"Oh, thank you," she called back over her shoulder. Her pony, finding that he was turned homeward, was setting off at his best gait. Slapping his hat firmly on his head, Jack hurried to overtake her, and the two raced along neck to neck.
"This is how they brought the good news from Ghent to Aix," he called. "I recited it once at school!
"'Not a word to each other; we kept the great pace,—
Neck by neck, stride by stride, never changing our place.'"
"Isn't it glorious?" called back Lloyd. Her cheeks dimpled with pleasure, and were growing red as a sun-ripened peach from the exercise. Her hat-pin began slipping out. Snatching at the little cap, she caught it just in time to save it from sailing off into the desert, but her hair came slipping down over her shoulders to her waist, in soft, shining waves. Jack thought that he had never seen anything prettier than the little golden ripples in it, as it floated back behind her in the sunshine.
"You look like Goldilocks when the three bears chased her," he laughed. "Don't try to put it up again. That's squaw fashion. You ought to wear it that way all the time you're out here, if you want to be in style."
Across the road from the Wigwam, Mary and Norman were waiting for the return of the hunters. They had rolled a barrel from the back yard over to the edge of the desert, where they could watch the road, and, turning it on its side, had laid a plank across it, left from flooring the tents. On this they were seesawing up and down, taking turns at occupying the end which faced in the direction Jack and Lloyd would come. Mary happened to have the coveted seat when they came in sight.
"Gay go up, and gay go down," she chanted, as the seesaw rose and fell with delightful springiness. "All the way to London town." Norman was high in the air when she began again, "Gay go up," but it was anything but gay go down for Norman. With an unexpectedness that he was wholly unprepared for, Mary's chant ended with a whoop of "Here they come!" She sprang off, and ran to meet them, regardless of the other end of the plank. It fell with such a thud that Norman felt that his spinal column must certainly have become unjointed in the jolt, and his little white teeth shut down violently on his little red tongue.
His cries and Mary's shout of "Here they come" brought Joyce to the door. Mr. Ellestad was just leaving. She had prevailed upon him to read the legend to her mother, and then he had stayed on till sundown, discussing the different things that a girl might do on the desert to earn money. The story of Shapur had inspired her with a hope that made all things possible. She was glad that Lloyd's triumph gave her an outlet for her enthusiasm.
As soon as Mr. Ellestad left, she hustled Jack off to his mother's tent to change his wet clothes, and then started to build the fire for supper. "It's a pity that it's too dark for me to take a snap shot of you with that duck," she said. "But the first one that Jack or Phil kills we'll have a picture of it. It will do just as well. Then if I were you I'd make some little blotting-pads of white blotting-paper, put a blue-print on the top sheet, of you and your rifle and the duck, and at the top fasten one of the feathers made into a pen. You can split the end of the quill, you know, just as they used to make the old-fashioned goose-quill pens."
"So I can!" cried Lloyd. "I'm so glad you thought of it. Oh, Joyce, I've had the best time this aftahnoon! I had no idea the desert could be so interesting!"