we don’t know. Mother has that way always. Sometimes father will tell what he thinks is a great piece of news, and mother will say very gently, ‘Land o’ rest, David, I knew that six months ago. You mustn’t go ’round telling all you hear.’ Mrs. Sandy had always told Peggie and me about her stately sister at the old Southern home in Queen’s Ferry, and when I gave up the school over at Beaver Ford and told her I wanted to get into an upper class school, or preparatory for college, she said that she would write to her sister in my behalf at Calvert Hall, and, well—I got the appointment.”

“But Miss Calvert never talks about her, and she didn’t send her love by us,” put in Isabel, decidedly. “Has she lived out West here long, Miss Murray?”

“Before father took up his claim. I really am not sure how long it is. I know that Sandy was born East, but did most of his fighting out here, and then he went back home, and married Miss Diantha. Perhaps, before you go back home, you may find out all about it.”

“Oh, girls, look,” cried Polly, turning around eagerly. They had come to a turn in the road, skirting the base of the mountain. On one side was the sheer, precipitous cliff, with straight trunks of pines and spruce rising like ship masts higher and higher, until the tops were lost to sight. Below were the pines too, and the ground grew more and more rugged, as they rode upward. Far beneath them lay the valley, and in the distance was the ranch, its buildings and corrals looking almost like toys. Ahead the wagon road wound around the face of the mountain, and disappeared.

“We call this the Delectable Mountain,” Jean told them, as they all halted, to look at the gorgeous panorama outspread before them. “Mother named it years ago. It was a long and weary trip for her out here. They came by wagon from Iowa, the nearest shipping point. Mother has often told us of the long trip, and how kind people were at the ranches they passed along the route, but how very few there were. Father had taken up the claim, and then had sent for her to bring the goods on, and he met her. And she says that when, at last, after days and days of travel, they finally came around this curve of the old trail, and the valley lay before her, she just looked and looked at it, and smiled. ‘Davy, it’s the Delectable Mountain, isn’t it, dear heart, and yonder lies our Promised Land.’ That is what she said, girls. I think it was, too.”

The girls were silent. It was about eleven, and the sunlight flooded the valley with its golden glow. About it, the mountains grouped shelteringly. For miles and miles, in all the vast view, the only spot of human life was the ranch. And for the moment there came to the girls, even in their own careless pleasure, a realization of what that long journey had meant to the bride of thirty years ago, and what simple heroism there lay in the story of the valley home.

“How brave she was,” said Ruth, gently. “What did she do when the Indians came around?”

“She gave them bread,” Jean replied, smiling. “Mother doesn’t believe much in bullets. Now, ride along, girls. We’ll go as far as the spring cave for this morning, then back home to dinner, and you’ll have done very well. I think even the Admiral would say that much.”

They kept on for another three quarters of a mile, until the road broadened out, and there, at the side, was a spring tumbling and trickling out of the rocky ledge. A granite cup was tucked into one of the crevices, and they all dismounted, and had a good drink, then rode back to the ranch with keen appetites for one of Mrs. Murray’s famous dinners.

CHAPTER XV

THE CHANT OF THE NEW MOON

That first day at the ranch seemed the longest of the stay, when the girls looked back to it afterwards. There were so many things to see and talk about, so much ground to cover.

“It is sure to be like this for the first few days,” Mrs. Murray told them, smilingly. “It is the same with my own bairns when they come home for the summer vacation. They are like a lot of sheep for a while, following me around, and dodging at their father’s heels the same way. You must not try to do too much at first, or you’ll do nothing at all.”

“If I learn how to saddle a pony to-day, I’ll feel I’ve done well,” sighed Sue. “I’ve tried to do it four times so far, and Don laughs at me. When I tried to put the halter around his neck, I got hold of the wrong end of the rope, and it was upside down. But I’m going right back, and try it over.”

The girls laughed as she sped back to the corral. They were sitting out of doors after supper, some on the broad low stoop, some in the hammock. Mr. Murray had arrived from Deercroft about sunset with his two big boys, as he called them. Two stalwart Westerners they were, with their mother’s steady gray eyes, and the close-lipped smile of their father.

“I thought they were just boys from the way Miss Jean talked of them,” protested Polly, as she looked after the two striding away to the house with their suit-cases. “They’re grown up.”

“Archie is twenty-three, and Neil a year older,” explained Jean. “But still they seem like boys, don’t they, mother dear?”

“They’re growing fast, Jeanie,” was all Mrs. Murray would say.

“We won’t see them much after to-morrow,” went on Jean. “Help is scarce out here, and they have to help father with his haying. Ours is not a big ranch, you know, girls. We’re only a home ranch, so we hardly depend on the range at all for feed. It used to be a case of everybody turn out the cattle to graze, and then have the two big round-ups, spring and fall, but now everything has gone into sheep, as the cow-men say. Father sold off his stock about seven years ago, and went in for sheep, as soon as the trouble had quieted down.”

“What trouble?” asked Polly. “I didn’t know there was any trouble out West here excepting from Indians long ago.”

“Didn’t you?” Jean smiled. “You should have lived here during the range trouble. The range used to be free for all, girls, but the cattlemen said when the sheep grazed on it, they didn’t leave enough for a grasshopper to perch on. So they tried to drive them out. And you know the old riddle. When an irresistible body meets an immovable body, what is the result?”

“General and inevitable smash-up,” Ted said.

“Exactly. In this case, after thousands of sheep had been killed and many men too; after the wells had been poisoned, and all the State turned into a boiling kettle of trouble; all at once, Uncle Sam stepped in, and homesteaded the land. That meant the loss of the range in a way, although up here in our corner, we haven’t had much trouble, have we, mother?”

“It’s a blessing we haven’t,” declared Mrs. Murray fervently. “Between the Indians, the long winters, the range troubles, and the loneliness out here, I’m thinking we’re as much pioneers and good pilgrims as those that landed on the rock at Cape Cod. If it hadn’t been for the children, I’d have grieved, but there’s no time for grieving with a brood of bairns growing up around you.”

“It must be nice to belong to a large family,” Polly said, wistfully. “Especially if they looked alike like yours do, Mrs. Murray. It must be like having a lot of little selves around you.”

“Isn’t that just like Polly,” cried Ted. “Now, I’ve got two brothers, and they’re not a bit like me. Mother says I am a good deal more like the one boy in the family. Oh, look, girls!”

“It’s only Don,” Jean said, rising to get a better view. “He’s riding Scamp. That’s his own pony. He broke him himself, and taught him tricks. They say he’d make a good polo pony, but Don wouldn’t sell him for any price.”

The girls rose to get a good look as Don flashed by on the calico pony. Down went his hat on the earth, and he swung round in an oval, leaned far over sideways, and caught up the hat. Then once again, and this time, it was the handkerchief from his throat that went fluttering into the dust, and as he came back, he seemed to almost slip out of the saddle, as he caught it up.

Then he took the rope that hung at the saddle-bow, and sent it twirling far out in ever widening circles and ovals.

“Don’t catch me, Don,” Peggie called merrily, as she ran up from the corral.

“I could if I wanted to,” Don shouted back.

“Eh, lad,” his father said. “Hold up a bit, and to-morrow Archie and Neil will help you show off.”

“It must be splendid to watch you roping cattle,” Polly said. “I’d like to see that.”

“You’ll see that over at Sandy’s,” Mr. Murray promised. “Sandy’s the only one of us old timers who sticks to tradition. His place is the same to-day as it was twenty years ago. He has the only long-horned Texan steers in the county, I think. When I put sheep in here at the Crossbar, Sandy said he wouldn’t depend for a living on any herd of huckle-backed lambies for all the country east of the Mississippi. He’s very set in his opinions and habits, Sandy is.”

“Father,” interrupted Jean. “Do you remember the day the timber fire got in the Pine Ridge stretch, and the cattle stampeded?”

“I didn’t know you had timber fires up here,” Ruth exclaimed seriously. “There doesn’t seem to be much timber to burn.”

“Which makes what there is more precious, child,” laughed Mr. Murray. “Anyhow, it’s true. We don’t have them as a usual thing, but now and then they’ll start in spring and fall when the dry leaves and underbrush are like excelsior for blazing up over nothing. This one on Pine Ridge happened about eight or nine years ago. The lads were home then, but our Jeanie was at school down at Laramie, taking her Normal course. Somehow a fire started off yonder on the Pine Ridge range, southwest of here, just behind old Topnotch Mountain. Archie saw the smoke pouring up, and called out to me. I had the herd grazing around the shoulder of Topnotch. The leader was a fine old chap. He knew more about herding than any steer I ever saw, but he didn’t know a thing about timber fires. This one was jumping from dry brush and grass straight for spruce clumps, and scrub pine, and while the ranch wasn’t in danger, the herd was, because that leader stampeded the wrong way, and all the rest after him. Instead of making for the valley and home, he went on a dead run straight for a line of buttes, and a drop of two hundred feet down over the rocks.”

“Like enough you and Archie would have gone over with the cattle, too, father,” interposed Mrs. Murray, placidly.

“Oh, how did you stop them?” broke in Ted, anxiously.

“Archie did the neatest bit of rope play I ever saw. He raced alongside on his pony, and slung the rope fair around the old lad’s horns, and turned him. Stop him? Indeed, and he never stopped till he reached the home valley, but it turned him in the right direction. Sandy always reminds me that is a rare bit of telling, but I saw it happen. Now, girls, early to bed with you all, if it’s trolling you’ll be to-morrow early.”

“What’s trolling?” asked Polly. “A troll’s a kind of gnome, isn’t it?”

“Not in Wyoming. Up here you troll for trout.”

“I thought you trailed for them,” said Sue. “Don’t you trail the bait along on the top of the water, and kind of skip it?”

“There was a boy used to come and play with Stoney,” Polly added. “A little colored boy from down the river, and he said he knew how to lie down on the bank, and reach under, and grab the trout.”

“Now, Polly, if you develop into a teller of trout tales, you’ll be worse than Don. Listen.” Jean rose from the hammock. “First of all, you must fish up-stream. No standing still, and waiting for the fish to bite. You must learn how to hunt the best spots, and then to cast well. Trout lie with heads pointed up-stream, and hunt the shadowy nooks. Peggie and Don are our best catchers.”

“It’s all in the way you cast and troll,” spoke up Peggie, half shyly. “You mustn’t throw out heavily, or you scare them away, and you must draw the fly very, very lightly along. Don’s caught them with worms, but I like the flies best. We’ll go fishing to-morrow.”

“Not so soon,” protested Jean. “They want to get up early, and take a ride before breakfast to-morrow, and you’ll need a good misty morning for successful fishing. Did you ride all the way over to Sandy’s, Peg?”

Peggie nodded happily, and smiled.

“Mrs. Sandy says she’s glad they got here all safe and sound, and she wants us all to ride over as soon as we can.”

“Next week we will ride over,” Jean said. “I want you to be accustomed to the saddle, girls, first. We will ride every day, somewhere around home here, and there are a good many interesting things to see. There are Indian graves up in the hills, and the Picture Rocks down the river; plenty to keep you busy.”

“We’d better go to bed,” cried Polly, rising. “We want to be up with the chickens to-morrow, and make the most of every day we’re here.”

“If you rise early, you will be in time for a dip with Peggie and me. We go in about five. Did you bring your suits?”

“Yes, they did, but if I hadn’t told them to do so, not one would have remembered,” Ruth said, soberly.

“Oh, listen a minute,” Peggie cautioned. “Sally is singing the chant of the new moon.”

In the hush that followed, they heard the old squaw’s low tremulous tones, over and over, singing the same strange minor notes, quavering and simple, that seemed to hold the spirit of the night and the spell of these far reaches of distant hills and mountain ranges, in their melody. Overhead, the new moon showed in the sky, silver and slender against the amber afterglow of the sunset. Out on a patch of ground between the ranch house and the cook-cabin stood the old Indian woman, lifting up her arms every now and then as she sang, or rather, grunted the chant.

“What does she mean?” whispered Isabel. “I can’t understand a word she says.”

“Neither does anybody else,” replied Jean. “Mother thinks it is part of some old invocation to the moon, or a prayer for fair weather. Sometimes, when she is in the humor, Sally will sit and tell us old tales that she used to hear when she was a child in the Shoshone camps. That was before the government compelled the tribe to give up their roaming life, and settle down on the reservation at Fort Washakie.”

“What a queer name, Miss Jean!”

“It is in honor of the great Chief Washakie, Polly. He was the best friend the whites had out here, and was always loyal.”

They did not disturb Sally Lost Moon, but called good-night to Mr. Murray and the boys, and went over to the lodge.

“If you need more blankets, call out,” Jean said as she bade them good-night.

“All right,” answered Polly. “Let’s not light a lamp, girls. I almost wish we were in a tent.”

“I wish we were going to sleep right on Council Rock,” Ruth declared. “I’d like to lie on my back, and look up at the stars and feel the earth go ’round. Doesn’t this all make you want to fit into the same tune? I mean, doesn’t it make you want to match the wilds, and be an Indian or a ranch girl, or anyone who really belongs here. I feel as though Virginia must be over on some star.”

“You’re sentimental, grandma,” Sue said, happily. “And that’s what you’re always calling the rest of us. I’m really surprised at you, Ruth, wanting to lie down and look at the stars and watch the world go ’round. That’s like Polly. Virginia isn’t on a star. It’s right down back of Topnotch there.”

“Yes, and what kind of an Indian would you make with pigtails, and spectacles, goose?” added Polly.

“I don’t care,” sighed Ruth. “I feel that way. I think I’d like to live out here.”

“There you are! And Peggie said to-day, she thought she’d like to live down East,” laughed Polly. “It’s like Aunty Welcome tells about flies on a window. All those on the outside want to get in, and all on the inside want to get out.”

“But have you seen Peggie’s room yet?” asked Ruth, in self-defense.

“Not yet. Why?”

“Just wait.” Very mysteriously. “I wouldn’t spoil the surprise for you by telling about it. I only wish I had one like it. She didn’t even realize how different it was from other girls’ rooms until I told her about it. It’s full of—no, I won’t tell. You will see it to-morrow.”

“Oh, please, Ruth, please,” they all begged.

“I shall put my shoes right back on,” protested Ted. “I feel put upon.”

“Let’s wait till morning,” Polly decided. “Peggie will be in bed now, anyway. I don’t believe Ruth got more than a peep at it herself.”

“I didn’t,” said Ruth meekly. “It was through the window too, while Peggie was in there after something. All I could see were horns and pelts, and baskets, and that sort of thing, but she says she has ever so many things she has collected.”

“I like Peggie,” Isabel said suddenly, in her precise way. “She has the deepest dimples I ever saw.”

“Sally Lost Moon calls them smile holes,” said Polly. “Isn’t that dear, girls? Smile holes.”

“Oh, listen a minute,” interrupted Sue who was near the open door. Up from the corral came the Murray boys, singing together. They could not catch the words, but the swinging, happy lilt carried on the night air. The last line they heard clearly.

“Will you ride,
Oh, will you ride,
Say, will you ride the trail with me?”

It died away as they went into the main cabin, just as the new moon slipped behind Topnotch’s shoulder.

“Will you ride,” started up Ted.

“Oh, will you ride,” Sue caught it up, and the rest finished it, Polly beating time with the heel of her shoe on the side of her cot.

“Say, will you ride the trail with me?”

“Ranch taps, girls,” Ruth reminded them. “Up early for a swim, you know.”

“Will you ride,” began Ted, gaily, but a well-aimed pillow from Polly cut off the tantalizing strain, for all the world like a young rooster’s crow, and they went quietly to sleep.

CHAPTER XVI

LOST CHANCE GULCH

The long night’s quiet rest left the girls refreshed and bright. When Peggie and Jean came over to the lodge at five, they were up and dressed, ready for the run down to the creek for a morning dip.

“You’ll find it very different from sea bathing, girls,” Jean told them. “The water does not have the same buoyancy, but it gives one a feeling of exhilaration all the same. This place has been our swimming hole for years.”

“I should think so, by the beaten path to it,” remarked Ruth. “You can’t lose your way, can you?”

The little path led down to the creek, and along its winding course until it turned a bend, and slipped into rapids around a rough, old butte that the children at the ranch had named Thunder Cloud, years before. Here the creek bed was full of rocks, as if, Polly said, years before, some giant had thrown them down there like a handful of pebbles. A little farther on, the creek broadened and deepened, and there lay the swimming hole.

“There are no rocks in it, here,” said Elspeth. “It’s only up to my shoulders at the center, excepting in early spring, when the snows melt, and then it’s a regular torrent through the whole valley.”

Ted and Sue waded out into midstream carefully. They had dressed in bathing suits up at the cabin, and even putting them on again had brought back the old joyous times at Lost Island last summer.

The water felt cool, but not chilling. Isabel and Ruth splashed about in the shore shallows experimentally, but Polly stood on a rock, and looked around her at the gorgeous scenery. The sun was well up in the heavens, but over everything there still clung the soft, hazy mist of a midsummer dawn. The distant mountains looked as if they had folded violet and pearl cloaks about them. The summits were veiled in straying, ever changing cloud wreaths. Even the near-by buttes of sandstone and shale, rugged and bare as they were, took on a certain beauty of their own in that tender, mellowing light. The bottom of the creek looked golden too, and the water was full of shimmering, shining ripples, as the girls splashed into it, with merry cries.

“I wish there was a long stretch of sandy beach, don’t you, girls?” said Isabel, as she hesitated, a mermaid without a resting place. “This shore is so rocky.”

“Rocky,” exclaimed Sue, floundering around vigorously. “Call this rocky after Maine. These rocks are pebbles.”

“Do you expect a Wyoming swimming hole to be a seaside sun-bath?” called out Ted. “Come on in, Polly. It’s splendid.”

“This used to be the old fording place, mother says, for westbound cattle bunches years ago,” said Jean, as she stopped a few minutes after a spurt up the river and back. “Some of the settlers went this way too. They named it Thunder Ford, so we called the old butte yonder Thunder Cloud. There used to be a chief of that name. I can just remember seeing him once when I was a little girl. I rode up to Sundance with father, and they had a sheriff’s sale of Indian ponies.”

“Oh, tell us about it,” Polly begged at once, wading towards her. “We can hear you.”

“There wasn’t anything to tell. The Indians were in debt, I guess, and had to sell their ponies, some of them anyway, to settle. They showed them off first, and many cowboys had ridden in from outlying ranches to watch the fun. Each Indian would mount his pony, and try to put it through all kinds of tricks, with the cowboys shouting at them, and urging them on. There’s a little square of green grass in the center of the town. At least, it’s supposed to be green, but it was pretty well sun-dried and brown. Father and I stood there, and watched the racing, and I noticed the old Indian next to me. He was very tall and homely, with a broad band tied around his head, and one big eagle’s feather slipped through. Then he wore an old army shirt, and fringed buckskin ‘chaps,’ and last of all, there was a heavy government blanket half trailing from his waist; and mind, girls, this was in July.”

