“What was your second puzzle?” Babs asked.
“Why this picturesque place ahead of us in the mountains, should be called Hog Canon?”
“Oh, that is too easy,” Megsy declared.
“Probably because some former dry rancher tried to raise hogs,” Babs suggested.
“You are nearly right, but not entirely so. It was Nature itself that raised the little wild hogs that ‘abounded,’ as the story books say, in these mountains, but they are gone now or nearly so.”
“Goodness, you don’t mean the kind that I’ve seen in pictures with tusks that look so dangerous.”
“No, not wild boars. These were very small creatures, I’ve heard father say, but they were all gone when brother and I came to the desert to live. Now what is your third puzzle.”
“Why you named your pack horse Old Stoic.”
“All you have to do is to look at him and that mystery is solved. He hasn’t a spark of fire in his eye, he has never been known, within the memory of the oldest inhabitant, to do anything but plod. I guess the colt in him vanished years ago.”
The girls all turned to look at the pack horse that was following them but it deigned not to return their notice. It did indeed seem to be stolid and stunned. Suddenly Virginia began to laugh. She was riding ahead by that time and the others pressed forward to hear the cause of her mirth.