The two girls laughed. “She isn’t much of a treasure-hunter, is she!” said Doris. “Bless her heart. We’ll go out right away and sit down under the pine trees.”
They emerged into the sunlight, and Sally carefully closed and concealed the entrance to their secret lair. After the chill of the underground, the warm sunlight was very welcome and they lay lazily basking in its heat and inhaling the odor of the pine-needles. Far above their heads the fish-hawks swooped with their high-pitched piping cry, and two wrens scolded each other in the branches above their heads. Sally sat tailor-fashion, her chin cupped in her two hands, thinking in silence, while Doris, propped against a tree, was explaining the pictures in her new book to Genevieve. In the intervals, while Genevieve stared absorbedly at one of them, Doris would look about her curiously and speculatively. Suddenly she thrust the book aside and sprang to her feet.
“Do you realize, Sally,” she exclaimed, “that I’ve never yet explored a bit of this region above ground with you? I’ve never seen a thing except this bit right about the cave. Why not take me all round here for a way. It might be quite interesting.”
Sally looked both surprised and scornful. “There’s nothing at all to see around here that’s a bit interesting,” she declared. “There’s just this pine grove and the underbrush, and back there,—quite a way back, is an old country road. It isn’t even worth getting all hot and tired going to see.”
“Well, I don’t care, I want to see it!” insisted Doris. “I somehow have a feeling that it would be worth while. And if you are too tired to come with me, I’ll go by myself. You and Genevieve can rest here.”
“No, I want to go wis Dowis!” declared Genevieve, scrambling to her feet as she scented a new diversion.
“Well, I’ll go too,” laughed Sally. “I’m not as lazy as all that, but I warn you, you won’t find anything worth the trouble.”
They set off together, scrambling through the scrub-oak and bay-bushes, stopping now and then to pick and devour wild strawberries, or gather a great handful of sassafras to chew. All the while Doris gazed about her curiously, asking every now and then a seemingly irrelevant question of Sally.
Presently they emerged from the pine woods and crossed a field covered only with wild blackberry vines still bearing their white blossoms. At the farther edge of this field they came upon a sandy road. It wound away in a hot ribbon till a turn hid it from sight, and the heat of the morning tempted them no further to explore it.
“This is the road I told you of,” explained Sally with an “I-told-you-so” expression. “You see it isn’t anything at all, only an old back road leading to Manituck. Nobody much comes this way if they can help it,—it’s so sandy.”