“Maybe he felt that he had to wear it as long as the government had given it to him,” suggested Isabel, thoughtfully.

“Maybe he did. He watched the race with his arms folded, and when father spoke to him, he wouldn’t even glance at him. But I said I couldn’t see, and all at once, he lifted me up in his arms, where I could get a good view of the street and the ponies, and held me there. And afterwards, when we were buying things at the general store, we found out he was old Chief Thunder Cloud who used to be with Sitting Bull years ago.”

“Can we get any bead work, or baskets around here, Miss Jean?” asked Polly, as the remembrance of Mrs. Yates’ commission occurred to her.

“You can buy them at any of the reservations. When the bishop comes, we will ask him.”

“When will he be here?” questioned Polly, with interest.

“Any time. He usually stops over night at our ranch on his way north. It is different being a bishop out here from what it means in the eastern or even middle states. Here he is a pioneer missionary. Do you know, girls, that he even has jurisdiction over the reservations, at least the Shoshone one?”

“He’s tall, and kind of young, and rides a horse like a soldier,” put in Peggie. “And he looks like a soldier. That’s why all the ranchers and cowboys like him, I guess.”

“I’m getting cold,” Isabel exclaimed, shivering.

“I should think you would,” declared Ted, “standing there with the water up to your ankles. Isabel, I sigh to think what would ever become of you in a deep swimming tank. You’d cling to the side like an anemone.”

“All out now,” Jean called. “And we’d better run to keep up the circulation. Next time we’ll bring down the swimming suits, and kimonos, and dress here. It’s too long a trip in wet clothes.”

Up the path they went, dripping wet, and radiant with health and happiness.

“Hurry up and dress, girls,” Jean said, as they came to the guest cabin. “After breakfast, we’ll ride over the other way towards the sheep range, and you’ll have a chance to look them over.”

“Oh, look down there at Don,” cried Peggie, suddenly, and the next minute she was flying as fast as her feet could carry her towards the corral.

“Head him off, Peg, head him off,” shouted Don. “Not that way, over here. Oh, suffering cats, look at that!”

“He’s making a bee line for the bars, Don; I can’t stop him,” Peggie cried.

A flying streak of gray darted madly across the bare, brown earth of the corral. Headlong after it raced Don, waving his arms and whooping shrilly.

“What on earth—” began Ruth, but Sue, Ted and Polly were already on the way to the corral also, and Jean was laughing.

“It’s Don’s timber cub,” she said to Ruth and Isabel. “He’s loose.”

Don caught at a coiled rope that hung on a saddle on the fence, just where he had left it before saddling up for the ride. The streak of gray made for the open passage like an escaped fleck of quicksilver, and Don set his teeth, and threw out on a chance.

“I got him,” he called, as the rope circled out through the air, and drew taut and snug over something. “He’s a dandy little cub. I brought him in last week. Two months old. From Badger Hole Creek. The herders said the mother was shot when she was hanging around the sheep one night nearly two weeks ago. This little shaver must have been trying to find her ever since. I’m going to tame him.”

Tenderly he bent over the palpitating little form, and loosened the rope. The wolf cub looked like a shaggy, big-headed little Spitz dog, with a very pointed nose. It tried to burrow down in Don’s coat sleeve, and he trotted it back to its new home, a cage he had fashioned for it in the shade of the wagon shed.

“What’s his name, Don?” asked Sue, eagerly.

“Kink,” grinned back Don. “Suits him, doesn’t it? I’ll have him tamed in a month, but he’s pretty shy now.”

“Breakfast,” called Mrs. Murray from the back door of the house, and they hurried back to the cabin to dress.

“Put on your riding skirts,” warned Jean. When they had finished eating, there was no delay about the start. Don had the five ponies saddled in a few minutes, and this time it was easier mounting, but it was still hard to get accustomed to the movement of the ponies.

“I feel as if I were going to tumble off any minute,” Ruth declared.

“You should ride the funny little burros down in Colorado if you want a good jogging,” Jean said. “Last summer mother was pretty well tired out after the shearing and shipping and all that, so after the extra helpers had gone, I took her down for a little trip to the Springs, and we had a good time. It was her first vacation in thirty years. I don’t like to ride burros at all. The best horses for these roads are the cross-breeds, half Indian pony, half easterner, like ours.”

“Oh, aren’t we going on Topnotch to-day?” asked Ted, as they took the opposite turn at the creek crossing.

“No. We’re bound for the north this time. It’s a good ride, and easy for you, and you’ll get used to the saddle.”

After they had passed the valley and lower buttes, great, rolling tablelands came in view, their jagged bluffs fringed with scrub-pine and spruce.

“This is the open range,” Jean said. “It goes on for miles and miles to the north, higher and higher till it blends into Bear Lodge.”

“Oh, girls, don’t you remember that place in the Bible?” exclaimed Polly, halting to lift her head and draw in deep breaths of the clear fine air. “I mean where it tells about the cattle on a thousand hills. Who’d want an old, smelly, burnt sacrifice, when he could have this, and all the cattle on them.”

The full heat of the day was still far off, and the morning calm and hazy. The lazy, droning sound of insects came from the shadowy depths of sage-brush on either side of the path, and High Jinks would shy every now and then as a honey-laden bee or flippant butterfly darted by his nose.

“Is it far?” asked Polly, after they had passed the low, sun-dried bed of Coon Creek, and struck out across a long, open stretch of upland with only a ragged pine here and there to break its barren monotony.

“About five miles the short way, but nearly fifteen if we had to go around the hills west of here. Father fixed a short cut years ago when we used to pasture our herd on the Black Pine stretch. He built a bridge over the gulch up here. Some of the road is so overgrown now that you have to take your time. Polly, don’t hold Jinks in if you can stand a little gallop. He’s just ready to dance for a run.”

“I won’t hold him in—” began Polly, and she slackened her hold on the bridle. The pony shook his head free joyously, and started off on a helter-skelter canter that made Polly lean forward, and grip his sides with her knees like an Indian. Her cap dropped off, and her hair tumbled down from its pins, but she liked it. Jean and Peggie had shown her how to adjust herself to every turn and twist of the pony, how to grip with her knees, and lean over his neck, and stand in the stirrups when he ran. Many things had she learned with the other girls too, in just one day at the Crossbar, and not the least of them was to consider the temperament and feelings of the pony she rode.

“They’re all good chums, if you only know how to treat them right,” Peggie had said, and the girls believed it.

Peggie came after her on her pony, Twinkle, but Polly beat her, and they both reined up short and waited for the rest. Sue had dismounted, picked up Polly’s cap, and was bringing it.

“Twinkle isn’t quite as fast a runner as Jinks,” Peggie said loyally, “but he has a very understanding way with him. I like a horse that understands, don’t you? I don’t like the white patch over Jinks’ eye, because it always looks as if he had an eyeglass on, like Mr. Cameron, the owner of the Red Star outfit.”

By this time the rest had caught up.

“Look west, girls,” said Jean, suddenly, pointing with her quirt. “See where the ground sinks, and there’s a fringe of timber? That’s Lost Chance Gulch, where father built the bridge.”

“What a queer name,” exclaimed Isabel, who was ever ready to scent a story of romance. “Who lost the chance?”

“An old trapper named Zed Reed. He built a shack down in the gulch, father says, years and years ago, and always vowed there was gold there. Folks said he was a little bit light headed. I can remember seeing him come to our place. Father used to give him work now and then to feed him. He was very tall, and had a long red beard, and curly red hair, and he wore a coonskin cap with the tail hanging down one side. I used to like to have him come because he could play on the fiddle. He carried it in an inside coat pocket that he had had made specially to hold it, and he would play the loveliest tunes on it. The people around here, and even the Indians, called him Old Darned Coat. Isn’t that a funny name?”

“Why?” asked Polly. “I never came across so many dandy stories about people and places.”

“This country up here is full of stories,” answered Jean, dreamily. “I love them. They are so real, and so full of human interest. People said that, years before, Zed had been engaged to Colette Buteau, the daughter of the French Canadian that used to keep the old trading post on the Dakota border at Twin Forks. She died a day or two before the wedding. She, with her father, was killed by the Sioux. Zed was never the same after that, and he said he would wear his wedding coat for the rest of his life. It was a green broadcloth coat, with black velvet collar and large silk-covered buttons, and it had big revers, and a skirt to it, and the lining was quilted silk. I suppose it was a very wonderful coat in those days, but Zed kept his vow, and as the years went on, and the coat grew shabbier and shabbier, he would darn each little frayed rent as tenderly and carefully as possible. Mother says that finally it seemed to be all darns, and they called him Old Darned Coat. I can remember him coming to the back door, and bowing so courteously to mother, and saying, ‘Howdy, Mis’ Murray. Could I get just a little piece of darning silk from you, I wonder—silk twist is best of all, and I’ll work it out on the wood pile.’”

“Did he die?” asked Sue, her eyes wide with interest.

“Yes. Father found him in his shack, just asleep, with Colette’s picture beside him on his fiddle, and under the two, the old darned wedding coat. He was buried in it.”

The girls were silent as they passed the level upland. The ground was dipping again, and patches of trees became frequent. Ted and Sue were in the lead now, and finally, as they came in sight of Sundance Mountain in the far distance, about forty miles off, Peggie told them why it was called that.

“I love its name,” she said, in her odd way, half shy, half abrupt. “It always makes me think of the days that Sandy tells us about, before even father came here, when the Indians would send out runners from tribe to tribe to call them to the Sun Dance, and they would all gather each year at the mountain to hold the dance and feast for seven days, I think it was.”

“It must have been happy for them,” Sue said, “when the land was all their very own, I mean. Sometimes, I don’t blame them for fighting for it. After all, it had been theirs for so long. How would we like to be chased off, like a lot of stray cats, just because we didn’t want our country taken from us.”

Polly reined in her pony sharply.

“Look!” she cried. “Is that the bridge, Miss Jean?”

“That is it,” Jean answered, and they urged the ponies forward.

The path made a sharp turn to the left, and instead of the tall grass of the low ground, up here they found the earth rough, and strewn with jagged points of rock. They had come to the end of the trail, and could look down into the shadowy depths of Lost Chance Gulch. A bridge of logs spanned it, with hand rails on each side, and they rode over it in Indian file, the ponies picking their way daintily. All excepting Polly. Jinks hesitated at the bridge, and backed away.

“Now, what does ail him?” asked Polly, but before she could answer, something crashed through the underbrush beside her. All she saw was the haunches of a brown doe, but Jinks did not like it a bit, and he began to live up to his name. The rest had gone on. And all at once a figure came out from the gloom of the gulch, such a strange looking figure, that for the moment, as she looked at him, and he at her in equal astonishment, she thought it must be the ghost of old Zed himself.

CHAPTER XVII

THE SHEEP CAMP

He was very tall, this stranger who seemed to have risen out of the gulch as if by magic. He was broad of shoulder, and his curly gray hair grew fully three inches long. So did his gray imperial, and above it was a gray moustache, with curly ends. His corduroy trousers were tucked into the tops of high boots, and his shirt was open at the throat, with a dark blue silk handkerchief knotted around it. Over one shoulder he carried a pickaxe, and his other hand held a bunch of wild flowers.

He smiled down at Polly’s startled face, and shifted the wild flowers, so he could catch hold of Jinks’ bridle, and steady him.

“Well, girl, where did you come from?” he demanded, in a deep, mellow voice.

“Virginia,” answered Polly, mechanically.

“Have you now? Pretty long ride, wasn’t it?” His blue eyes twinkled with appreciation.

“Where Did You Come From?” He Demanded

“I just heard the ponies when they crossed the bridge. Where’s the rest?”

“They rode on. The deer frightened Jinks, and he began to back with me, and rear. Here they come.”

“Hello, Mr. Sandy,” cried Jean when she was within hearing. “So that’s why you deserted us, Polly.”

“I thought he was Zed,” laughed Polly, flushing a little. “He seemed to come up out of the gulch so suddenly. And—and—”

“Go on, finish it,” said Sandy, with relish. “And I looked rough enough to be most anybody, even old Zed. Well, well, let’s look this bunch over, Jeanie. I haven’t seen so many Eastern rosebuds in many a day. When will you be over home? My wife’s getting mighty anxious to see these girls from Calvert.”

“They must learn to ride well first.”

“Ride well? Don’t they ride well. Seems to me they look pretty well set up in their saddles. You’d better come over this week.”

“What are you doing way over here?” asked Jean.

“Blessed if I know yet myself, Jean.” He took off his broad-brimmed hat, and pushed back his gray curls doubtfully. “Bought out Zed’s claim down here in the gulch some time ago, more from sentiment than anything. Seemed too bad to see his shack and belongings taken up by strangers who wouldn’t know how much Zed thought of it all. And once in a while I ride over, and look around. It’s a mighty pretty spot he chose. Ever been down?”

“No, I haven’t. We hardly ever ride this way. It’s generally down towards town, along the old Topnotch road.”

“Where are you bound for now?”

“Over to where the boys are with the sheep. I wanted the girls to see the herder’s wagon, and how he lives. So I hardly think we had better stop to-day, but don’t be surprised if you find our trail around there before the week is up.”

“Come along any time. You’ll find a queer lot of things down here one way and another. Zed was a friend of mine, and I used to see a good deal of him about twenty years ago and more, when we and Wyoming were kind of young together. Zed was terribly well informed. There’s a lot of his books down there yet. Go in the old shack and look at them, girls, when you come over. The door’s always unlocked. You can’t miss the way if you follow the path from the bridge here. It leads up to the door.”

“Isn’t he nice,” exclaimed Polly, as they rode on. “He looks like the pictures of the old-time scouts, doesn’t he?”

“He was an old-time scout himself, and he’s never got over it,” laughed Jean. “Father says he’s a regular tenderfoot at ranching even now. But I love the Alameda place where he lives. It’s more like a mountain lodge, girls, and he’s planted flowers everywhere. He built it before he went back east after Miss Diantha, and carted rose slips and flower seeds all the way from Cheyenne and even from Omaha. Every time he’d go south with a bunch of cattle, father says, he’d bring back something for her to make her western home more like the one she had left. We’ll go over there next week. How do you stand the riding to-day? Is it easier?”

“I wish I could sit on a pillow, that’s all,” said Ted, frankly.

“You’ll be used to it in a few days, and not notice it at all. Polly, how are you? Is Jinks behaving himself now?”

“Oh, yes, indeed,” cried Polly, looking back over her shoulder. “It was the deer frightened him. Girls, did I tell you, I saw a real deer back at the bridge. Brown, with a regular Molly Cottontail like a rabbit. You know what I mean, Miss Jean.”

“There are lots of them in the foothills around here. We don’t see them near home except when father finds his early vegetables nipped, but I often find their hoof prints down by the creek where they go to drink at night. Now comes a good level stretch, girls. Try and let the ponies out a little.”

“They don’t go a bit like the horses down East, do they?” Sue said. “I mean at home the horses on the river drive seem to either trot or buckle under, and their feet look bunched.”

“It’s because they have a shorter stride, and seem to go quicker,” Jean replied. “Now then, hang on, girls, and hold with your knees for your first gallop.”

Ginger, Jean’s pony, took the lead, and as he went by, the other ponies took his tracks. Before them spread the tableland in long sweeps of undulating range. The gray green of sage brush blended into distant waves of purple distance.

“See that line of hills yonder,” said Peggie, as they drew rein at last. She leaned forward in the saddle, and pointed to the hazy distances northwest, where the clouds seemed to trail their gray shadows along the hilltops. “From here the ground gets higher and more broken, doesn’t it, Jeanie? That’s Bear Lodge yonder. It looks as if it were part of the sky. The sheep are just about a mile from here. We can soon see the camp now.”

“Why is it so far from the ranch?” asked Polly.

“They travel about hunting the best feed. One spot lasts only a little while, and they keep traveling. Father says some herders will start their flocks in the spring, clear from the coast, and drive through the summer as far east as Idaho and Wyoming. They feed and fatten, and by the time they reach the market they are fat and ready to shear or kill. I like the sheep raising better than the cattle.”

“There’s a dog,” exclaimed Ted suddenly, pointing to the ridge before them, and sure enough a dog stood on it, head up, and staring.

“It’s Siwash,” gasped Peggie, out of breath after her gallop. “And he knows us, Jean, I declare.”

Siwash came to meet them in very friendly fashion. He was large and shaggy, with beautifully pointed ears, and a splendid ruff around his head.

“He used to be a puppy over at the ranch,” Jean explained. “You should have seen Peggie trying to raise the litter after the mother was killed in a wolf fight three winters ago. Mrs. Sandy has one of them now, and Siwash and his brother are here. Look, girls, yonder’s the camp.”

“Why, the wagon looks like a prairie schooner,” cried Ruth. It did, too, just like the pictures of the old-time wagons the pioneers crossed the plains in. It stood off to one side, with a cook-stove near it, conveniently set up. There was no tent. The herder did not notice them until they were near. He had a lamb on his lap, feeding it.

“Don’t stop, Randy,” Jean called. “We just rode over to look at the camp. The boys got home yesterday. I think they’ll be over soon to see you. What’s the matter with the little one?”

“Its mother won’t claim it,” Randy said, grinning, somewhat shy at finding himself the center of attention.

The girls slipped off their mounts, and hobbled them under Jean’s direction. It was their first attempt, but even Peggie said they had caught on to the trick of it very well.

Then they took a look around the camp. Not that there was much to see. Only the far-reached mass of sheep, their heads bent low to crop the grass, and only their backs visible like a lot of gray rocks. And as they munched, they moved forward, ever so little at a time, but still steadily forward.

“May we look in your wagon too, Randy?” asked Jean. “I want to show the girls how completely it is fitted up for a movable camp home.”

“Sure,” Randy told them, cheerfully. “Walk right in.”

“The door is up here in front, girls.” Jean led the way, and the girls climbed up in front. There was canvas stretched over bows to make a roof, and in the back end a window was cut. It was quite comfortable, with its bunk, and cupboard, and boxes. Randy had colored pictures tacked up here and there, and some old magazines lay in one corner on top of a pair of gray blankets.

“It makes me think of a gypsy wagon,” Polly said. “I saw one of them once at a camp up near Richmond. Aunt Evelyn lives there, you know, girls, and grandfather took me to visit her when I was about ten. The wagon was like this, only inside it was hung with yellow silk curtains, and lace over it.”

