“Ye-yes, I believe I do. I seem to be floating—floating; I’m getting light as a feather. My stars! I was never so happy in my life! I want to get up.”
“Of course you do,” chuckled Shonto. “Not only that, but you want to tell the world, when you get up, that you’re equal to about anything, don’t you?”
“Yes, I want to flap my wings and crow, even if I am a hen. I don’t care for anything. I’m a whizgimp. Mary Temple says that a whizgimp is a person who is happy, even though he knows one more hot day will send him to the bug house.”
She sat up suddenly and unexpectedly, turned to her knees, and in springing lightly to her feet with a glad little laugh, her foot struck the medicine case.
With a muttered oath the doctor sprawled in the trail and grasped at it. His frantic fingers touched it, but the contact served only to push it over the edge, and it went rattling and bounding down the cliff into the green waters of the river.
“Come on!” Charmian giggled. “Let it go! What’s the difference! Lead out—I’m crazy to get down into the Valley of Arcana! And I can run along that narrow shelf and laugh while I’m about it!”
CHAPTER XVIII
IN THE PALM OF THE MOUNTAINS
SHONTO and his artificially elated companion continued their journey down the side of the steep cliffs without further mishap. The girl had taken the lead, stepping with a firm, springy stride, all horror of the abyss gone by reason of the potent drug. She was fearless but never reckless. The doctor had known that this would be the result of the hypodermic injection, so he did not worry about her safety and made no objection to her going first.
Nevertheless he was worried—worried as never before. A great calamity had come upon all that were concerned in the expedition, but only Dr. Shonto knew that this was true. The lost medicine case was responsible for it. It was so prodigiously serious that his homely face had turned a shade paler, and his mind was struggling desperately with the problem that it presented for him alone to solve.
Eventually the pair rounded the last switchback, and followed a gently sloping trail, quite wide, to the level floor of the valley. They came out upon the floor through a rocky pass, an eighth of a mile above the point where the green river swung in so abruptly to the foot of the cliffs. The land was wooded here. Sycamores, cottonwoods, water oaks, live oaks, willows and alders bespoke a more temperate clime than they had passed through since hours before they reached the cabin of Shirttail Henry Richkirk. The valley was lower than Ranger Reed had estimated, and the explorers had entered the Upper Sonoran Life Zone, where existence would be less problematical during rigorous seasons in the wilderness.