“Coffee!” whispered the girl. “Is it really coffee that I smell?”
“Gracious, I believe they’re starving,” gasped Mrs. Van, running into the house.
“All we’ve had to-day is a cake of chocolate and some lumps of sugar,” said Scott, briefly. “Look after the horses, O’Grady, will you? They’ve had it pretty rough, too.”
He was lame and sore from his fall of the day before, and tired and hungry from the day’s discomforts, but he managed to say enough to give them an idea of what had happened.
“After I climbed out of the arroyo,” he said, “I didn’t know which way to go. If those fellows had got Polly I wanted to go after them; if they hadn’t—well, I didn’t dare take the chance that they hadn’t. I was pelting down the trail like a madman when I heard her voice calling me from up the trail.
“We got on the horses and began climbing again, pretty well pleased with our luck, but the horses were all in. They’d been at it since early morning, climbing most of the time, and I saw that they weren’t going to make it. So I picked a good-looking spot near the head of the stream that we’d been following, and we camped there for the night, ate the rest of our sandwiches, and rolled up in our blankets. It wasn’t very comfortable but it was a case of needs must.
“In the morning I set out to find the trail again. It had pretty well disappeared—choked up by the brush. We fought our way through it all morning and finally lost it; struck out higher up on the mountain and came out on the barren side near the top. That’s all, except that we’ve been going since five this morning on nothing but a cake of chocolate that Polly found in her coat pocket and a few lumps of sugar.”
“If I were going back to Chicago to live I believe I’d start soup kitchens for hungry people,” declared Polly, suddenly. “It’s the worst thing in the world—being hungry.”
“If you was——” Mrs. Van Zandt started suddenly and stopped equally so. Polly blushed. Scott came to the rescue.
“We may as well tell ’em while we’re telling our other troubles,” he suggested, and Polly told them.