The rattling of the car was stilled as Jerry drew to one side of the road and stopped. He got out and glanced up at the sun. It still was high in a gleaming blue sky. “It’s hours yet before milking time,” he replied. Then to Mary, “What is your wish, Little Sister?”
Dora thought, “Never a brother in all this world puts so much tenderness into that name. Leastwise mine don’t!”
Mary had evidently replied that she would like to revisit the rock house, for Jerry was assisting her from the car. Dick had learned from past experience that Dora scorned assistance. Two girls could not be more unlike.
Before they entered the rock gate, Dick implored with pretended earnestness, “For Pete’s sake, don’t any of you imagine you hear a gun shot, will you?”
“Not unless we really do hear one,” Mary said.
Dora, to be impish, declared, “I’m prophesying that we will hear a gun fired before we leave this enclosure.”
The sand was deep and the walking was hard. Jerry, with a hand under Mary’s right elbow, helped her along, but Dora ploughed alone, with Dick, making no better headway, at her side.
“When we first visited this place,” Dora began, “I felt that there was sort of a deathlike atmosphere about it. It’s so terribly still and with bleached skeletons lying around. Now that I know it is Lucky Loon’s tomb,” she glanced up at the rock house and shuddered, “it seems more uncanny than ever.”
Dick, having left the others, wandered along the base of the cliff on which stood the rock house. The front of it had broken away leaving a wide gap at the top.
“Here’s where Lucky Loon went up, I suppose.” Dick pointed to irregular steps that seemed to have been hewn out of the leaning rock. “We could go up these stairs to the top of this rock, but nothing short of a mountain goat could leap that chasm.”