“These seats lift up like lockers,” said Peggie. “In the winter, they have a stove in here too, and it’s cosy, but pretty lonely. Sometimes there’s months and months when the herders never see a human being.”

“The boys are sure to ride over soon, Randy,” Jean promised when they were ready to leave on the home journey. “I’ll tell them to bring some stuff to read.”

“I’m out of baking powder, too,” Randy remarked, casually. “Can’t make decent pancakes without baking powder.”

“All right, I’ll remember,” laughed Jean, and they rode away.

“I should think he’d be terribly lonesome,” Ted said.

They Never Forgot That Picture

“Guess he is. Some herders get so they talk to the sheep, and I think all of them talk to their dogs. Maybe that’s why sheepdogs seem to know more than others.”

The girls were rather quiet on the ride back. They never forgot that picture, the lonely wagon, and far-reaching stone-gray masses of nibbling sheep, and Randy with the lamb on his lap, nursing it as tenderly as any baby. Day after day, for weeks at a time, he never saw any human being, nothing alive but Siwash and the other dog, and the sheep. Still he looked cheery, and contented, they thought, remembering Randy’s face, tanned and sunburnt to a brick red, and his close-shut mouth that had smiled down at the deserted lamb.

“It is much better for him here than if he were thirty or fifty miles out in the hills as some of the herders are,” said Jean. “I mustn’t forget to send over his baking powder.”

They arrived at the ranch about noon, and after dinner, Peggie agreed to show them her room and its treasures.

“It used to be Jeanie’s too, but now she’s away from home, I have it all to myself.”

It was the smaller bedroom at the large cabin. There were three all told, opening off the main sitting room. Peggie’s looked southeast over the valley. There was no plaster on the walls. There were just plain boards nailed on the uprights evenly. The ceiling was of boards too. At the small windows Peggie had hung short, pretty curtains of cream-colored cheese-cloth hemstitched by her own self. There was a deal table placed at a good angle near the best window light, and it served as a desk as well.

“Neil made that for me,” Peggie said with pride. “He can carve out of wood beautifully. It shuts up and locks, and I can put books along the top.”

“What books do you like, Peggie?” asked Polly, trying to read the titles.

“I like tales of travel, true tales I mean, and stories about children that live in the cities down East.”

“How funny that is. And we always want to read stories of girls who live ’way out West.”

“Neil made me my chairs too, and the washstand. He had to be careful about the chairs, but the stand is made of two soap boxes nailed together, and the top one has three partitions in it. I use it for a kind of bureau too. And the flounce is made from an old bed-quilt cover mother didn’t want any more. I ripped it up, and took out the lining, and made it all myself.”

“It’s dandy, Peggie,” Ruth exclaimed. “I think your pelts are the best of all though, and the Indian things.”

“The pelts should be put away in the summer time, but I like to see them around. They’re mostly gray wolf, and wild cat. Archie and Neil caught enough ’coons one year to make mother a whole coat, didn’t they, Jeanie? They were so proud over it that they wanted her to wear it all the time.”

“This skirt of doeskin belonged to Sally Lost Moon, girls,” said Jean, lifting down a beautifully fringed and beaded garment from the wall. “She beaded it herself when she was a girl. Feel how soft it is, like chamois skin. She told us she had moccasins to match, and a little short jacket.”

“How long it must have taken her to make it.”

“Yes, but when it was done, she had a spring suit that would last years, and always be in style in the hunting lands. Where is your skirt that Archie burnt for you, Peg?”

Peggie smiled, and found it, a little riding skirt of buckskin, fringed around the bottom, branded all over its surface with strange signs and symbols.

“Those are the brands of every outfit we know up here,” Jean told them. “Isn’t it a queer idea? Here is our brand, see—Cross and bar. This is Sandy’s, Double A.”

The girls thought it the most unique kind of ornamentation they had ever seen. The deep-toned brown of the burnt brands showed up richly against the cream of the buckskin.

“Mail for the girls,” called Don’s voice outside the window. “Peters brought it on his way east.”

“Jimmy Peters from Deercroft?” asked Jean, catching the letters. “Where’s he bound for?”

“Home,” replied Don, and went on.

“He’s one of the boys we saw at the station the day we came. I like him because he’s trying hard to get ahead. Sandy’s helping him.”

“He says the Bishop’s riding this way; says they’re going to meet him Saturday up past Badger Lake, and ride back with him. Mother thinks he’ll be here Sunday perhaps.”

“Is that the real Bishop?” asked Polly, eagerly.

“Indeed, we think he’s very real,” laughed Jean. “Wait till you see him. Let’s see who gets letters. Two for Polly, one for Sue and Ruth, post-cards for Isabel—oh, what a lot of them—and Ted too.”

“They’re mostly from the girls at the Hall,” Ted cried. “Isn’t that nice of them to remember us right away. I love to be missed, don’t you, Miss Jean?”

Polly had opened her letters, and was skimming them over. All at once she gave a quick exclamation.

“Girls,” she cried. “Who do you think is coming?”

“Miss Calvert,” Ruth said, soberly.

“Aunty Welcome,” Sue put in.

“You’ll never guess,” Polly declared delightedly. “And he won’t be so very far away from us, about ninety miles. He’s come up to dig for bones and things for the Museum, you know.”

“But, Polly, please, we don’t know!” protested Ted. “Tell us, can’t you?”

“Dr. Penrhyn Smith, our blessed old smuggler from Lost Island. Grandfather says here that the Doctor starts the first of next week. He says he will follow the trail of the dinosaur to the Jurassic Beds.”

“Last time he was hunting a polypus,” said Ruth.

“A dinosaur is an animal ninety feet long,” Sue added, thoughtfully. “Once they found one as small as a bantam.”

“Susan Randolph Warner,” exclaimed Polly, “you behave. We must respect any dinosaur, no matter what its size, if it brings the Doctor this way. He told grandfather he’d look in at us some day to be sure we were all right.”

“Sandy would love to meet him,” Jean said. “And so would father, and all of us.”

“I wonder where on earth the Jurassic Beds are,” Ruth meditated.

“At last,” cried Isabel, happily, “there’s one thing Grandma doesn’t know.”

“Well, Grandma’ll find out,” Ruth retorted, decidedly, “if I have to dig with the Doctor after prehistoric bones and things.”

Peggie was listening eagerly, the suit of buckskin half slipping from her lap, her chin on her hand.

“I know where there are old bones, great big ones, and they’re not cattle or buffaloes, either. They look like spools joined together.”

“Vertebræ,” Polly suggested. “Where, Peggie?”

“Don and I found them once long ago when we were hunting down in Lost Chance Gully.”

“Wouldn’t it be queer,” Jean said, dreamily, her hands clasped behind her head, “wouldn’t it be queer, girls, if poor old Zed spent his life hunting for gold, and something better than gold lay under his feet. We’ll go over and take a look at it, and then write to your Doctor Man, Polly.”

“Dear me,” exclaimed Ted, in her comical way, “I was just beginning to feel vacationized, and now maybe we’ll be following a mission before we know it, and have to pitch in and work hard digging out old bones seventeen million years old. Polly, you’re always starting something.”

But Polly only laughed.

“What would be the good of starting things if I didn’t have you girls to fall back on when it comes to finishing up,” she said.

“Leave it to Polly to make you feel all comfy and willing,” Sue put in. “Never mind, Polly, we will stick by you even if you take to shaking up Jurassic Beds, won’t we, girls?”

And the whole Ranch Club said “Aye.”

CHAPTER XVIII

ZED’S TREASURE TROVE

“The best rainbow trout we get around here are in Lost Chance Gulch,” remarked Mrs. Murray, the following morning at the breakfast table, and she looked up in surprise as a ripple of mirth went round the table.

“It isn’t anything, motherie,” Jean said, “only that we were all thinking of the Gulch, and then you spoke of it. Do you want some of the trout to-day?”

“It would make a fine mess for supper, Jeanie.”

“Then we’ll go over and get some. I think we’d better take the surrey, girls, instead of riding. We can drive up pretty close to the cabin, and it will be easier.”

About an hour later, they started off, with a well-filled lunch basket, and smaller ones for trout.

“I hope we’ll catch more prehistoric bones than fish,” said Sue, happily.

“That’s right, hoodoo us from the start,” Ted protested. “Hunt for your old bones. I shall fish diligently.”

It was pleasant riding in the old surrey, with Peanuts and Clip going at a lively pace over the road. They had to take a different route from the riding trail in order to find a way down into the gulch, but an hour’s journey brought them to the cabin where old Zed had lived and died. Through the deep gulch ran the creek, over rocks, and half-sunken trees here and there. Cottonwoods grew in the cool stretch of land between the high walls on either side of limestone, and blue shale, and sandstone. You could trace the course of the creek by the cottonwoods, and already their seeds had spread air-planes of down, and were turned into wind travelers.

As the land struck sharply into the towering palisades of rock, the pines grew thickly wherever they could find a foothold. Down in the gulch the bright sunlight never struck with full force. Both its heat and radiance were tempered by the green gloom of the spruces, and the great ferns that grew everywhere.

The door of the little low cabin was unlocked, and the girls entered it with curious feelings of respect, almost as if it had been a shrine.

There were three windows, and many shelves around the one room. A rock fireplace was built into the wall. There was an old pipe on the shelf above it, and a Bible bound in calf, the back stitched in place where it had been torn. Polly opened it, and read aloud the inscription on the fly leaf.

“Zeddidiah Reed, from his grandmother, Comfort Annabel Reed, on his twentieth birthday.”

“What a darling name,” exclaimed Isabel, “Comfort Annabel! Can’t you see her, girls, with a little lace cap on, and silk half mitts.”

“Silk half mitts. What would a pioneer’s wife be doing with silk half mitts,” said Ruth, teasingly. “That’s like the miner in Arizona, whose Boston cousin sent him fur ear muffs for a Christmas present.”

“No squabbling allowed down here,” protested Polly, seriously. “Here are all his books, girls. Wasn’t he careful of them? Here’s a pickaxe, too.”

“That’s an old-time poll pick,” said Jean, examining it. “You don’t find them any more. We’d better take it for investigations while we’re on the hunt for bones.”

“These upturned rocks that seem to stand on end,” Ruth said, when they left the cabin and started along the bed of the creek, “look like Stonehenge, or the rocks in the Garden of the Gods, don’t they, Miss Jean?”

“I think they may have come from the same era, or system,” answered Jean. “It is in the limestone, I know, that the remains of mammals were first discovered.”

“Sandstone and shales,” Ruth said. “It’s all the same age, but the systems are different.”

“How do you know so much about it?” asked Ted, suspiciously. “Have you been looking it up while we slept, grandma?”

“I love rocks,” Ruth replied, with her slow, whimsical smile, and little uplift of her chin as she looked through her glasses at them. “I think they are the first primer of the world, where we get our A B C’s, don’t you, Miss Jean?”

“Oh, won’t the Doctor have a good time prowling around with Ruth,” Polly exclaimed. She clambered ahead of the rest, trying to keep up with Peggie, who went like a mountain goat from rock to rock, and up the steep inclines.

“How about trout?” called Sue. “Who said trout?”

“We’ll have time on our way back. How far is it, Peg?” called Miss Murray.

“Most there now,” came back Peggie’s voice far up among the rocks.

At last they caught up with her. It was directly under a great, beetle-browed crag, with mats of ferns overhanging from its edges like lace. There had been a wash-out, or some sort of natural force that had carried away with it a mass of the hillside at this point. The great roots were exposed, with earth clinging to them still, and vegetation trying to get a foothold. But Peggie did not stop. As soon as she caught sight of the girls coming through the undergrowth towards her, she turned and dipped into the cavernous mouth of the great earth opening.

“This is what I meant looked like big bone spools,” she told them. “Don and I found them.”

Not a word did any of the others speak, but stood in the great opening, and stared at Peggie’s find. Still imbedded in the earth and rock they were, but they certainly were bones, and most gigantic bones at that. Polly and Ruth went up, and examined them closely, and so did Miss Murray.

“It isn’t a dinosaur,” Ruth said, judiciously. “It’s a something else.”

“I should say it was,” cried Sue. “If that’s only part of its backbone, I should not like to have had it chase me over the range. I think it’s a cave bear.”

“That is certainly a section of vertebræ, Polly,” Jean said. “How strange it is to stand and think how many years ago it was alive.”

“They are very valuable,” Polly replied.

“Leave it to Polly to find the red silk thread that leads to the pot of gold,” laughed Ted. “I know that’s a mixed-up metaphor, but who cares. Let’s go back and fish now, with peaceful minds, and send word to the Doctor that we have a specimen worth thousands.”

“We?” Sue repeated. “Goose! This belongs to Chief Sandy, and Peggie gets the reward for finding it. Isn’t that so, Miss Jean?”

Jean laughed, but said nothing. It really seemed so strange and unreal to her that she could not think directly what the end would be. She had known, of course, that Wyoming was the only known haunt of the prehistoric dinosaur in America, and had been duly proud of it. Also, she had always rather objected to New York walking away with the best specimen found, but Jean was State proud, as her mother said, and believed that the spoils belonged to the original owners on a strict basis of equity.

“We’ll ride over to the Alameda to-morrow, girls,” she said, “and tell Mrs. Sandy and the Chief, as Sue calls him. That’s a splendid name for him too, by the way, Sue. He is the Chief, and we’ll call him that.”

“Chief Scout,” suggested Polly.

“Yes. It will please him, too. Now let’s go back to the creek, and start our trouting.”

But Polly hesitated.

“I wish I could send the Doctor just a little piece of the bone, so he’d know for sure.”

“Send him some of the rock around it, and just a splinter,” suggested Ruth.

It was hard knocking pieces off, but they finally got a small bit of the blue shale, and a piece of the smaller bone, only a splinter, but enough to show an expert eye what was there.

Then back they climbed down the steep walls into the gulch again, and rested for a while in the cabin, as it had been a long and tiresome climb through the underbrush, and over the high rocks. Polly took a pail, and went after water, clear and cold from the spring they could hear falling back of the cabin. Old Zed had chosen his home site with an eye to comfort and convenience. After a good rest, and something to eat from the lunch basket, they started out to try their luck for the first time as trouters.

Peggie was chief instructor now, and enjoyed her office thoroughly. She showed the girls how to select their flies from the store Don had put in the baskets for them.

“I heard him talking about the flies, and I thought he meant real ones for bait,” said Isabel soberly, as she adjusted a neat little red snapper of a fly. “I haven’t as much respect for trout as I had if they’re taken in by these things.”

“You’ll respect them when you eat them,” said Peggie. “Come ’way out on the rocks the way I do, just as far as you can. Why don’t you take off your shoes and stockings, Polly? You may get a wetting before we’re through. I always do. Sue, don’t stand still. You have to troll, and move up-stream. Look at me.”

The girls watched her as she cast in, and played the fly lightly, choosing the best spots, and making her way from rock to rock up-stream slowly. Pretty soon they were deep into the delicious art of trolling, and each one at once developed individual taste in the proper way to catch trout. Polly was a regular gamester, like Peggie. With Ted following her, she chose the sun-dappled spots where the water was rather quiet, to cast in. Finally, Jean drew out the first trout, and they all went back to take a look at it, for, as Ruth said, in her dry way, it was a good idea always to know what you were fishing for, and how it looked.

After that, the basket began to grow heavier. Ruth and Jean took turns carrying it, slung in sportsmanlike fashion over their shoulders by a strap, and Peggie and Polly proved the best fishers. Ted and Sue were too fond of the rough water, although they also landed several trout.

After a time they went back to the cabin, and took the lunch basket out on the rustic log-bench Zed had made in front of his spring. It seemed as though a lunch had never tasted better than that one, Polly declared, and the conversation was a lively mixture of rainbow-trout tactics and the right way to dig out a possible dinosaur from its antediluvian resting place.

“Do you suppose it has been there since the flood?” asked Ruth, earnestly.

“Now, Ruth, I object,” protested Ted, eating her last cucumber and lettuce sandwich with relish. “Of course it’s been here since the flood, and long before. Let’s ask the Doctor when he comes when it is correct to hold a birthday anniversary for a dinosaur.”

“What mystic law,
Oh, Dinosaur,
Has cast you at our very door?”

said Polly, slowly picking out her rhyme, and Ted picked it up joyously.

“Give us thy paw,
Dear Dinosaur,
We’ll give it a friendly rub,—”

“Rub?” queried Ruth.

“I want it to rhyme with club. Now, you’ve knocked it all out of my head, and it’s so hard for me to get an inspiration.” Ted retired into a melancholy reverie, and kept repeating under her breath, “Rub-tub-club-dub-hub.”

“Time to go, girls,” Jean said. “Wait a minute. Let’s gather some wild flowers, and put in a tumbler on old Zed’s table.”

It was a beautiful tribute they left to the old man’s memory, wild roses, and ferns, and wild convolvulus mingling with the rich dark green of spruce boughs over the mantel. The only sounds in the gulch were the songs of birds, and the falling water. It was so beautiful and quiet, the girls could hardly bear to break the charm by leaving, but the sun was slipping westward, and it was a long trip back.

“We’ll ride over to the ranch to-morrow, and tell the Chief,” said Jean, and on that promise they went back, each in her own way building a day-dream out of the bones of the gulch treasure.

CHAPTER XIX

“MRS. SANDY”

Mrs. Murray did not think it wise to take the long ride the following day.

“Better rest up a wee bit, or you’ll be tired out before you’ve played,” she told them. “Jeanie had better get out the tent, and see if it needs any mending, if you’re going camping. I think there’s a rent on one side.”

“We can’t all mend tents,” said Ruth, when the tent was carried out of the shed, and unfolded. “Suppose Miss Jean and I mend this, and the rest write home letters. I heard Archie say he had to drive to Deercroft in the morning, so that would be a good chance to send them off. Sue, you put in a post-card for Annie May, will you? I promised her we’d send one.”

“I think that Isabel ought to take our pictures with her kodak, and then we’d send them in, and have them printed on post-cards, and let them be scattered among all interested and loving friends,” said Polly.

“Oh, wait, girls, and I’ll do it,” cried Isabel. “The light is fine this morning.”

So away she went after her kodak, and the morning was spent taking snap-shots. Isabel was photographer in chief, and she was especially good on composition, and getting attractive backgrounds.

Don led Jinks out, and three of the girls mounted him, and were taken with heads up, all laughing. Then Peggie was persuaded to put on her buckskin suit and sombrero, and with a rifle in her hand she made a splendid picture of a ranch girl. Then Prometheus was led forth, and obligingly stood up and begged with his head coaxingly on one side.

