“She has mothered me every minute since I arrived, Mrs. Murray,” she exclaimed. “And the girls all know well how self-reliant I am.”
“Don’t you love to be mothered, though?” asked Polly, eagerly. “I do.”
“We all do,” declared Mrs. Sandy. “And the oldest ones are always the ones that need it most.”
“Who wants to ride with me?” called out the Chief. “Room for three here.”
Isabel, Jean, and Ruth took advantage of the surrey, but the rest of the girls were glad to wait while Don saddled up the ponies for them.
“The Doctor left us at the Forks back yonder,” said Sandy, driving on with a salute to the group up on the low stoop. “He’s riding too. Said he never sat in a vehicle when he could get a saddle and anything beneath it with four legs. The Fork trail is a good short cut to the Gulch, and he can’t miss the way. We’ll find him sitting on old Zed’s doorstep just like a forest foundling.”
The girls laughed heartily at the picture. It was a splendid day. The wind rippled the leaves of the cottonwoods along the river, and sent their bits of down sailing away into the air. The far-off mountain range to the northwest seemed incredibly near, and for once its trailing robes of violet and gray were laid aside. Every peak stood out distinctly. Down in the valley Archie was hammering at a new bar gate, and every blow seemed to rouse a hundred echoes from old Topnotch’s crags and precipices.
“We haven’t brought anything to dig with,” said Ruth, in her quiet, dry way. “There are some old picks at the shack, I think. We can use those if the Doctor wants us to help him.”
“Old-time poll picks, those are,” the Chief explained. “Zed used to go around, digging one prospecting hole after another. It’s a wonder he never found the skeleton himself.”
“I think it must have been covered up until the big storm,” Peggie called from her saddle. “Don and I have been down through the valley lots and lots of times, and we’d never noticed that great ledge of rock before. We would surely have seen it.”