“Dick, you and Harry come on up,” Jerry called. “It’s safe all right.”
“You girls won’t mind being left alone, will you?” Harry asked in his chivalrous way, of all of them, although he looked at Mary.
“No, indeed,” she replied. “Go along.”
The boys went up the swaying ladder so easily that Mary, usually the less courageous one of the two, said to Dora, “I’m going up. Catch me if I fall.”
The three boys were in the rock house and did not know that the girls had climbed the ladder until they saw them standing near the open door.
Jerry leaped toward them. “Little Sister,” he said, “what if you had fallen?”
Dora thought complacently, “Well, I guess that lover’s misunderstanding is patched up all right. It didn’t matter, evidently, whether or not Etta fell, and as for Dora Bellman—” she laughed and shrugged her broad, capable shoulders.
Mary was asking, “Has anyone seen the Evil Eye Turquoise?”
“Not yet. Come, let’s look for it,” the cowboy called, adding, as he turned to his neighbor, “Etta, I didn’t tell you that part of the story, did I?”
Smilingly, and evidently untroubled by the recent by-play between the cowboy and Mary, she replied in the negative. So, standing near the open door, they all told parts of the tale to the interested listener.