“Just as if he was begging for the Bishop’s dinner, the rogue,” said Peggie.

Sally Lost Moon, after much explaining and pleading, finally came out of the cook-house, and was stationed where the buttes loomed up behind her, and everything looked unsettled and primeval, Isabel said impressively. Then just as all was set, Isabel levelled the camera, and Sally turned and ran as if a bear were at her heels.

“Shoot, shoot,” was all she would say, and shook her head vigorously. “No shoot me; no shoot me!”

“Oh, Sally, please,” begged Polly. “Look, I’ll give you my silver bracelet if you’ll let us take you.”

She drew off the bracelet from her own wrist, and Sally looked at it longingly, jingling its silver bangles happily. Finally, she put it on her wrist, and went out to try again.

“I’ll stand near, Sally,” called Mrs. Murray encouragingly, and so, surrounded by reserve force, Sally faced the camera for the first time in her life.

“Won’t it be fun to show her a real picture of herself?” laughed Polly, when it was over.

“I don’t know whether it will or not,” Jean answered. “The Indians are so suspicious and superstitious that they are easily scared. She might think you were making bad medicine for her. Two years ago, some tourists took snap-shots of some Shoshone babies, and the squaws grabbed the camera, and smashed it. They said the white women were drawing out the spirits, and shutting them up in the black box to carry away with them.”

“Oooo!” cried Sue, “‘An’ the gobble’uns will get you if you don’t watch out!’”

“Now, all of you group around Miss Jean, and look happy,” ordered Isabel, so the last picture of all was the group, and a jolly, care-free lot of vacationers they looked, too.

“Let’s go down for a swim, then back to dinner, then write all our letters this afternoon,” Polly suggested, and they carried out this programme for the day.

It was worth resting up for, they all declared the next morning, when Peggie called them before five. Breakfast was ready by the time they were dressed, and a little past six, they were all in the saddle, ready for their long ride overland to the Alameda ranch. It was quite an imposing cavalcade that started out, two by two at first, and then Indian file as the road narrowed in places. This time they rode due west, along the river road, through willows and tall cottonwoods.

After about four miles, Jean led the way up a rocky defile, and they struck an irregular ridge of tableland. Here the rocks began to assume all kinds of queer, fantastic shapes, and Peggie told the names of them, as they came to each—Jumping Rabbit, Columbus, Praying Chief, Sleeping Bear, Double Towers, and so on.

“We used to take a lunch when we were little, and come here to play for a day in the summer,” Jean said. “See those rocks away over yonder? Don’t they resemble some wonderful eastern city? They look like the cliff cities of Arizona and New Mexico, too.”

“Maybe they have been, sometime,” Polly exclaimed, reining up a minute to take a good look at the strange sight. “It’s like discovering a dead petrified city, isn’t it?”

“I wish you had the time and money too, girls, to visit the Yellowstone this trip. If the vacation were longer, we could take the time, and drive across country to it. Father took us that way once. I remember when we came to the great Absoraka Range, with forty snow-capped peaks, like a tremendous wall from north to south. It makes you feel so little just to look at those wonders.”

There was silence for a minute, then Ruth said, soberly:

“I heard a story once in church, and I never forgot it. Our rector at Queen’s Ferry told it. It was about two very old mountains that wakened once in a thousand years, and wished each other good-morning. And they would say it this way.

“‘Good-morning, brother, how goes the world?’

“‘Well, brother, well,’ the other mountain would say, and after a time they would fall happily to sleep. But one day they wakened, and one mountain noticed a lot of little specks running around the ground at his base, so when his brother greeted him, he was disturbed, and said:

“‘I cannot say if it goes well or not, brother. There are a lot of little ants or some kind of insects running around me. They seem to be building things of little pieces of trees. And they fight, and make a lot of useless noise. I do not like them.’

“‘Never mind,’ said the other one. ‘They are bothering me too, but let us go to sleep and maybe they will be gone when we wake.’

“And it went on like that for ever so long, thousands of years, and every time the mountains wakened, they were troubled by the little specks that were always building and fighting, and making a noise. Then one morning the mountains awakened, and all was very quiet and happy.

“‘Good-morning, brother, how goes the world?’ said one, and the other was so glad to be able to answer:

“‘Well, brother, well. All those little fretful specks they call people have gone from the face of the earth, and the world is at peace with God again.’ That’s all, but doesn’t it make you respect the everlasting hills, Miss Jean?”

“Indeed it does, Ruth,” Jean replied. “That is a lovely story. I think that Mrs. Sandy would enjoy it, too. Be careful when you come to the terraces here. Keep the ponies close to the side of the bluff.”

They had come to great natural terraces of rock and sandstone, graduating down from the trail, far to the river bed below; and here the quiet river that flowed past the ranch had turned into a turbulent, dashing torrent between narrow bluffs. From the road, they could not see it, but the sound of its rushing came booming up to them. All at once Ted cried out:

“Oh, there’s a cat in that tree, Miss Jean. Here, kitty, kitty, kitty!”

“Never mind calling it, Ted,” laughed Jean. “That’s a bobcat. There it goes now. Did you see its tail? They’ll hardly ever hurt any one unless attacked first, although the boys watch for them at night, if they have to go up through the piney trails. I think we’ll see some deer when we start down the next hill. They are usually out in numbers here. Don’t talk, because they can scent us and hear us very far off.”

Quietly, the little band rode on, eyes on the alert for the turn in the road, and view of the deer, and they were rewarded by such a sight as they had never seen before. Below them stretched beautiful fertile fields. A mountain cascade in the distance fell like a gorgeous, captured cloud, so filmy and pearly white it looked. And down in the grazing ground was a herd of deer. The girls watched them for some time, delighted at the gentle beauty of the does and little ones, and the stately buck, who every now and then would rear up his many pronged horns, and listen, nose to the wind.

“I don’t think they will mind us, if we ride on, girls,” Jean said, but the deer had a different opinion. As soon as they caught sight of the ponies and riders, they were off over the fields and into the forest.

It was nearly ten when they reached the Alameda ranch. Peggie and Polly rode ahead of the rest, and let out a clear, gay shout when they came in sight of it. It lay in the valley far below, in a nest of trees.

“How did they ever find enough trees in one spot to make it so pretty?” asked Ruth.

“Sandy planted them there years ago, before he went East after his bride,” Jean told her. “He used to call it his Honeymoon Lodge in those days. How glad Mrs. Sandy will be to see us.”

And she was, too, more full of pure gladness than she had been in years, she told the girls. They found her down at the corral with Sandy himself, both of them busy with some calves. They heard the shouts from far off, and Mrs. Sandy hurried to meet them.

The first thing that startled the girls was her marked resemblance to the old oil painting at Calvert Hall. There was the same happy, inviting face, surrounded by little bobbing curls, and though the curls were gray now, you hardly noticed it, they formed so pretty a frame to the sweet, pink-tinted face.

“I’ve been looking for you every day, dears,” she said, kissing each one of the girls, as they slipped from their ponies to greet her. “And this is Isabel Lee, Phil Lee’s daughter. You have your father’s mouth and chin, dear. I knew him well. What did you say, Jeanie—Sue Warner? The Warners of Colebrook? Bless my heart, I have danced at many of your grandmother’s parties there, Sue. Ruth, and Edwina, I’m sure I’ve met some of your families too, for you both look familiar to me, although Sandy would declare it was the rose-colored glasses of memory I was using.” Tears sparkled on her lashes as she turned last of all to Polly. “Oh, my dear,” she said, tenderly, “do the lilies still bloom as fair at Glenwood as they did forty years ago? They were gold-colored with ruby hearts.”

Polly nodded her head eagerly.

“Uncle Peter told me you loved them. There’s just Uncle Peter and grandfather left now of the ones who can remember you at our place. Mandy and Aunty Welcome are both pretty young, you know.”

“I know,” laughed Mrs. Sandy. “Welcome must be about forty-five, isn’t she? And Mandy I don’t remember at all.”

“I’ll look after your horses, Jeanie,” Mr. MacDowell said. “You won’t do anything now but talk Queen’s Ferry, and it’s a bully thing that Mrs. MacDowell can at last.”

They went slowly up to the home that Sandy had built so many years ago for the home-coming of his bride. It was prettier than the other ranch houses the girls had seen, more like a bungalow. There was a deep foundation of gray rocks, and the porch was built on columns of the rock too, and crimson ramblers grew all over it just as they did South. There was a piano in the big living-room, and everywhere an indefinable touch of something that seemed alien to this great, happy-go-lucky new land: a quiet elegance and air of repose, something that made the girls think at once of the atmosphere of Calvert Hall.

“We have lots to tell you, dear,” exclaimed Peggie, reaching up to give Mrs. Sandy a hearty bear hug. “We’ve discovered something in old Zed’s gulch, and we’ve got a new name for Sandy.”

“The Chief,” Ted added.

“Hail to the Chief!” began Polly, merrily. “Doesn’t it suit him?”

“It will please him greatly,” said Mrs. Sandy, proudly, and when the girls saw how her face brightened at his name, they began to understand somewhat, one very good reason why Diantha Calvert had come out West to be a rancher’s wife.

There were so many things to see that day, the time passed before they realized it. Ted and Sue rambled around with the Chief, as they called him, at his heels from the corral to the wagon sheds and back again, while the other girls stayed with Mrs. Sandy, and listened as she told stories of the early days.

“Were you never afraid at all?” asked Ruth.

“Dear, what would you think of an Old Dominion girl who dared to be afraid? Besides, the Indians trusted Sandy. He never betrayed their confidence, nor misled them. Many times he acted as peacemaker between them and the army, trying to make the way free from war for them, and trying to make them understand how resistless the march of progress was. Many of the settlers had been murdered, and their places burned, but we were not molested, even by the Sioux. I can remember one day, I was alone here. Sandy had been south at Fort Washakie for several weeks. It was early spring, and the kitchen door was open. I was making bread, I know, and had just opened the oven door to take out the loaves when I heard a step on the doorsill, and saw a shadow on the floor.”

“Indians?” exclaimed Polly.

“Yes. It was an Indian. He stood looking around for a minute, and I didn’t act frightened at all. I thought he might have a message from Sandy for me. Then he grunted, and held out his hand for the bread. There were about eight loaves in all. I held them out to him, and he took every single one. And he gave me this in exchange.”

She went over to an old dresser and took from a drawer a belt, beaded richly, with elk teeth dangling in short fringes from it.

“Isn’t it lovely,” the girls cried. “Why did he do it?”

“Because he was hungry, I think. We never knew. But if I had refused him the bread, or cried out, or done anything that was not friendly, he might have killed me. I don’t know, I may be wrong,” she went on, gently, with a happy, faraway look on her sweet old face, “but I’ve found it a truth, children; if you give kindness, you receive kindness, if you give love, you get love in return, even with savages. It is the brotherliness of humanity that is the most ancient law of all. It is the law of the human pack, as Sandy says.”

“Oh, girls, pack!” exclaimed Polly suddenly. “That makes me think of animals. We’re forgetting about the bones.”

“Bones? What does the child mean?” said Mrs. Sandy.

Then they coaxed her down to where the Chief sat explaining to Ted and Sue the difference between the Sioux and the Crows. And they told of the find down in Zed’s gulch. Sandy listened with steady, unblinking eyes, and brows drawn together a little.

“It must be some bear skeleton, dear,” Mrs. Sandy said. “Or maybe a buffalo, don’t you think so, Sandy?”

“Not if it’s embedded in the rock, lass. Show me how big it is, Peggie.”

And obediently Peggie measured off on the bar-post the height of the bones as close as she could guess at it.

“If it is a dinosaur, or anything like it, Chief,” Ted said, “it must be about ten million years old.”

“Don’t talk so, child, it sounds downright reckless,” hushed gentle Mrs. Sandy, just as Miss Calvert herself might have done. “Was it a monster of the deep before the flood, Sandy, dear, like the leviathan?”

“Now you’ve got me, Di,” cried the big old fellow, merrily. “How can I say for sure? When they find a toad or a frog asleep in the middle of a rock cliff, do they wake him up, and ask if he was one of the identical brood that plagued Pharaoh? There’s things that lie close hidden in the grand, still dawn of creation, and we small humanlings cannot hope to pierce the veil, or to understand the how and the why of it. But if there is a monster of the deep or of the plains either, that’s hiding away in old Zed’s gulch, we’ll haul him out, girls, and find out what he’s worth. I doubt not that he’d enjoy a sniff of fresh air at that, eh, Polly?”

Polly leaned forward, her brown eyes sparkling.

“Then I had better send word to the Doctor to come and see what it is,” she said. “I dug up a piece of the bone to-day, and sent it to him, and some of the rock around it.”

“Good. I’ll ride over on Monday to look at it. You had better come too, to show me where it lies.”

They gladly promised to meet him at the gulch on Monday, and after another look around the ranch, they were ready for home. The Chief was more proud of his horses than anything else. He had raised a special breed from the pure bred wild horses of the plains, and crossed it with pure Arab.

“And they’re the finest bred horses in America to-day,” he declared. “When you come over next time, I’ll take you up and show you them. None of these high-hipped Indian pony animals, with joints like soup bones—”

“Sandy, boy!” protested Mrs. Sandy.

Sandy’s gray eyes twinkled at the motherly reproof in her tone. It was plain to be seen he was her big boy.

“Well, an’ they do look like it, too, Di—but forgive me. Come and see my beauties, when you can.”

“Could we ride them?” asked Polly.

“I doubt it, Polly. Never a saddle have they borne on their backs. When I came West forty years ago, I looked about me, and I saw three things that made me worship in my soul the Maker of things, an eagle in its flight, a mountain at sunrise, and a wild horse. I couldn’t catch the eagle, and I couldn’t snare the sunrise, but I have some of the horses for my own, and it rests my eyes to look at them.”

“Oh, girls, we have time, and we may not get over again,” began Isabel, pleadingly, but it was so late that Jean said no. They would be over before it was time to go back East, surely. So they all kissed Mrs. Sandy good-bye, and only Polly caught the words that she said, as she kissed Jean.

“Is Honoria well?”

“Very well,” said Jean.

“Did she send me any message, Jeanie, dear?”

The tears came in Jean’s eyes.

“No, ma’am, none.”

Mrs. Sandy sighed, and smiled.

“Ah, well, in His good time,” she said. “We must bide it. Good-bye, dear.”

And all the way home Polly pondered.

CHAPTER XX

THE BISHOP’S VISIT

“They’re going to open up the old Beaver Creek schoolhouse Sunday for services,” said Don, that night at supper. “Jimmie Peters went over, and cleaned it up, and the Bishop will be here Sunday sure.”

“Why don’t they have a real chapel?” asked Isabel.

“There are only about nine people inside of thirty miles who would come,” said Mr. Murray.

“But nine would be enough,” exclaimed Polly. “The whole Church started with only twelve.”

“Polly, that’s very true,” Jean said, earnestly. “I had not thought of that myself.”

“If the nine were strong, and really wanted a chapel, they could have it. Just as you told us about that priest who traveled through the wilderness to hold services for the Indians, and when they drove him away, he went up on the great rock, and held them anyway, and after a time the Indians came near. If people knew for sure that services would be held every single Sunday at the schoolhouse, wouldn’t they come?”

“I think they would,” said Peggie. “I’m sure they would. Polly, you’re a missionary.”

“Let’s speak to the Bishop about it,” said Ruth. “We could call it our mission, girls, and send things out West from Trinity Church for it.”

“Land o’ rest, lassie, don’t you think you’ve started enough to look after,” exclaimed Mrs. Murray, smilingly. “What with disturbing the remains of poor animals that have lain in peace since before the flood, and riling Sandy all up over it, don’t you think you can rest a bit?”

“Oh, but we love to start things, Mrs. Murray, dear, and finish them too, which is something, you know. I’m going to ask the Bishop if it could happen. Is he very dignified, and stately? Our Bishop is. At Confirmation when he stands in the chancel, with his beautiful silvery hair, and splendid old face, it seems to me,” Polly said softly, “as if I can almost see behind him the long wonderful procession back to the very first Apostles.”

“But do you remember, dear,” answered Mrs. Murray, “that those same Apostles were chosen by their Master for the fight when they were young men, and strong. So it is to-day with the fields where they need husbandmen who can stand the heat and labor of the day. Our Bishop—God hold up his hands!—is still young, and he can outride any man in four counties, when it comes to endurance. They say that when he passes a herd, all the cattle nod their heads in greeting, but that is only a saying among the lads on the range. They think he’s a fair wonderful man.”

So it was no wonder the girls looked forward to Sunday. Every day they went for a good long ride with Jean or Peggie. Sometimes it was to Picture Rocks, sometimes over to the Indian graves, sometimes to the battlefield where Crazy Horse had made one of his last stands against the white troops. The first Sunday they spent very quietly. Mr. Murray read prayers after breakfast, and Jean played the hymns on the little cottage organ in the living room at the main cabin. It gave the girls a realization of what the kingdom of home meant out in the wilderness, this gathering of the little Murray clan about the father; the boys, tall and brawny, leading in the responses, the girls carrying the singing.

“Have you always done that?” asked Sue, later in the day. “I think it’s splendid, to hold service even by yourself.”

“We have to if we want service, and what’s the difference? I think if you were all alone, and still worshiped God, and held his day sacred, it would be just the same as if you had gone to church,” said Peggie, sensibly. “As long, of course, as there was no church to go to. We always do.”

There was much trout fishing that week, too. Ted and Sue learned to cast and play for the speckled beauties as warily as any of the rest, and many a delicious feast they had when they came back with a good catch. There was very little fishing along the river, and the fish were plentiful. Polly and Ruth found one quiet, dark pool below the rapids where they seemed to love to bask in the dappled water.

Evenings they would sit and listen to Mr. Murray tell stories of the early days; of times when the little, hard-earned bunches of cattle would be found butchered by some marauding band of unfriendly Indians; and sometimes of stolen horses, snatched away by young braves on the path for plunder.

One day the Chief, as they always called him now, drove over from the Alameda ranch, and stayed through the afternoon and evening at the Murrays’, and then the girls heard wonderful tales of the old trails and scouts. Once Polly turned with eager flushed face to Mrs. Sandy, and asked impulsively:

“How could you leave Queen’s Ferry and come ’way out here when it was so wild?”

The faintest bit of a blush rose to Diantha’s cheeks, and she said:

“He asked me to, child.”

“Do you know,” Polly said later, when the girls were by themselves in the old cabin, “sometimes I just want to ask her right out why there is any trouble between dear old Miss Calvert and herself. They make such a darling pair of sisters, don’t you know, girls?”

