The Indian girl looked out toward the cliffs and in her eyes there was an expression as though she were seeing a vision. “I cannot tell how I know,” she said, then smiling directly into the eyes of her friend, she added, “But I know.”
The good breakfast was rather hurriedly eaten, for when the girls had heard what Virginia had decided to do, they were all as much excited about it as she.
“You don’t mean that we are really, truly, going to ride north to the Wilson Ranch,” Margaret exclaimed, and Barbara equally amazed, added, “But Virg, you said one had to cross the mountains that we see towering above the cliff, did you not?”
The western girl nodded. “Aren’t you afraid that we might take the wrong trail and be lost?” Babs continued.
“You will not be lost.” It was Winona who had spoken in that calm quieting voice of hers, “for Red Feather and I will accompany you, and too, perhaps Eagle Eyes would like to go. The lads know every trail on these snow-capped mountains and they are always glad to have an adventure, whatever its nature.”
An hour later, the four girls, with the two Indian boys in the lead, left the almost hidden entrance in the wall of the rock and started on the long hard ride toward the mountains far to the north.
Virginia had carefully fastened the bit of brown paper in a place of safety, and, as they rode along in single file, her eyes were often on the trail ahead of them, and her thoughts were with Tom. How happy they would all try to make him at the V. M. if only they could find him well and unharmed. She and Margaret would let him know that they cared for him like a brother and that they wished him to feel that their home was also his home.
With a sudden thought of what might have happened to him came to her, she closed her eyes and tried not to look at the suggested picture, for, all too well she knew how cruel rustlers could be when they wished to dispose of a herder who might some day be a witness against them.
“Isn’t it time to stop for lunch?” she heard Margaret asking, and, so intently had she been thinking, that her friend’s voice sounded far off.
“Yes, I believe it is high sun,” she replied as she glanced at the heavens.