So it was no wonder the girls looked forward to Sunday. Every day they went for a good long ride with Jean or Peggie. Sometimes it was to Picture Rocks, sometimes over to the Indian graves, sometimes to the battlefield where Crazy Horse had made one of his last stands against the white troops. The first Sunday they spent very quietly. Mr. Murray read prayers after breakfast, and Jean played the hymns on the little cottage organ in the living room at the main cabin. It gave the girls a realization of what the kingdom of home meant out in the wilderness, this gathering of the little Murray clan about the father; the boys, tall and brawny, leading in the responses, the girls carrying the singing.
“Have you always done that?” asked Sue, later in the day. “I think it’s splendid, to hold service even by yourself.”
“We have to if we want service, and what’s the difference? I think if you were all alone, and still worshiped God, and held his day sacred, it would be just the same as if you had gone to church,” said Peggie, sensibly. “As long, of course, as there was no church to go to. We always do.”
There was much trout fishing that week, too. Ted and Sue learned to cast and play for the speckled beauties as warily as any of the rest, and many a delicious feast they had when they came back with a good catch. There was very little fishing along the river, and the fish were plentiful. Polly and Ruth found one quiet, dark pool below the rapids where they seemed to love to bask in the dappled water.
Evenings they would sit and listen to Mr. Murray tell stories of the early days; of times when the little, hard-earned bunches of cattle would be found butchered by some marauding band of unfriendly Indians; and sometimes of stolen horses, snatched away by young braves on the path for plunder.
One day the Chief, as they always called him now, drove over from the Alameda ranch, and stayed through the afternoon and evening at the Murrays’, and then the girls heard wonderful tales of the old trails and scouts. Once Polly turned with eager flushed face to Mrs. Sandy, and asked impulsively:
“How could you leave Queen’s Ferry and come ’way out here when it was so wild?”
The faintest bit of a blush rose to Diantha’s cheeks, and she said:
“He asked me to, child.”
“Do you know,” Polly said later, when the girls were by themselves in the old cabin, “sometimes I just want to ask her right out why there is any trouble between dear old Miss Calvert and herself. They make such a darling pair of sisters, don’t you know, girls?”