“Better not lift the sacred veil of family secrets, Polly,” Isabel replied, solemnly. “You never can tell what sort of a skeleton will pop out at you and do a war dance.”

“There simply couldn’t be a skeleton there,” insisted Polly. “Two quiet, dear, well-bred old ladies from Virginia, who won’t speak to each other! Why, I don’t think it’s Christianlike, and here Miss Honoria trots off to Trinity every Sunday and is Chairman of the which and t’other committees, and Mrs. Sandy is the Lord’s right hand out here, Mrs. Murray declares. Surely, it isn’t right for them to scrap and fall out just like we girls do.”

“Ask her about it, Polly; you won’t be happy until you find out,” said Ruth placidly, and Polly smiled and said nothing more, but she made up her mind then that she certainly would ask, the first quiet chance she got.

The very last day of that week, Archie rode over after the mail, and there was a letter from the Doctor in answer to Polly’s. He had been greatly interested in the news of her discovery, he wrote. As near as he could figure it out, off hand, the ranch valley, and range to the north where the gulch lay, belonged to the same sandstone drift he had proposed working in about two hundred miles west.

“How can it be the same?” asked Sue. “Two hundred miles!”

“If he says so, it must be so,” Polly replied, decidedly. “He says the bone is apparently the same character and formation as other fossils found up here, and he will come up himself next week, and take a look at it.”

“What’s that noise?” asked Ted suddenly, going to the open door, and listening. There was no light inside, but out of doors the stars shone clearly. They listened, almost holding their breath to hear the far-off sound of music. It was some one singing far up on the road, and all at once Polly whispered:

“Maybe it’s that herder coming after his baking powder.”

They all laughed, and then listened again. Nights were their one time now for consultation and conclave, and they usually enjoyed a good talk after they reached the little guest cabin.

“It sounds like somebody singing hymns,” Ruth said. “They hear it too, over at the other house. I can see lights moving.”

Just then the door opened in the home cabin, and Jean came out.

“Girls,” she called clearly. “Here comes our Bishop. That’s Jimmie singing to let us know they’re near.”

Then they caught the melody, and words too, as the two horsemen rounded the last bend in the road around old Topnotch, and came down the valley. Clear and full, Jimmie’s voice sounded as he sang,

“Guide me, O Thou great Jehovah,
Pilgrim through this barren land,
I am weak, but Thou art mighty,
Hold me in Thy powerful hand.”

“That’s Jimmie’s favorite,” Jean said, softly. “He used to herd for father a few years ago, and you could hear him singing nights as he rode round the cattle. He’s with the Big Bow outfit now, and they call him the singing cowboy.”

“Where did he learn it all?” asked Polly. “He sings as if he just knew the right way to.”

“He used to be a choir boy in Denver. I don’t know what we’d do up here without him. He always rides over to meet the Bishop, and looks after everything for him.”

“Isn’t it queer?” Ruth said, all at once. “People aren’t very different any more than birds or animals are. Here you find a cowboy singing hymns and canticles, and with all the East and South to choose from, Miss Diantha married a Westerner who was a scout and rancher. Wouldn’t it be queer if some day we find out we really are all brothers and sisters in one family?”

“Ruth, pay attention. You’re dipping into social economy, and that doesn’t come until you reach college,” laughed Jean.

When the Bishop and Jimmie rode up, all were out to greet them, and he did seem strange to the girls, this young Bishop with the round, hearty voice, and quick laugh, who swung from his saddle as easily as Jimmie himself, and shook hands with them all. When he came into the low-ceiled living room, he had to stoop a little, or surely his head would have touched the lintel. Tall he was, and young, and broad-shouldered, with one of the kindliest and noblest faces that the girls had ever seen, they thought, as he smiled down on them that first night.

“And you’ve ridden far, too, sir,” said Mrs. Murray, bustling about to prepare supper for the travelers. “We thought maybe you and Jimmie’d stay up at Dickerman’s ranch over night.”

“I wanted to get home, Mrs. Murray,” said the Bishop. “When I strike any point within fifty miles of the Crossbar, I feel the homing instinct strongly. You make it so very pleasant for me here.”

Jimmie stood over in the corner, his hands clasped behind him, a slender, curly-haired lad, with eyes like a collie’s, and the way they looked at the Bishop told the girls Jimmie’s opinion of him plainer than words could do.

The next morning they were up early, and after prayers they started out for the little schoolhouse where services were to be held. It was the same one the Murray children had attended when they were small, but now only Peggie took the long ride over the hills.

“And you’re not a bit afraid?” asked Isabel, as the miles stretched out before them. “Isn’t it lonely in the winter?”

“Oh, yes, a little bit, but you don’t mind it after a while,” said Peggie cheerfully. “This year it’s closed because there aren’t enough children to carry the expenses. We’ve had such good times here. One Christmas, when Jeanie taught us, we wanted Santa Claus and a Christmas tree so much, and she said we could have one. So we all went out, and picked out our tree, and one of the Dickerman boys cut it down, and we pulled it back ourselves.”

“Like bringing in the Yule log, wasn’t it?” said Polly.

“Yes. We had such fun trimming it, and there was a Santa Claus too.”

“Where will you go to school this year?”

“I don’t know. There isn’t any place now, unless I go down to Deercroft and board, and mother doesn’t want me to do that.”

“Why don’t you come back with us to Calvert?” asked Polly. “You’re old enough. Crullers started when she was twelve. Oh, Peggie, why don’t you try to? It would be lovely.”

Peggie said nothing for a minute, but rode along, her face bowed a little, her eyes full of longing.

“I’d like to go,” she said finally, “but I don’t think it’s my turn yet. The boys come first, and then when they’re through college, they’ll help me.”

No more was said then, but the thought remained with Polly, and, as the Admiral always said, once a really good and interesting thought had taken root in Polly’s mind, it was almost certain to grow and bear fruit.

The little schoolhouse stood at the fork of the river, a rough log cabin, with some spruces growing back of it. What impressed the girls was the instinctive sense of holiness that seemed to enfold the whole place. The horses were hobbled, and a few minutes later Mr. and Mrs. Murray arrived in the surrey. They had stopped at one point in the journey, and turned off towards an out-of-the-way ranch, to pick up some neighbors, Sam Brumell and his two sisters.

“Not that they’re church folks, ’cause they’re not,” Mrs. Murray had said, in her bright, cheery way, “but I know it does ’Lisbeth Brumell a pile of good just to feel she has touched the Hand of the Father again in the dark, and it won’t hurt Sam any to listen to the Words of Life, either, nor poor blind Emily, so we’ll just stop and gather them in, father.”

There were others who wanted to be gathered in too, that day. Strangest of all, to the girls, was the group of cowboys, friends and “pardners” of Jimmie’s from the Big Bow outfit, who had ridden over twenty miles to do honor to Jimmie and his Missionary Bishop. And there were several families from outlying ranches, some with children. Mr. and Mrs. Sandy arrived last of all, because as Sandy explained later, Diantha had stopped to pick all her roses for the altar.

Jimmie had prepared the way as best he could. The desk was pushed back against the blackboard, and covered with a fair linen cloth, and the Bishop’s beautiful Cross stood on it, with the white roses on either side. There was no organ, but Jimmie and the Murray children led the singing, as they were familiar with the canticles and responses, and the girls joined in. The sermon was not at all like a sermon. It was the warmest, tenderest, best kind of a talk. The tall young Bishop stepped down from the little platform that had served as chancel, and talked directly to them, calling them by name.

“I hear,” he said, “there has never been a Confirmation here at the Forks. Then we’ll have one in the spring. There are plenty of children to gather for this, and grown people too. Donald and Margaret Murray, James here, and the Dickerman twins—”

’Lisbeth Brumell rose determindedly in her seat at this point. She was a little woman, with a sad, tired face, the face of a woman who had found the wilderness too hard to bear.

“I know it ain’t right for me to speak up during service,” she said, brokenly, “but I only wanted to say you can count me in too, Bishop, when you round up the lot.”

“Well, I’m glad poor ’Lisbeth got that off her mind,” said Mrs. Murray, thoughtfully, after they had returned home. “She’s always wanted a staff to lean on, and it will make her daily grind easier.”

“What’s the matter with her, Mrs. Murray?” asked Isabel.

“Lonesomeness, most likely. She made up her mind to be lonesome all her life, and she was a terribly disappointed girl.”

“How?”

“She didn’t marry the lad she wanted to. He went over Thunder Ridge twenty-two years ago, in the big blizzard, with fourteen hundred cattle. I’m glad she’s going to find rest at last.”

“Girls, girls,” exclaimed Polly, her eyes bright with excitement, when they started for a walk after dinner that night. “Grandfather was saying not long ago that people were getting tired of churches, and out here—”

“They’re all ready and waiting for the round-up,” finished Ted, shortly, but fervently. “I’ll never forget to-day, or the cowboy’s voice when he sang the ‘Inflammatus’ without any accompaniment.” And Ted began to sing it softly.

“When Thou comest, when Thou comest to the judgment,

Lord, remember now Thy people—”

“What’s that about the Shepherd and Bishop of souls?” asked Sue.

“You’re all of you sentimental,” Ruth interposed soberly. “All you need to do is to remember that little schoolhouse at the Forks when you get back home, and do something for it. If it’s not going to be used for a school any more, it could be turned into a chapel, and services held there regularly.”

“Who’d read them?”

“I think father would, or Jimmie, or maybe Sandy, if they could be appointed lay readers,” said Peggie. “I think so.”

“Polly, you’ve started something else,” laughed Isabel, but Polly only smiled. She was too happy to talk.

CHAPTER XXI

A DAY AT THE ALAMEDA

The next day they rode over again to the Alameda ranch to see the Chief’s horses of which he was so proud. By this time, as Ted said, they were so accustomed to riding horseback that it seemed queer to walk around.

“Ted, that sounds for all the world like some old sailor who didn’t like dry land,” said Sue. “Anybody’d think, to hear you, that you were born and bred on a ranch.”

“Wish I had been,” Ted flung back over her shoulder, as she rode past. “Peggie, will you change places with me? You go back to school, and let me stay here.”

“Have to ask mother that,” Peggie replied, shaking her head.

“Have you asked her, yet, really, Peggie?” said Polly, who was next to her in the file of horses. But Peggie shook her head.

“Not yet. I mustn’t. It isn’t my turn. Don comes next.”

But Polly made up her mind privately, to ask Jean. If the skeleton turned out to be worth anything, the Doctor would be the first to purchase it for the Institute at Washington, and Peggie was the finder, so the money would be hers and the Chief’s, as it was his property. The Admiral always said that Polly was the most rapid builder of air castles he had ever known, but that never disconcerted nor discouraged Polly.

It was the first time since their arrival at the ranch that Jean had let them ride without her, but with the extra harvesters that week, she felt she must help her mother. Sally Lost Moon was willing, but slow and a poor cook.

“Peggie knows the way over as well if not better than I do,” Jean had said, that morning. “Take the trip easily, girls. I think you’ll be all right.”

Peggie and Polly rode together, and the other girls behind them. It was a merry cavalcade of demoiselles, as Mrs. Sandy put it, that trotted up to the Alameda that morning. After they had turned the ponies into the corral, the whole day lay before them. They went far up the back road with Sandy himself, first of all, about a mile, until they came to the horse range. Carefully selected, it was, out of all the land he owned, chosen for shelter and good water and grass. Here he had built a great corral in the center, with feed-sheds for winter. Here grazed fifty beautiful mares, horses that had never felt a saddle touch their glossy arched backs.

“What do you think of them?” asked the Chief, proudly, as he rested one foot on a fence rail, and looked at the lot with loving eyes. “They are my special hobby, girls. I always liked a fine horse even when I was a youngster, but I never saw any to compare with my beauties over yonder. I keep weeding them out, and breaking in the ones that don’t seem fit for the royal family, as it were. They all know me, too. Watch.” He put his fingers to his lips and blew a shrill, far-reaching whistle. Every neck lifted at the call, heads were turned towards him, and some whinnied anxiously. Then one broke into a run, and the rest followed.

“Oh, oh, just look at them come,” cried Polly, enthusiastically. “See their manes float on the wind, and how light they are.”

“Many a time I’ve come across a drove of them feeding on a good plain, and have watched until my own horse would give the alarm to them, and off they’d all go like that. It was hard catching them, and hard breaking them afterwards, but those that did, got horses with the speed of the wind in their hoofs, and the strength of the hills in their muscles. The desert breed is the only one that matches it, I’m thinking.”

“Who takes care of them?” asked Ted.

“The boys. I’ve five of them. I used to try to do it all myself, but they fare better and so do I, if I keep away. Besides, there’s plenty to be doing down at the home ranch. Over yonder, a few miles more, are the cattle, and some more of the boys. There’s about five hundred head. I used to have a larger herd, in the old Texan trail days, but there are few real ranches left now. They’re all stockmen and farmers. I’ve got some of the last long-horned steers in the county, now, out yonder, and when I settled here, they were all Texans. I sold some youngsters to a farmer in Iowa, I remember, for yoke work, and he wrote back after he’d got them home, that he didn’t know what to do, because their horns were so wide he couldn’t get them into the barn. ‘Widen your barn door, you nester,’ I wrote him. ‘Don’t cut the horns. Cut the barn.’ And he did too.” The Chief laughed heartily over the recollection, and they all went back to where Mrs. Sandy was watching for them on the broad, cosy porch.

“Do just what you want to, girls,” she told them. “Go where you feel like going, and play that it is home for a day. Ted, I saw you looking longingly at the collection of hunting knives and guns in the long dining-room. Why don’t you take the girls in to see them? They are all trophies of Sandy’s Indian campaigns,” she added with pride.

There seemed to be no kitchen to speak of, in sight. The long sunny room at the back of the house was a great living-room and dining-room too. There was a huge rock fireplace that reached clear up to the rafters, and the walls were decorated with all sorts of treasures of the Chief. On one side were specimens of Indian beadwork. There were hunting bags made of leather with beautifully-beaded fronts, the beads woven in solidly in threads instead of being fastened to the cloth or leather. There were hunting jackets, heavily fringed and beaded richly, with elk teeth and eagle feathers, and bear claws fastened to them ornamentally.

“Here is the headdress of old Red Buck, a Sioux Chief,” Sandy told them. He held it up so they could see that it was as tall as he was, a great cascade of eagle feathers. “The day I saw him in battle, he wore nothing but this, and another strip about his waist, but he was so heavily painted that he looked fully dressed. The others turned their war ponies about, and ran at the finish, when they saw the cavalry closing in on them, but he stood his ground, and stood yelling defiance at us, and shooting arrows until a bullet caught him, and he fell back from his pony.”

“What did the pony do?” asked Polly.

“Stood over his master, with lowered head, and whinnied to him. We found the two of them that way, and I stopped to take the headdress. He was a brave old lad, that redskin. I honor him for standing his ground alone with a whole troop of United States cavalry swooping down on him. That elk head up yonder is the biggest ever shot in our section. He used to come down and fairly taunt us early settlers with his royal kingship of these hills and valleys. I got him one moonlight night up at Ghost Lake, about seven miles above here, after nearly a week’s stalking.”

“Aren’t the moccasins pretty?” Isabel exclaimed, quick to notice anything fanciful. There must have been twenty or thirty pairs dangling from the wall on nails.

“Those there,” said the Chief smiling, “belong to my wife. They are her special reward of merit from the women folks in the tribes, twenty or thirty years ago, and more, I guess. Some of them were given to me before we were married. They’d come around and find me building this cabin, and I’d tell them just what it was for, and they’d go away and think about it. Then after a time, one would return, and bring me something for a peace offering to my bride. Mostly they brought moccasins, and they are certainly worked fine, those honeymoon slippers.”

“Isn’t this a papoose case?” asked Ruth.

“Yes. An Indian girl named Laughing Flower left that here one day. Her baby was pretty sick, I guess, and she didn’t like the way the old women and medicine men fussed over it, so she brought it over here to Diantha. It couldn’t walk, and they had told her at the camp it never would, that it was bewitched, and all that sort of nonsense. When I came home I found Di sitting in front of the fire there, with the little brown thing on her lap. She’d loosened its clothes, and bathed it, and rubbed its limbs with sweet-oil, and hung the papoose case up on the wall. After a week, Laughing Flower went back, and her boy could walk. Little two year old he was, with eyes like coffee beans. That’s why they loved Diantha, I guess, and let us stay here in the valley. We always treated them decent.”

“Now, tell us about all these guns, please,” begged Sue. “I didn’t know there were so many kinds.”

“Didn’t you? I’ve used everything from an old flint lock that belonged to Zed, down to this lightweight Winchester. These breech-loaders came in use along in the Indian wars, when I was a little lad about five, I guess. Here’s a carbine that went through the Civil War. It belonged to an old pard I had, back in my first days here; Tennessee Clayborne, he was called, but mostly Tennessee. He was with Custer to the finish.”

The Chief was silent after that, whistling softly to himself as he fingered the old gun lovingly.

“I wish I could shoot,” said Polly. “Not to kill anything but just to hit something.”

“Do you? Well, I shouldn’t wonder if that could be gratified.” Sandy lifted down a lightweight Winchester. “We’ll go out, and see which one has the steadiest hand, and surest eye.”

“Polly has, I’m sure,” said Isabel. “I don’t want to shoot, please. I don’t like even to touch anything that will go off.”

So out they went, and the Chief put up a piece of paper on a tree near the wagon-sheds, not a very big piece either.

“Now, you girl sharpshooters,” he laughed, stepping back, “let’s see what sort of scouts you’d make.”

Ted tried her luck first, and came within an inch of the paper, then Sue shot, and clipped the bark a couple of inches below the mark. Polly was laughing and eager, and managed to take a corner off the white square, but it was Ruth, quiet, steady-handed Grandma, as the girls called her, with spectacles and all, who lifted the rifle to her shoulder, aimed and sighted slowly, and put her bullet where it should go.

“There’s one place where you can’t trust to luck,” said Sandy. “That’s when you’re leveling a gun. You’ve got to think and figure too. Ruth’s got a calculating eye, I should say. We had one little shaver with us, in the Shoshone uprising, with only one eye, and he could pick off any brave’s topknot you’d prefer. We’ll throw some pieces of wood into the creek, and see if you can hit them on the go. That’s good practice.”

“Peggie, you didn’t try,” called Polly, as Peggie came around the corner of the house.

“I went over to the cook-shack to see Fun.”

“Fun?”

“Ah Fun, the cook. He came from California with Sandy a long time ago. His name is Ah Fun, and he never smiles. Isn’t that queer? I always go over and speak to him.”

