But Betsy would not lie down again. Pretending to want to make the acquaintance of the pack horse she walked back toward where he so patiently stood, half dozing. Patting him on the head she said, “Old Stoic, if there’s a rattler or a tarantula, a scorpion or anything else startling or unusual around, you let me know won’t you.” Then she cried triumphantly. “Look girls, he’s nodding his head. He is intelligent after all. He just assumes that dull uninterested expression for reasons of his own. Maybe he’s a detective. That’s just the way Dad does when he’s in a group where he expects to overhear something of great importance. He acts as though he were intently thinking of something far away.”
The listeners laughed. “Honestly Betsy, I doubt your theory in this case. I don’t believe Old Stoic thinks. He seems to just plod, but now if you’re all rested enough, we’ll up in the saddle and away.”
“Whizzle, but it’s hot, hotter, hottest!” Betsy exclaimed when they had ridden a mile farther on their way.
“Or, as the story books say, ‘The relentless tropical sun beat down upon the lone traveler and his beast of burden. Nowhere about him on the vast sandy waste could he see a sprig of vegetation that would suggest a life-saving oasis—’”
“Oh Babs, have a heart! I’d heaps rather have you spiel about ice cream sodas and cool things like that if it’s all the same to you.”
Virg smiled back over her shoulder. “Perhaps we ought to have waited for a cooler hour,” she said. “I forgot that you Eastern girls are not as used to our Arizona sun as I am, and, I’ll confess, it is rather warm, but there’s hope ahead, for in just a few moments we will have sighted the canon up which we will soon be riding.”
Betsy drew her sombrero farther down over her eyes, and then peered ahead through the air that was quivering with the heat.
The canon which they were nearing did not look inviting. There were no green growths that would have suggested a cool brook flowing down among them, only bare jagged rocks with here and there a scraggly mesquite bush growing in the cracks of rock where sand had gathered.
“Well, I don’t wonder the neighbors call the gentleman who chose that canon as his dwelling place ‘foolish,’” she remarked with a little disdainful grunt.
“Oh, but that isn’t his chief folly, or rather, not the one for which he is noted far and wide,” Virginia looked over her should to inform them.