"Whatever are you doing there?" he asked.
"Waiting until your dog goes home," said Frank. "He won't let me have my clothes. If you hadn't come I expect I'd have to stay here until to-morrow."
Harry couldn't help grinning when he observed the resolute animal. "Wouldn't it have been easier to come out and whack him off?"
"No," said Frank decidedly. "If you were in my place you wouldn't want to try."
Harry walked up to the creature and picked up the clothes, whereat it rose immediately and wagged its tail as though satisfied in having done its duty.
"He doesn't seem to mind me," Harry observed dryly. "Anyway, there's no reason why you shouldn't come out now unless, of course, you're happier where you are."
Frank swam across, dressed, and ran all the way to the ranch, but it was half an hour before he was moderately warm again. The next day he set about teaching the dog to guard. It occurred to him that it was not desirable that Harry and Miss Oliver should be the only ones to whom the animal would give any stray article of clothing he might come across.
A week or two later Miss Oliver went away on a visit to Tacoma, and Mr. Oliver, who had bought a new mower, commenced to cut his timothy hay. The machine could only work on the cleared land, and where the stumps were thick he set the boys to mow with the scythe. Frank found it troublesome work, for the big roots ran along the surface of the ground. The fern had grown up among these roots, and it was their task to cut and pick it out from the grass, while every few minutes the scythe point struck a root and sometimes stuck in it. In places it struck gravel, which made dents in it, and the blade often got entangled among shooting willows and young fir saplings. Frank decided that while it was evidently a costly and difficult thing to clear a ranch, it must be almost as hard for its owner to keep what he had won, since the forest persistently crept back again.
"Suppose you left this place alone for a couple of years?" he asked, stopping to whet his dinted scythe.
"You wouldn't know it again," Harry answered with a smile. "It would be a waste of willows, with young firs growing up between them. You couldn't tell it from the bush, only that the trees all round would be higher."