“Oh, I want to see him too,” Polly said, so after the target practice, a formal call was paid to the cook-cabin, and there they found Ah Fun, a thin old Chinaman, with a face so yellow it looked like a dry maple leaf.

“Better not let the Doctor see him,” said Ruth, in her comical way, without a smile, when they came away. “He’ll gather him up for a fossil specimen sure as shooting.”

The girls strolled down towards the corral, for it was getting late, and the ride lay before them. Polly had lingered before a picture that hung over the old chest of drawers in Mrs. Sandy’s bedroom. It was a portrait of Miss Honoria, taken in the seventies, a wreath of flowers on her head, and a low-necked dress with a fichu of white Spanish lace about her shoulders. Very girlish and lovely it looked. Mrs. Sandy lingered too.

“Does she look at all like that now?” she asked, softly. “That was my favorite picture.”

Polly felt a sudden impulse, and spoke on the spur of it.

“No, she doesn’t look at all that way. She’s quite old looking, and very gray, and she hardly ever smiles. Mrs. Sandy, please forgive me, but what is the trouble?”

“Trouble, dear child?” A little flush stole to Diantha’s cheek, and she bent over to smooth the linen pillow shams, already without a wrinkle. “What can you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Polly went on, “but I have always wished I had a sister all my very own, and here you have one, and—and—”

“And what, Polly?”

“And you never see each other, or write, or anything. Was it—was the trouble so bad as all that? I don’t see how anything could ever be that way with sisters.”

“Don’t you, dear? Perhaps you will some day.” Diantha paused, and thought for a minute. They could hear the laughter of the girls mingling with the Chief’s deep bass down at the corral as they got the ponies ready for the home trip. “It is so far back now that only in the hearts of a few old families lie the pain and the rancor of the old war days. My father, Colonel Calvert, never forgave the North. He believed the government should have purchased the slaves and then freed them under special act of Congress, and forbidden slave-holding thereafter. But he held it as unnatural and unlawful for brother to lift hand against brother, or to take away property rights without restitution. This is all so far back that you cannot get even the shadow of its intensity, and I am glad you cannot, but my childhood days were filled with it. Honoria has all the Calvert pride, but I am afraid I had not, for, dearie, I married a Northerner, and love him better than all of Virginia, and so—” she made a hopeless little gesture with her slim, pretty hands, “so Honoria has never forgiven me, nor will she accept Sandy, no, not after thirty-five years. Honoria is very consistent.” She finished with a sigh.

“Polly, are you ready to go?” called Peggie outside.

“Coming,” said Polly. She reached over, and put her arms around Mrs. Sandy’s throat, and pressed her cheek to hers. “I’m sorry for both of you, dear Mrs. Sandy,” she whispered. “Have you tried writing to her?”

“She never replies to my letters. I am afraid there’s nothing that can be done, Polly child.”

“I know what I’d do,” said Polly, resolutely, as she reached for her hat. “I’d just get on a train, and go down home, and go straight up to the Hall, and when I saw her, I’d hug her before she knew what was happening, and I’d shake her too, a little bit, and kiss her, and say, ‘Hello, Honoria.’ That’s what I’d do.”

Mrs. Sandy laughed heartily at the mental picture of her accosting the stately Honoria in such a fashion after thirty-five years, but Polly was serious in her intent.

“It would settle the whole thing, Mrs. Sandy, dear, I am sure it would, and grandfather and I’d be delighted to have you and the Chief at Glenwood with us too.”

“Oh, Polly, do you realize what the trip would cost? Sandy would have to sell off some of his thoroughbreds, wouldn’t he?”

“Why not take the money that will come from the bones in Zed’s gulch, and make it a second honeymoon trip?” asked Polly. “Don’t laugh at me, please. I know it’s only another air-castle, but let’s keep hoping.”

“All right, child,” promised Mrs. Sandy, as she kissed her good-bye. “I’ll keep hoping.”

CHAPTER XXII

SAFE CONVOY

Polly did not tell the girls that she had learned what the secret trouble was between the two sisters. Someway, she could not. It seemed such a personal, tender secret that, after all, concerned only the two, and Sandy himself. Dear, stalwart, dauntless Chief Sandy! Polly wondered whether Miss Honoria knew him well. It did not seem as if any one who had met him, and come under the spell of that genial, generous spirit, could fail to sense its charm and worth. She could almost shut her eyes, and imagine him going up the broad stone steps at the Hall, and bowing over Miss Honoria’s hand. No, come to think of it, he wouldn’t bow, not the Chief. He was no courtly Southerner like the Admiral. More likely he would smile that broad sunny smile of his that seemed to take in all creation, and gripping Honoria’s hand in his, he would probably kiss her willy-nilly, in brotherly fashion, and say:

“Well, sister, how goes the world?”

Then what would the mistress of the Hall do? Polly smiled to herself. Would she faint, or would she gasp and laugh, or would she order the Northern invader from the sacred precincts of Calvert Hall? What would she do? Polly could hardly wait to find out. Someway, she decided, someway, it must be arranged for the meeting to happen.

“Does any one feel like taking a camping trip next week?” asked Mr. Murray, Monday night. “I won’t have the time to spare now girls, but if mother says so, we’ll start out a week from to-day, with a good team, and go camping.”

“Why, father, you’ll have to take more than one team, won’t you?” said Mrs. Murray. “I’ll leave Sally to cook for the boys, and go too.”

“Couldn’t we ride horseback?” Polly put in.

“I was figuring on a grub wagon that would take the tents too, and then fix up that old sheep wagon, for the girls to ride in. We can put four cross seats in that, mother, and the boxes and cupboards would come in handy. I’m afraid they’d get tired out riding.”

“If we did, we could hitch the ponies on behind, and get into the wagon, the way the pack-trains do. We’d love to ride, wouldn’t we, girls?”

“Listen to them,” exclaimed Jean. “Wouldn’t you think, to hear them talk, that they’d been in a saddle since they could walk. I’d let them ride, father. We’ll have the fun of teasing them after a good twenty-mile jolt over the mountain roads.”

“Monday then, and an early start. Archie and Neil will look after things, and it will do us good too, won’t it, mother?”

“The biggest lad of the lot,” said Mrs. Murray, tenderly, as she watched the tall, angular figure start off down towards the sheds. “He’ll enjoy it vastly.”

“It seems too wonderful to be true,” said Isabel, in her fervent way. “Will we be right in the mountains, then, Miss Jean?”

“‘In the heart of the ancient woods,’” quoted Jean, blithely. “Have you ever slept out of doors on a bed of spruce boughs, with nothing around you but the mountains and the sky? Mother says it comes the nearest to feeling the everlasting arms around one of anything in this life that she’s found.”

“You’re rocked in Mother Nature’s cradle, bairnies, then,” smiled Mrs. Murray. “Just like all her younglings of the wilds. And good it is for you, too. I feel the summer’s missed its best reward when we fail to have our little camp outing after the haying.”

“I used to think they never bothered over hay on ranches,” said Ted, suddenly. “I thought they just let all the cattle out to range.”

“So they did in the old range days, when it was free. But we small ranchers have to take care of ourselves a good deal.”

“I don’t understand this,” exclaimed Polly, who had been reading over her last letter from the Admiral. “Grandfather says here that he did think he might get out this way, but business keeps him near Washington all summer, so he is sending the Doctor under safe convoy. What is that, ‘safe convoy’?”

“Special delivery, receipt guaranteed,” spoke up Don, who was making a cage for a couple of ’coons he had caught.

“That letter was mailed a week ago, Polly,” Ruth said. “And you know the Doctor will be here by Wednesday.”

“But under ‘safe convoy,’” repeated Polly. “Grandfather never uses too many words. What does he mean by that ‘convoy.’ A convoy is a ship that conducts another ship, isn’t it?”

“Right-O,” sang out Ted, teasingly. “I think he will come straight through by express. And you told Jimmie to be on the watch for him around Deercroft, to make him feel at home, and the Chief is to meet him Wednesday.”

“Maybe it doesn’t mean anything, but I ‘s’pects it strongly,’” Polly replied, using Aunty Welcome’s favorite phrase of incredulity. “I don’t believe he is coming alone, but whom could he bring way out here?”

“Let’s ride down and meet him too,” Jean said. “I’m very anxious to meet this wonderful Doctor of yours, anyway. We could take the surrey, and Peggie or I will drive. Then he will have a double surprise to find you girls waiting as well as the Chief.”

“Oh, could we?” cried the girls together.

So it happened that unconsciously they planned a participation in the Doctor’s surprise. Wednesday morning they all packed into the surrey, and drove away over the mountain road to Deercroft. They were early, and Jean put the horses up at the local livery stable, while they walked around and saw what they could of the town.

“It isn’t one bit like what I expected to see,” Ruth declared. “Here are electric lights, paved streets, and everything orderly and shipshape.”

“Well, what did you expect?” asked Peggie, wonderingly.

“I don’t know exactly. A Western town always seems to mean just a row of frame houses, and a lot of saloons—”

“We haven’t any,” said Peggie, simply. “The women voted no license.”

“I told you this was the girl State, didn’t I?” Jean added, merrily. “We keep it swept clean.”

“Grandfather always says that girls don’t have to consider such things,” said Polly, thoughtfully.

“He wouldn’t if he lived out here. Our girls study their political economy and civil government, and it trains them for the issues they will meet later. Hark, that’s the express. I hear it whistle. Let’s hurry.”

“There’s the Chief, and Mrs. Sandy too, at the station,” said Sue, who was ahead. “They are waving to us.”

“How are you, chickens?” called Mrs. Sandy cheerily to them, as they came to the platform. “I had to do some town shopping, so we killed two birds with one stone. Looks like we might have a thunder shower, doesn’t it?”

“That’s blowing to the north, Di,” the Chief put in, placidly. “You can see its shiny lining now.”

The express came swinging down the track, and stopped. Few passengers got off at Deercroft, so it was not hard to find the Doctor. Third coach to the last, they saw him, as the porter put the stool down for him to alight. He turned at their quick call, and waved his hand, but all his attention was centered on some one who was coming down the steps, some one rather tall, and dressed in silver gray, even to the long gray veil that was draped about her hat.

And suddenly, in one flash of recognition, the girls knew the Doctor’s surprise.

But Mrs. Sandy did not. There she stood, smiling happily at the pleasure of the girls, supremely unconscious and unprepared. She saw the tall, slender, stately old lady behind the figure of the Doctor, but did not associate her with him, not until the girls surrounded both, and were kissed and shaken by the hand. It was Polly who put her arm around the figure in gray, and led her where Mrs. Sandy stood, her Chief beside her.

“Here she is, Miss Honoria,” Polly said, with shining eyes that filled with quick tears as the two faced each other after more than thirty-five years. Honoria held out both hands. Her voice trembled with emotion.

“Sister,” was all she could say, “sister, I had to come, too.”

Mrs. Sandy opened her arms, and took the stately figure close to her heart, sobbing happily.

“Let’s get the horses,” said Ted in an inspired moment, and deftly she diverted attention from the main group, leading the way over to the stable with the Doctor, the girls all following.

The Doctor looked like a boy who had achieved some long-cherished ambition. He kept taking off his traveling cap, and smiling around from face to face, then putting the cap on again and adjusting his eyeglasses.

“God bless my heart, but this is a glorious reunion, isn’t it, girls?” he said.

“Wait until you see the skeleton, the—the bones, the fossil remains,” said Polly.

“Polly, I think that was all hatched up by you, as a wise and clever scheme to drag me into this part of Wyoming,” he replied.

“But I sent you a specimen—”

“I’ll wait until I see where you took the specimen from.”

“Wasn’t it a good specimen?”

“Fine, undoubtedly. So was the surrounding rock.” The Doctor laughed heartily at the puzzled expression on Polly’s face. “If it is exactly as represented, we’ll give you a degree, Polly, an honorary degree, if we have to invent one to fit the occasion. We can’t call you a Fellow Geologist, can we? This will necessitate Congress striking off a special bronze medal for a new sisterhood of geologists. How would that do?”

“It is a very large skeleton, I think,” Polly answered. “And truly, Doctor, we girls have nothing to do with it. Peggie Murray found it long ago. We are only the—the—”

“Promoters of the science,” finished the Doctor. “I see. Dear, dear, what a tanned lot of young Indians you are. Isn’t it a splendid country? I felt several inches taller as soon as I breathed the air of this altitude.”

Jean said the team was ready to start now, so they all climbed in, and drove back to the station.

“This is my first experience with a three-seated surrey behind a pair of bronchos,” exclaimed the Doctor. “They use them on the tourist expeditions through the National Park, though, come to think of it. Have you been over there yet?”

“Not this time,” said Ruth, frankly. “We haven’t money enough. But we’re having a perfectly splendid time at the ranch, and next week we’re going camping.”

“Just for a few days to give them a taste of it,” Jean added over her shoulder. “We start back for Virginia on our fourth week.”

“You, too, Miss Jean?” asked Polly. She had not expected that Miss Murray would go back with them.

“Isn’t this a personally-conducted tour?” asked Jean, smiling. “Of course, I shall see you safe and sound at home.”

When they drove up to the station, there sat Mrs. Sandy and Miss Calvert holding each other’s hands, and talking in low tones, making up for the silence of all the years.

Sandy had a quiet, comprehensive, half-humorous smile on his face, and as he shook hands with the Doctor, he said in an undertone:

“Lee has surrendered.”

The Doctor nodded his head in quick appreciation.

“It’s high time,” he answered. But the girls held bravely to the traditions of Calvert Hall. Never by smile or look or word did they show that they knew of the reconciliation. Not then. Not until the drive home was finished, and they had waved a temporary good-bye to the MacDowells and the Doctor and Miss Calvert at the creek crossing, did they dare to give vent to their feelings, but when they finally reached their own private quarters, Ted tossed her cap high in the air, and Polly began to dance a Virginia reel with Sue.

“Well, they’ve made it up, that’s sure,” said Ruth, meditatively, “but what puzzles me is, what the trouble was in the first place.”

“I know,” cried Polly, pausing to take breath. “I’ve known for days. And I couldn’t tell. But as long as it’s all over, I will. Let’s sit down in front of the fire, and comb our hair and talk.”

The nights had been cool ever since their arrival, and a few blazing spruce knots just took the shiver off, as Sue said, so they sat around its blaze now, clad in kimonos, combing out their hair, as girls love to do, and talking. And the old love-tale of Diantha Calvert and her Northern sweetheart gained a fresh tenderness and charm, told there in the dancing firelight. When Polly had finished, there was a long silence, while blue eyes and gray eyes and brown stared dreamily at the fire. Then Ruth said softly:

“‘Many waters cannot quench love.’”

“Did you hear what Mrs. Sandy said, when I asked her if she was surprised?” Polly reached over and gave a big log a friendly poke so that it rolled over and became a blazing ledge. “She said, with such a look, you know, all glad and proud and kind of relieved too: ‘No, honey, not very much. I always knew it would happen some day. Love will bring to us that which is ours if we trust.’ Isn’t that beautiful to remember? Love will bring to us that which is ours, if we trust.”

“Well, I’m trusting that those bones will turn out to be a perfect and well-preserved dinosaur,” proclaimed Sue, rising, “and it’s getting late.”

They left the cabin-door open now, with the screen door fastened, and long after the rest were asleep, Ruth lay wide awake thinking. A head raised cautiously from Polly’s pillow.

“Ruth, are you asleep?”

“No,” came back a whisper.

“Aren’t you glad for poor dear old Honoria?”

“So glad I can’t sleep. Think of them to-night, talking and making up for thirty-five years of lonesomeness.”

“Bet a cookie she’d never have thought of coming out here if we hadn’t blazed the way. Good-night.”

Ruth’s whisper came back softly, and there was silence in the guest-cabin.

CHAPTER XXIII

THE CAVE OF THE DINOSAUR

It had been arranged with the Chief that the girls were to wait at the Crossbar until they heard from him, and not attempt making the trip over to the gulch unless they were sure he and the Doctor would be there to meet them.

It was hard being patient, but after their morning dip down at the swimming place, Jean kept them busy getting the sheep wagon ready for the camping trip. They took clean papers, and tacked them evenly inside the cupboards and lockers under the seats, and made a regular inventory of everything they would need. Ruth took charge of this, and would check off each article as it went into the wagon.

The heavy things, such as tents, bedding, cooking utensils, and so on, were to follow in what Don called the grub wagon.

Sally Lost Moon was to stay at the ranch and do the cooking and housework for the boys, and it had been decided to let the girls ride their ponies. When one of them grew tired, she could ride in the wagon. The girls were delighted at this prospect. Of all the outdoor pleasures they had enjoyed at the ranch, the riding came first of all. There was something so exhilarating and healthful about it. The trouting was good sport and plenty of fun, and the long tramps they took nearly every day out to the Indian graves, or over old Topnotch’s twisted trails, or far down along the river to the lower rapids, each held a special enjoyment all its own, but there was something so novel and exciting about the pony riding that it excelled all other sports.

Polly had been delighted too, the first time that Jinks whinnied to her, and showed plainly he felt on friendly terms. By the third week, all of the ponies were quite willing to respond to the petting and overtures of friendship that had been lavished on them.

“I do really believe they all know us by now,” Ted had declared, that morning. “Don let me help rub Shoofly down yesterday morning, and he understood everything I said to him.”

“Who, Don?” queried Sue, in a muffled tone, as she knelt by a locker, and dug down under towels and mosquito netting to be sure that she had not packed the kodak at the very bottom.

“No, goose. The pony. I wish I could take him back home. I shall miss him so, and the riding, and oh—I don’t know what to call it—the wideness of everything.”

“Glorious expanse, she means, Sue,” Isabel explained. “Where did you pack my hand mirror?”

“It is not packed, Lady Vanitas,” retorted Sue, firmly. “We are to wash at pools and river brinks, and other handy wet spots en route, and you’ll just have to peek over at yourself like Narcissus when you want to see how you look.”

“Don’t you worry, Isabel,” Polly called cheerily. “I saw Peggie drop a three-cornered looking glass in the box with the dishes. We’ll nail it up on a tree. Oh, girls, I wish we had some lightweight rifles, not to shoot with—”

“Not shoot with?” repeated Ted, indignantly. “For what, then?”

“Practice and defence,” replied Polly. “We won’t want to stay around the camp every minute, and if we stray off any distance, some wild animal might appear, and where would we be?”

“‘Algy met a bear,
The bear was bulgy.
And the bulge was Algy,’”

quoted Sue solemnly.

“Sue, I’m surprised,” laughed Polly. “Wouldn’t I love to see Miss Calvert’s face if she heard that.”

