“I don’t believe that your little girl has any fever, Mrs.—?” She stopped for the stranger to supply her name.
“Hook,” answered the latter, briefly.
“But I’ll get my thermometer—it’s right here in the kit,” she continued.
She wiped the little instrument off, and inserted it between the child’s lips. A minute later she announced that her temperature was normal.
“Are you hungry?” she asked the little girl.
“You bet!” replied the child, without the slightest hesitation.
It was after the meal was over that Mrs. Remington confided her suspicions to Marjorie.
“That little girl isn’t sick at all,” she whispered; “it was merely a ruse to get us to drive them back. Still, I’m not sorry that we are doing it—”
“No, a night alone in the desert isn’t particularly enviable,” remarked the young lieutenant. “And besides, she seemed awfully poor.”
Less than an hour had elapsed before the girls were back in their cars again, resigned to the undertaking they had assumed. The weary monotony of the desert stretched before them, but they did not flinch. Each girl took her turn at the wheel, drove for an hour, and wakened the next in turn. Marjorie alone had been keeping watch on the speedometer; she did not want to pass the shack that was to be their destination without knowing it.