“I shall be ready in just one hour,” she said. “So get a good rest, for I am a fast walker, and I shall expect you to keep up with me.”
The boy grinned as his sharp teeth closed on the first mouthful of that toothsome pie, but he was too busily occupied to discuss the question of his walking powers just then.
Never had Nell found an hour slip by at a quicker rate than this. There was the baking to finish, the kitchen to clear up, dinner to get ready for Gertrude and the children, and the furniture to restore to the room she had so carefully cleaned in the early morning.
But all the time she was darting to and fro in her endeavours to compress the work of two hours into one, there kept ringing in her mind Gertrude’s words of yesterday, “We shall somehow be different to-morrow.”
“If it is really granfer, I must not let him slip out of sight again, poor old man,” she murmured to herself. “I must take care of him somehow. Perhaps Joey and Mrs. Trip could board him; but I shall know better when I have seen him—poor granfer!”
CHAPTER XXVIII
Doss Umpey’s Excuses
GOAT’S GULCH was a narrow valley, or deep slit in the hills, much higher up than Camp’s Gulch or the Settlement, and so inaccessible that Nell was continually wondering as she toiled up the rocky slopes, how the cart in which the boy and the two men made their home, had been brought to such a place.
Trees there were in plenty, some growing out from the crevices in big rock-boulders, others struggling for root-hold on jutting shelves, where the soil was thin and poor.
Of level ground there was absolutely none. It was all uphill, or it was down, or strewn with boulders so big that they looked like mountains in miniature.