“She would laugh, too—now.” Sue made a significant pause. “Here they come. I heard the wheels on the bridge over the creek.”

So then they all left the sheep wagon, and their camp outfitting, to go and greet the visitors from the Alameda. There was a tinge of color in Miss Honoria’s delicate cheeks, and she looked around at her girls with a happy smile that spoke volumes.

“I wanted her to rest after her long journey,” Mrs. Sandy said, tenderly, “but she said she’d rather come over. Sister, you’d better sit up on the stoop where it’s cool.”

Honoria smiled proudly, and obeyed.

“She has mothered me every minute since I arrived, Mrs. Murray,” she exclaimed. “And the girls all know well how self-reliant I am.”

“Don’t you love to be mothered, though?” asked Polly, eagerly. “I do.”

“We all do,” declared Mrs. Sandy. “And the oldest ones are always the ones that need it most.”

“Who wants to ride with me?” called out the Chief. “Room for three here.”

Isabel, Jean, and Ruth took advantage of the surrey, but the rest of the girls were glad to wait while Don saddled up the ponies for them.

“The Doctor left us at the Forks back yonder,” said Sandy, driving on with a salute to the group up on the low stoop. “He’s riding too. Said he never sat in a vehicle when he could get a saddle and anything beneath it with four legs. The Fork trail is a good short cut to the Gulch, and he can’t miss the way. We’ll find him sitting on old Zed’s doorstep just like a forest foundling.”

The girls laughed heartily at the picture. It was a splendid day. The wind rippled the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river, and sent their bits of down sailing away into the air. The far-off mountain range to the northwest seemed incredibly near, and for once its trailing robes of violet and gray were laid aside. Every peak stood out distinctly. Down in the valley Archie was hammering at a new bar gate, and every blow seemed to rouse a hundred echoes from old Topnotch’s crags and precipices.

“We haven’t brought anything to dig with,” said Ruth, in her quiet, dry way. “There are some old picks at the shack, I think. We can use those if the Doctor wants us to help him.”

“Old-time poll picks, those are,” the Chief explained. “Zed used to go around, digging one prospecting hole after another. It’s a wonder he never found the skeleton himself.”

“I think it must have been covered up until the big storm,” Peggie called from her saddle. “Don and I have been down through the valley lots and lots of times, and we’d never noticed that great ledge of rock before. We would surely have seen it.”

It was past noon when they finally reached the gulch, and just as the Chief had predicted, they found the Doctor sitting on the doorstep, smoking his short brier-wood very peacefully, and reading from a pocket edition of some favorite author. It was characteristic of him to be so occupied just on the brink of a discovery.

Peggie led the way up to the cavern, and all, even Sandy himself, followed after her. The horses were hobbled in Zed’s little clearing, and the surrey team was hitched to a tree. Behind Peggie trod the Doctor, then Polly and Jean, last of all, the Chief, and his three scouts, as he called them. It was an important and solemn occasion, and even the irrepressible Ted and Sue walked soberly, and refrained from any giggles. They all realized fully just what the discovery would mean if it turned out to be authentic and valuable. The Murrays were far from being even well-to-do. There were too many mouths to feed, too many school bills to cover. And to Peggie belonged the credit of first discovery. Some share of the reward must be hers too, they knew.

“If any old deer or buffalo has dared to crawl ’way into that cave to die,” said Polly, as they all paused to rest at one place, “I shall give up all hope of founding the Sisters of the Geological Society, Doctor.”

“I think it’s a tidy little mastodon myself,” Ted remarked. “Nobody’s asked me what my opinion is, but I’m sure it’s a mastodon.”

“Mastodons are very ordinary, Ted,” Ruth said. “They’ve been found even in New York State.”

“Truly? Dead ones?” cried Ted, and they all laughed at her earnestness.

“What other kind do you suppose, Edwina?” asked the Doctor, severely. “A mastodon was dug up at Newburg, along in the forties.”

But here Peggie started ahead once more, so conversation was checked. Only once the Doctor spoke.

“It will be difficult getting it out.”

That gave Polly courage. Surely, unless there was good ground for hope, he would not have said that. The Doctor was very quiet, very non-committal, she knew. She could hardly wait to get to the cave, and watch him. She was sure she could tell right away, whether or not there was hope, just from the expression of his face.

“There it is,” said Peggie finally, with a little throb of happy pride in her tone, as she stopped short and pointed to the great jaw-like opening a few yards away. “It’s inside there.”

Instead of going into the cave at once, as the girls expected him to do, the Doctor paused at the opening to look at the rock formation of the ledge.

“It is limestone, isn’t it?” asked Polly. “And it is certainly blue. They call this other kind of rock that crumbles, shale.”

“It’s good stuff,” the Doctor said approvingly. “Very good stuff. Now, let us go in and look at Exhibit A.”

There was no need of a light. The cave, as the girls called it, was really nothing but the great space left under the ledge by the tearing away of a mass of the earth. Peggie scrambled over the rough ground until she came to the precious bones, then stopped.

“There they are!” she cried.

Every one was wonderfully silent now. The Doctor’s face was grave too, but behind his eyeglasses his gray eyes looked keen and bright. He laid his cap to one side, and sat down deliberately beside the remains. And he “handled them, and dandled them,” as Polly said afterwards, as happily and contentedly as a mother with a brand-new baby.

“Want a pick Doctor?” called Sandy. “I can give you a hand too, if you want to dig.”

“I wouldn’t disturb it for worlds,” returned the Doctor, “I want some of my colleagues to see it, just like that. I believe we’ve struck into the perfect Jurassic drift, unsuspected in this section entirely.”

“But what is it?” asked Polly, anxiously.

“Just what you said it was, Polly, child. A part of the vertebræ of a dinosaurus, I feel sure. It is not a ninety-foot one, by any means, but if we can judge from this section here, it must be at least thirty to thirty-five feet long—long enough to justify a good leap in the dark if you saw one coming at you.”

“How long has it been there, do you suppose?” asked Sue, in an awed tone. It seemed so wonderful to think that the discovery was really authentic. All along, they had half-questioned it, except Ruth and Polly.

“Sue, we don’t know,” returned the Doctor, musingly, as he took a penknife out of his pocket, and scraped at the bone. “We’re trying to find out just such things as that, we old chaps who prowl around the face of the earth, and try to win Mother Nature’s confidence. It may be ten million years ago, some say ten thousand. When we start and figure how long it takes for the Colorado River to eat its way through even an inch deeper in the Grand Canyon, we begin to realize how many years it must have taken for it to cut down all the way from the top.”

“It makes me feel dizzy,” said Ted, emphatically.

“It has made wiser heads than yours feel dizzy, child,” returned the Doctor, gently. “And we are only children that He holds in His hand. When I begin to feel pretty good, and well satisfied with myself, I go away quietly, and read over that chapter in Job that has more geological data in it than anything I know of.”

“I know,” said Polly. “‘Where wast thou when I laid the foundations of the earth?’”

“Exactly. Where were we? It takes all the conceit out of me when I consider a bit. Mr. MacDowell, this gulch belongs to you, doesn’t it?”

“I’m sorry to say it does,” said the Chief, fervently. “I just wish that poor old Zed were here to claim his own. He put all his love into this old strip of land for years, and it never opened its heart to him.”

“Purpose in all things,” protested the old Doctor, cheerily. “Maybe he would have buried the cash receipts in a tin can, for all we know. You have a better use for them. I want to send a telegram as soon as we can get to a station. We’ll get some more authority on the remains than my own, and then come to terms. How’s that? In the meantime, let’s go back to dinner, for I am starved.”

In the ride back, the Doctor and Ruth went ahead, for Ruth was fairly bursting with questions she wanted to ask. Polly and Peggie were last of all. Sue had changed places with Ruth, and was in the surrey, letting Ruth ride her pony.

“Sandy says I’m to have a third of whatever he gets,” Peggie said, her cheeks pink with excitement. “He says one third goes to me for finding it, and one third to Mrs. Sandy, and one third for him.”

“Oh, Peg, I’m so glad for you,” cried Polly, joyfully. “Will you come to school with us? Will you, Peggie? We’d take you into our club, and have the best times.”

Peggie smiled radiantly.

“I will if mother says so,” she promised.

CHAPTER XXIV

THE LONG TRAIL

As Ruth was fond of quoting, “The quicker ’tis done, the better ’tis done.” Polly watched for a good opportunity when Jean was alone, and broached the subject without waiting.

“Peggie go to Calvert?” exclaimed Jean, in surprise. “Why, Polly, what made you think of such a thing?”

“I wanted her. We all want her to be one of us this year. It would do her good, and she would be with you, Miss Murray dear.”

“But the cost—”

“Let the dinosaur pay for it,” said Polly, hastily. “Of course I know she couldn’t go unless something did happen to open the way for her, but this will, won’t it? The Chief told her to-day she was to have a third of whatever he received, because she is the true discoverer.”

“But you and the other girls are the promoters.”

Polly flushed quickly.

“Oh, we don’t want anything. All we did was to encourage Peggie.”

“I think you were what you are so fond of, the gift-bringers of opportunity. It is very dear and thoughtful of you, anyway, and I will promise to talk it over with father and mother soon. That is what you want me to do, isn’t it?”

Polly reached up, and gave her a quick, forcible hug, and kissed her cheek, for answer. Jean watched her as she went down the creek path to join the other girls at the swimming pool. Someway the thought would not be banished, and she found herself considering it seriously. Peggie a Calvert girl? Peggie, her little, wild ranch girl, to turn into one of Miss Calvert’s pupils, at a “select academy for young ladies,” as the fall circulars always said. Jean caught herself laughing softly at the picture. Still, after all, she decided, it depended on Peggie.

Every day found the Chief and the Doctor over in the gulch, planning and exploring. The girls did not accompany them. They felt that their share in the labor was accomplished. It only remained to see results. So they spent the last of the week having a good time on the ranch, and riding around, bareheaded, merry, and just “full of fun,” as Mrs. Murray said, comfortably.

“Land o’ rest, let them enjoy themselves while they can,” she would say, standing at the low doorway, to watch them at play down in the lower field below the corral. Don and Peggie were giving an exhibition of trick-riding and Ted and Polly were trying to imitate them. “I wish sometimes that I could turn loose hosts of young ones like these out here in our beautiful land, and let them find the world as young as they are. Yes, I know what Doctor Smith said, that that lot of bones yonder had been there maybe ten million years. I don’t pretend to know those things. Maybe the world was made in six days, and maybe it was made in sixty million. The Lord knows, and that suffices. I never did hold with this promiscuous poking after what doesn’t concern us. First thing we know, an airship will bump an angel down, and then there’ll be more excitement. The world is young still, bless it, and it’s fresh and green and very beautiful, and I do love to see young things playing on it, whether it’s lambs, or children, or rabbits. They’re a wonderful lot alike.”

Jean listened, sitting on the lower step of the little porch, sewing on a new dress for Peggie, that she needed for camping. It was a strong, tan khaki, like the other girls wore, with a divided skirt, and middy blouse. Someway, as she heard what her mother said, it seemed like the propitious moment for Peggie, and she unfolded Polly’s plan.

Mrs. Murray listened in silence, her plain, motherly face a little bit sad, though the smile did not leave her lips. Jean waited a minute when she had finished, before she asked:

“Could you let her go, mother dear?”

“She’s but a bairn yet, Jeanie, lass.”

“She’s twelve, mother. I could take care of her.”

“She’s needing good schooling since they closed ours over at the Forks. I’d have to let her go to town anyway this fall, and then she’d be with strangers. You’d write often, wouldn’t you, Jeanie, and let me know just how she took to it all?”

“Twice a week regularly, mother,” Jean promised.

“And you don’t think it would be harming her any, being with girls of her own age that have all they want. We’re only plain people, Jean, lass.”

“Oh, mother, the girls at Calvert are not what the world calls wealthy. They seem so to us because we have so little in a way. We are rich in land and stock, and love, but very little real cash. It’s only a different scale of values, dear. What difference does it make whether father gives one of us a yearling or a new pony for a birthday gift, and down yonder, the Admiral gives Polly a new camera, or a necklace. It all comes to the same thing. Peggie will hold her own among them all, dear, and they will love her too. She is old enough to start in the first year. If she does realize her hopes from the discovery in old Zed’s gulch, I should let her go.”

Mrs. Murray sighed thoughtfully.

“I’ll ask father about it, Jeanie, to-night,” she said, finally, and Jean knew the fight was won already, for whatever her mother advocated, Mr. Murray unhesitatingly accepted.

Monday morning, even before the first long amber rays of sunlight pierced the clouds over towards Bear Lodge, the girls were up and dressed. The sheep wagon was ready, well-provisioned, and made comfortable as could be for the trip. Behind it was the grub wagon, loaded with the tents, stove, bedding, and heavier camp supplies. Mr. Murray drove this wagon, and Jean or her mother took turns at the sheep cart. It was quite a formidable pack-train that went slowly out by the valley trail at sunrise. Sally Lost Moon stood in the doorway, with the sheepdogs around her, waving good-bye with her apron till they passed out of sight, and Don, too, waved a last salute. Archie and Neil were at work up beyond the buttes, and they could not see them.

First came the sheep wagon, then a line of ponies and girl scouts, as the Chief would have dubbed them. They looked it too, in their trim khaki suits, and lightweight felt hats with turned-back brims. Every brim bore the class pin of Calvert, the big C on a shield of deep maroon, with silver quarterings.

They took the straight road west from the ranch, instead of turning off over the bridge, or north towards the gulch.

“Isn’t this the way we go to the Alameda?” asked Sue.

“We pass the MacDowells’ place on our way to the mountains,” said Peggie. “Father said we would let out a hail at them but we’d best not stop, for it delays us. We want to reach a good place to camp to-night.”

“Does he know where he’s going?” asked Ted, interestedly. “I mean, does he know all the roads and trails ahead?”

“I guess he does,” laughed Peggie. “He’s traveled them often enough. Every year some of us go camping, you see, and we like to go over the same trail.”

“Shall we meet bears?” asked Isabel, thoughtfully, but without any sign of pleasurable anticipation.

“I hope so,” Peggie said, very cheerfully. “I like bear meat. I never had a chance to shoot any, but Don did last year. He’s got the pelt now, up in his room. You didn’t see his room, did you, girls? It’s the garret over the main cabin. You have to climb up a ladder to get to it, and even Don can’t stand upright, but he’s got all his pet things up there.”

“I’m finding out the queerest thing about life,” Isabel said, in a low voice to Ruth. “The less you have, the more you love it.”

Ruth laughed, and nodded her head.

“I found that out long ago. I just had to.”

Isabel said no more. She was too busy thinking. The idea of a big boy like Don being satisfied with an attic room, and of a girl like Peggie being perfectly happy away out here in the hill country, puzzled her. She felt that these two had found the secret of contentment someway. Riding slowly along the up grade behind Peggie now, she caught herself remembering an old fairy tale that had perplexed her when she was a little girl, one about a king who sought the Land of Heart’s Content. He had traveled to the kingdom of Yesterday first, and had found it to be the Land of Heart’s Regret. Then he had gone to the far country of To-morrow, and had found that it was the Land of Heart’s Desire. So, finally, weary and travel-worn, he returned home, and found there in his own land of To-day, the Heart’s Content he longed for. Isabel wondered if perhaps the secret of happiness at the little Crossbar ranch was that the Murrays had all found the land of Heart’s Content.

Up and up they rode, after passing Sandy’s ranch, a little speck far below in the broad valley, then along a great tableland, covered with scattered spruce, like little watch-towers. Once they saw an eagle winging its course southward. It looked like a hawk at that distance. Mr. Murray pointed out to them its nest in the top of a great old pine, nearly dead, with only a few scattered branches towards the top that showed green.

Every once in a while a gray squirrel or young rabbit would stand still to watch their approach, then scud away into the underbrush in sudden alarm. Sometimes they caught sight of deer, and the girls wondered at their tameness.

“They’ve not been hunted much up this way,” Jean told them. “And you’re not allowed to kill any that have no horns, so that protects the does and the young. The open season lasts only from September fifteenth to November fifteenth.”

When the shadows pointed north, a stop was made at the first brook they came to, and lunch was spread.

“Oh, how good everything does taste!” exclaimed Polly.

“Wait till you’ve had bacon and corn cakes every morning for nearly a week,” laughed Jean. “Father used to have an old herder working for him, and he would say, ‘Bacon and corn cakes is the staff of existence for any man in the open.’”

“I know what I’d love to do,” Polly exclaimed. “I’d like to start off with a wagon like this, one that you could live in like gypsies, and just go and go, and take any road you liked best, until you were tired out.”

“But, goose, don’t you know that you’d never be tired?” said Jean. “We are all gypsies at heart when it comes to the love of the open.”

“But I should like to chase summer,” went on Polly. “Just keep following the trail of summer in a gypsy wagon. Yes, and I think one could, too. Girls, let’s take a gypsy-wagon cruise next year.”

“Over the world, and under the world,

And back at the last to you,”

quoted Ruth.

“Now, girls, girls, fill up good, for we’ve a long stretch ahead, and no lagging behind,” called out Mr. Murray, going over to look after the ponies. “We want to make the Soup Bowl to-night.”

“What is the Soup Bowl?” asked Ted, as they all helped to pack up the dishes after they had washed them in the brook.

“A place up in the hills that is sheltered, and has good feeding ground for the horses,” Jean told her. “We’re to camp there to-night.”

Steadily ahead they went, with the wall of the mountains fronting them. Not a break could they see in it, but Mr. Murray held as steadily to his trail as a sailor does to his course, and the wall grew ever nearer.

“I can’t get used to the trees here,” said Ruth once. “There doesn’t seem to be anything worth speaking of as you go higher excepting these funny, straight, skinny-looking pines.”

“The trees grow smaller as you go higher,” Jean answered. “Even these slender lodge-pole pines are shorter towards the heights. You can tell the spruce, girls, because it looks blue at a distance. And both the hemlock and Alpine fir love the banks of the trout brooks up here in the hills. Oh, to-morrow we’ll get splendid trout.”

Once, as they rode, they came to a hilltop that overlooked the country for miles and miles. Far away to the south, Peggie pointed out Deercroft, just a little clump of match boxes, it looked, at that distance. They could see homesteads too, here and there far below them, and now and then a ranch.

“You can tell the difference if you look carefully,” Jean told them. “Wait a minute. I have my field glasses.” She stopped the team, and reached back into the locker for them, and the girls enjoyed looking through them in turn. “The ranches all have corrals. And the homesteads always have gardens. Do you see the difference?”

