“Do you mean, Miss Temple, that Morley and his wife and Leach have ridden off and left us here on the desert?—that their opal claims are a fake, and that they were afraid Shirttail Henry would expose them to Mrs. Reemy?”
“Of course,” answered Mary simply. “I knew it all along, but nobody would have paid any attention to me, so I couldn’t say boo to a goose. Now isn’t this a beautiful splatchet?”
“I don’t believe I understand you,” puzzled the physician. “A ‘splatchet’?”
Mary never seemed to find the dictionaries adequate to the needs of her vocabulary. She invented words indiscriminately when the sound of them seemed to suggest the thought she wanted to express.
“A splatchet,” she said carefully, “is a double mess on the floor. If you were baking pancakes, for instance, and turned to the sink a second to rinse out a couple of teacups, then saw that the pancakes were about to burn, and then you jumped for them and upset both the dishwater and the pancake batter, you’d make a splatchet on the floor.”
“What animals have they taken?” asked Shonto, with a smile at her droll word coinage. “Have you investigated?”
“Of course,” said Mary. “They’ve taken the three horses they rode here on, a little grub, and three canteens of water. That’s all. No great loss to us. We’ve plenty left to travel back on. They tied what grub they took behind their saddles, for all the burros are here.”
“You didn’t find a note or anything like that?”
“Nothing.”
“Well, this is a pretty mess, Miss Temple! Mrs. Reemy will be sick with disappointment.”