Later, as he was driving down the pine-shaded cañon road, the good man was thinking, “How I do wish my Sylvia could attend this mountain school. She seems to be making very little headway with her French governess. If only she could live awhile the simple, healthful life that the little Martins are living, how much good it would do her.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
THE RETURN OF TOPSY
“Dixie Martin, come quick if you want to see something. Oh-ee! It’s something you’ve been wanting for weeks and weeks.”
It was Carol who called. The small curly-headed girl was hanging out clothes in the sunny yard, back of the log cabin, while the older sister stood on a box beside a washtub in the shade of a spreading pine tree.
Hearing the excited voice of her little sister calling to her, Dixie hastily wrung out the pair of patched blue rompers that she was washing, and, with soapy suds glistening on her hands, she ran around the house, wondering what she was to see.
To her great joy, coming across the garden toward them was no less a creature than her long-strayed and much-loved cat, Topsy.
With a cry of delight, Dixie wiped the suds from her hands on her blue all-over apron, and rushing at the rather thin and rusty-looking cat, she caught it up in her arms and kissed it on the nose, eyes, and even on the paws.
“Oh, you dearest, darlingest, belovedest!” she exclaimed. “Wherever have you been? You look like a reg’lar tramp cat, and no wonder,—your coat hasn’t been sleeked for three weeks if it’s a day. Didn’t you love your Dixie any more, that you ran away and wouldn’t come back? You don’t know how lonesome I’ve been.”
The little girl’s face was burrowed in the soft black hair. The pussy-cat purred its contentment when its little mistress sat on a stump near by to cuddle it in her lap, but suddenly Topsy flipped up an ear and sat erect, as though she had just thought of something. Then, before the astonished girls could guess what it was all about, away the cat darted toward an old abandoned shed down near the apple-orchard, soon reappearing with a very small something in its mouth.
The older girl had turned back to the washtub, but another exclamation as excited as the first brought her whirling about.