Once, as they passed along the road, they came to a river crossing, the water cold and swift. Fording it was an old man with a thin, sunburnt face, and long, sandy moustache. He was mounted on a calico broncho, with a high Mexican saddle, and dressed in dingy yellow, with an old felt hat tilted over his eyes. He turned in midstream to shade his eyes, and look back at the camping-out cavalcade, and Mr. Murray let out a long hail at him. He answered with a wave of his hand, and rode on.

“That’s Dave Penfield,” he told the girls, “best scout in Wyoming, not barring out Sandy himself. He’s over seventy now, and when the President himself came to the Big Horn country to hunt, if they didn’t look up old Dave to steer him to the right spots. Dave said he didn’t mind a bit. Always had heard the President was a very respectable and sociable sort of man. That’s Dave all over.”

Sometimes wonderful black ravens swung lazily and majestically out of the woods, or a brilliant orange tanager would flash out of the green gloom across their path like a vivid bit of flame. The girls cried out at the beauty of the mountain flowers, too. It seemed as though the rougher the rocks became and the wilder the scenery, the more delicately beautiful the flowers were.

“It is that way as far as you can go up the mountains,” Jean told them. “Even at the highest altitudes they find tiny flowers growing. Eleven thousand feet is what we call timber line, and after you pass that, you will find these tiny flowers.”

“What is the tree that trembles all the time?” asked Ruth. “I read some place that it grows out here.”

“Not as far north as we are. It is in Colorado. The aspen, you mean. It is a very beautiful tree. They say it trembles because it is the wood the Cross was made of. Oh, girls, look—there goes a goat.”

Just for a moment they caught a glimpse of him, a fleeing shadow along the line of rocks far above their heads.

“By jiminetty, mother,” exclaimed Mr. Murray, drawing rein, regretfully, “I wish I’d had my rifle ready for those horns.”

“I wouldn’t shoot like that, if I were you, Rob,” said his wife, placidly. “Don’t it say in the Book that the hills are a refuge for the wild goat? Do you suppose it was intended for that refuge to be invaded?”

“But, mother,” protested Mr. Murray, boyishly, “did you get a good sight at his horns? I’d have made old Sandy’s eyes shine if I’d taken those back to him.”

Just a little before sunset, they reached the camping place. High up in the hills it was, with a little lake, shut in by masses of fir and spruce. They came to an open space overlooking it from the easterly side, and were glad enough to slip from the saddles, and unpack for the night. All about them, blending into the sky itself it seemed, were distant ranges. A flock of frightened water birds flew up from the tall reeds near the water edge, and off to the south Peggie pointed out some wild ducks flying to the pond.

“I’ll build the fire for you, mother,” Mr. Murray said, “and leave you to get supper, while the girls help me put up the tents and gather spruce boughs for the beds.”

“Ruth, Isabel,” Polly called, as she stood up on a rock overlooking the camping place. “Just come up here and see how glorious it all is. There are some rocks over there that look like a great castle piled up against the sunset.

“The splendour falls on castle walls,
And snowy summits old in story,
The long light shakes across the lakes,
And the wild cataract leaps in glory.”

Ruth stopped short, breathless from her climb up to the rock.

“I forget the rest, something about the horns of Elfland and the purple glens replying,” she said. “Isn’t it beautiful, Polly?”

“Isn’t it Beautiful, Polly?”

Ted and Sue were busily unpacking bedding and tents, and refused to notice the sunset until the practical things were attended to. Peggie and her father looked after the horses. There was not much to do. Saddles and bridles slipped off, they were led down to drink, then hobbled, and left to munch the sweet, rich grass. The team horses had an extra feed of oats besides. By the time the girls had watched the sun tinge the last rim of the mountains with gold, smoke was curling up from the camp stove, and there was fresh water on to boil. It was a study in camp economy to watch Mrs. Murray make everything comfortable.

“Well, you see, child,” she said, when Isabel spoke of the ease with which it was all done, “we’ve camped out every summer since the children were old enough to enjoy it, and it’s second nature now. Don’t you want to cut the ham?”

“I want to do anything to help,” Isabel said, heartily, so when the others came down they found Lady Vanitas with a big apron tied around her armpits, slicing ham deftly for the crowd.

There were two tents, and in front of each was a wide projecting canvas roof besides, so that it seemed almost like an extra room. Mr. Murray said he would take a blanket, and sleep in the sheep wagon, as he would be more likely to hear the horses if they got into trouble. Mrs. Murray took the younger ones under her wing, Peggie, Sue and Ted; and Jean shared the other tent with Polly, Ruth and Isabel. There were no cots, but each one had a fine bed of fresh cut spruce boughs and blankets thrown over them.

After supper, some helped clean up the remains, and the rest gathered firewood with Mr. Murray for a good blaze to keep off any inquisitive wanderers of the night. When it finally started up, on the shore of the lake, it was a brilliant spectacle. The flames sent out great flickering banners that were reflected in the dark waters, the sparks flew up and crackled, and the spruce sent out a rich, pungent fragrance.

“I never saw any one swing an axe as fast as Mr. Murray,” said Ted, admiringly. “It just seems to throw itself at the tree, and every time it lands in the same place.”

“They say up home he’s the best wood-cutter around,” Peggie replied, proudly. Dearly did she love her tall, strong-limbed father. “We’d better get a good pile for the night, to keep the fire going.”

So they worked, bearing wood and getting ready for the night, and when all was done, there was no protest to an early turning in.

“What’s that queer smell?” asked Isabel, as she lay down on her couch of spruce.

“That’s just the piney smell,” answered Polly, sleepily. “It’s very, very healthful, Aunty Welcome says. We ought to get a lot of pine needles and make pillows of them to take back home.”

“It doesn’t smell like pine,” Isabel insisted.

“Now, Isabel,” protested Ruth, already half asleep. “Don’t be fussy.”

“I’m not,” said poor Isabel, catching her breath, then she began to sneeze. “I’m not fus-u-s-u-s-u-s-y-choo! choo! choo!”

“The train’s starting,” called Sue from the next tent. “All aboard!”

“I think you’re all horrid,” said Isabel, sitting up. “And I don’t believe it is the piney smell at all. Oh, ker-choo!”

“Well, for the land o’ rest, what does ail the child,” exclaimed Mrs. Murray, coming to the tent entrance in her nightgown.

“She can’t stand the piney smell,” began Ruth.

“Piney smell? That’s snuff,” laughed Mrs. Murray, sniffing suspiciously around Isabel’s bed. “I did have a box of it in case we met a bear. Ever since a brown bear waddled up to my back door one morning and stole some fresh pies, I’ve had snuff by me in case of emergency. You can always make a bear run with a good dash of snuff in his face. And somehow, the box must have got mixed up in the blankets, and come uncovered. You poor child. I’ll give you a fresh pair.”

Everybody laughed except Isabel; all she could do was sneeze. But finally they got settled down for the night. Only once Polly started to giggle.

“Now what?” demanded Isabel.

“It rhymes with Isabel.”

“What does?”

“Piney smell.”

“If I didn’t need my pillow, I’d throw it at you, Polly,” Isabel said, drowsily. “Go to sleep.”

So at last peace settled down over the little camp, and only the flickering firelight moved, except when Mr. Murray would rouse to put on fresh wood, and take a look around to see that all was well.

CHAPTER XXV

HEART’S CONTENT

“Let’s call this Camp Expectancy,” said Polly, the next morning, when they were ready to move on. “It is our first base of action in a way, and we ought to name every camp so as to remember it.”

So Camp Expectancy it was, and the next one they found was so delightful that they decided it must be called Camp Delight. And the last camp was Camp Regret. Three nights they spent here, in the great, silent mountains. And three days of fishing in the clear mountain streams, and enjoying the freshly-cooked trout afterwards. Every day they had game of some sort, but no bear showed up, and the girls were secretly just as well pleased. These were happy, restful days. At first the constant riding in the saddle tired them in spite of their long practice, but the three days rest at Camp Regret fitted them for the home trip.

“Oh, dear,” sighed Ted. “It’s just an aggravation staying such a little while. I wish I were grown up. I think I’d take up a government claim, and settle out here.”

“We’d welcome you,” Mr. Murray said heartily. “If ever a beautiful, healthy State needed good settlers it’s our Wyoming.”

“And we’d come and visit you every summer, Ted,” promised Sue, happily. “Wouldn’t it be fun?”

“It sounds like fun, but you’d find out there was work to be done before you got through,” laughed Mr. Murray. “There’s a lot of Easterners come out and take up claims, and think that’s the end of it. Free land, and plenty of game. Then they find out the difference when they have to prove up their land, and work it, and pay for irrigation. But it’s a great hopper. It sure sifts the grain from the chaff. Only the people with hope and grit and good intentions stick to their claims, and win out.”

Once, away up in the timber belt, they came on a nester and his family, building their first house. All the family were helping. There was the wife up on a ladder, helping fit cross beams, and two boys were sawing planks. Even a little three-year-old girl had her apron full of nails, holding them up for her father to take what he needed.

“Coming along, eh, neighbor?” said Mr. Murray, and the stalwart young homesteader smiled cheerfully.

“We’ll raise the pine tree on the chimney the first of September, God willing!”

“That’s the spirit that’s making our western states grow like their own pines,” said the old rancher, as they drove on, after a good drink of fresh water at the spring near the new home. “The pioneer days are still with us, mother, and for those who love the land of promise, the pillar of fire and the cloud wait on the border to lead them forward. By jiminetty, it makes the blood stir, even in my old veins, to hear that hammer and saw in the woods.”

Another time they met a sheepman from Idaho, driving his flocks eastward towards the fall markets. It was a strange sight. Hundreds of sheep grazing as they went, with the dogs skirting the bunch, and the grave-eyed, unsmiling herders staring at the campers.

“When did you start, friend?” called out Mr. Murray.

“Last of May,” came back the answer. “We’re going easy. They’ll be good and fat by fall.”

“Isn’t that funny,” exclaimed Polly, when they drove on. “Four months to go a few hundred miles.”

“They camp out when they come to a good feeding ground, and let the flocks get all they want. Then by fall when they reach the market, or where they weigh up, they are in fine condition and the sheepman has saved his freightage on them. That’s the way they used to bring up cattle over the Long Trail from Texas.”

At one homestead, with evenly irrigated fields all around it in a pretty valley, there were two young girls out with a yoke of oxen, working over their alfalfa crop. They turned and waved to the Murrays and the girls.

“That is Nell Wilson and her sister,” said Mrs. Murray. “They came from Illinois last year, and took up a claim. The sister was real poorly, I heard, but she’s picked up all right, and they’re doing well. Sandy went over in the spring to see that they got along all right.”

“Are they all alone?” asked Ruth, wonderingly. “They look so young.”

“Oh, they’re both in the twenties. Yes, they’re alone. Nell was a stenographer, I believe, and Grace, the sister, tried one thing after another. Then they took what money they had, and came out here. A family called Jimpson had taken that section, and couldn’t seem to make it pay. They put in a lot of good farm implements too, and had the oxen, and a horse, but they didn’t have any luck, they said. Well, I always contend there’s no luck like pluck, and the Wilson girls came along, and bought them out for a song, and they’ve had luck, but not without steady, faithful work. Archie’s been over helping them now and then, and he says Nell’s a dear girl.”

Polly looked up quickly at Jean, and saw that she was smiling, and she wondered, for Polly sensed a story or a romance miles off, as the Admiral said. Jean saw the eager inquiry in her glance, and nodded her head.

“They are to be married when Archie finishes college,” she said.

“Oh, I’m glad,” cried Polly, and all the girls turned in their saddles, and sent out a cheer back to the two in the field. “They’ll wonder what that’s for, but we know,” she added, merrily.

Sunday they did not break camp at all, but stayed at their first stopping place, Camp Expectancy, on the banks of the big lake. Mr. Murray read service for them, and the girls enjoyed singing the old familiar canticles out there in the green world. Monday night, just at moonrise, the tired travelers turned down the road that led past old Topnotch, and were glad enough to see the light in the cabin window, and hear the dogs barking.

Sally Lost Moon stood in the doorway holding up a lamp, and smiling broadly at them, and Archie and Neil took the ponies, while Don helped unload.

“They’ve started digging over in the gulch,” Don found a chance to tell Peggie. “Dr. Smith lives in Zed’s old shack now, and they say more workmen are coming, and they’ll be there all summer.”

“Oh, Don, just after our old skeleton,” exclaimed Peggie. “Do you remember how we laughed when we found it, and wondered what sort of a bear had bones like that?”

“It would be there yet if Polly hadn’t known better.”

“I know it,” Peggie agreed. “The other girls say she’s the best starter of things they ever saw. They say if I do go back east with them, I am to belong to their outing club too. Polly’s the president. Won’t that be fun?”

Don was very busy with the girth strap on Jinks, and she could not see his face, but his voice sounded muffled and unwilling.

“It won’t be fun for us. Won’t you miss us, Peg?”

“Of course I will, goosie,” cried Peggie, “but it will help mother to have me away, and I can get through school faster, Jean says, this way.”

“But you’ll stay down East there and teach, if you do.”

“No, I won’t, Don,” Peggie said, lovingly. “I’ll come home, sure. I love Wyoming.”

The following day they all rode over to the gulch for the last time. The Doctor was in his element, bossing a gang of workmen, and they met two other famous men.

“What on earth did the Doctor call them, girls?” said Sue, on their way back. “Paleo—paleo—”

“Paleontologists,” corrected Ruth, firmly. “Swallow first, and take a deep breath, and you can say it, Sue.”

“Bone diggers,” added Ted, irreverently.

“More than that, Ted,” Jean interposed. “The other word is long, and difficult to remember, but it means a lot. It comes from three Greek words, and means a discourse on ancient life or beings on the earth. That is more than bone digging, isn’t it?”

“I’m sorry,” Ted said, penitently. “But I know I’ll never remember the other word.”

“Yes, you will, young lady,” cried Jean, laughingly, “because the very first time you need discipline this term, I shall have you write it fifty times.”

“Help, help!” called Ted, woefully, but the girls only laughed too.

Their vacation was up on Friday. Wednesday Mrs. Sandy had invited them all over to the Alameda to dinner, and for a visit. They went in the surrey, for horseback riding was beginning to feel pretty tiresome.

“Such a tanned lot of young savages,” exclaimed Miss Honoria, when she saw them. “I declare, Polly, what will Welcome say when she sees your freckles?”

“Just look at Lady Vanitas, and her tanned face and arms. That comes from trouting without a hat. But we’re all glad to be tanned. Nobody will believe we have had a wonderful vacation in the sunshine and open air unless we can show tan.”

It was all fully arranged that day about the return trip. Jean was to accompany the girls back, and Peggie would go when Miss Honoria returned. Nothing was said definitely about what the precious skeleton represented in a monetary way, but from the smile on Mrs. Sandy’s face when it was spoken of, and Peggie’s bubbling happiness, the girls knew that all trouble in that line had been wiped away. The greatest surprise of all was when the Doctor came down to the home ranch, Thursday afternoon. He looked in the best of health, and was fairly radiant over the dinosaurus.

“I have maintained for years that the Jurassic drift took in this section,” he said, happy as a boy with a new toy. “And this confirms me positively. Polly, as a relief to my conscience, I wish to hand over some of the spoils to the club that had sense enough to know prehistoric bones when it saw them. Here is one hundred, and I knew you’d like it in gold. Girls always do. Five twenty-dollar gold pieces, one for each of you, and you shall be honorary members anyway of my own private geological society when I start it.”

“Oh, Doctor Smith,” cried Polly, flushing warmly at the unexpectedness of the gift. “We don’t deserve this.”

“Don’t you? Wouldn’t the dinosaurus be lying right in its rocky tomb this minute if it hadn’t been for your discernment? You take it, child, and add it with my best thanks and good wishes to the general fund of the Polly Page Club.”

“Girls,” said Polly, later, when she broke the glad news to the rest. “Let’s take a stateroom on the train from Chicago to Washington. We deserve that much, anyway, and it was hard sleeping all the way on the seats.”

“Hear, hear!” cried the girls, gaily.

The start was to be an early one, but even before breakfast, Friday morning, a solemn and regretful procession wended its way from the guest cabin down to the corral, and each girl took mournful leave of her pony.

“Jinks is crying, I know he is,” said Polly. “See him droop his precious head. I wish I could take him back with me.”

“Don’t we all wish the same about our ponies?” Ted exclaimed. “Where can I ever find another horse like Calico Bill. He’s salmon-pink and brown and white, and his eyes are so expressive.”

The ponies did seem to know that something wrong was going on, for they lifted their heads, and whinnied wistfully as the two teams drove away over the road southward. The two older boys stood with Mrs. Murray, waving, and beside them was Sally too, stolid, and bright-eyed, watching them out of sight.

“Four weeks of solid fun,” said Ruth, as she leaned back. “Hasn’t it been just splendid, girls?”

“You’ve blazed a good trail for others to follow, too,” Jean replied. “Better a suit-case and a khaki dress than white ruffles and a parasol, girls, on a board walk, if you’re out for health and a good time.”

“And a dinosaurus,” added Polly.

At the railroad station in Deercroft, they saw Jimmy.

“Thought I’d ride down to say good-bye,” he said, shaking hands with each. “Don’t forget what you promised about our mission, will you? They say we can have the old Fork schoolhouse to use if we want it, and we’re going to try to buy it in, and make a chapel out of it. I hope you’ll help out.”

“We will, truly, we will,” the girls promised.

“Here she comes through the cut,” called out Don, holding the ponies. “Good-bye all!”

Mr. Murray held Jean close in his arms.

“God bless you, my lass,” he said, gently. “Take good care of Peggie for us this winter. Good-bye, girls. Come again when you’re up this way.”

Jimmie had sprung to his own saddle, and his black pony was doing a waltz step all its own when the train pulled in. He swung his hat off in one last salute, and let the bridle slacken, and the last the girls saw of him, he was going like a rocket down the road towards the town, singing at the top of his lungs, his old favorite,

“Guide me, Oh, Thou great Jehovah,

Pilgrim through this barren land!”

Polly leaned back from the window, her eyes wet with tears.

“Isn’t it a darling land?” she said, warmly.

“It’s Heart’s Content to us who love it,” Jean replied, and the girls knew well what she meant.

The next volume in the Polly Page Series will be entitled:

THE POLLY PAGE MOTOR CLUB.

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- THE POLLY PAGE RANCH CLUB
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- CHAPTER XII
- CHAPTER XIII
- CHAPTER XIV
- CHAPTER XV
- CHAPTER XVI
- CHAPTER XVII
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- CHAPTER XXV
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