Once, as they rode, they came to a hilltop that overlooked the country for miles and miles. Far away to the south, Peggie pointed out Deercroft, just a little clump of match boxes, it looked, at that distance. They could see homesteads too, here and there far below them, and now and then a ranch.
“You can tell the difference if you look carefully,” Jean told them. “Wait a minute. I have my field glasses.” She stopped the team, and reached back into the locker for them, and the girls enjoyed looking through them in turn. “The ranches all have corrals. And the homesteads always have gardens. Do you see the difference?”
Once, as they passed along the road, they came to a river crossing, the water cold and swift. Fording it was an old man with a thin, sunburnt face, and long, sandy moustache. He was mounted on a calico broncho, with a high Mexican saddle, and dressed in dingy yellow, with an old felt hat tilted over his eyes. He turned in midstream to shade his eyes, and look back at the camping-out cavalcade, and Mr. Murray let out a long hail at him. He answered with a wave of his hand, and rode on.
“That’s Dave Penfield,” he told the girls, “best scout in Wyoming, not barring out Sandy himself. He’s over seventy now, and when the President himself came to the Big Horn country to hunt, if they didn’t look up old Dave to steer him to the right spots. Dave said he didn’t mind a bit. Always had heard the President was a very respectable and sociable sort of man. That’s Dave all over.”
Sometimes wonderful black ravens swung lazily and majestically out of the woods, or a brilliant orange tanager would flash out of the green gloom across their path like a vivid bit of flame. The girls cried out at the beauty of the mountain flowers, too. It seemed as though the rougher the rocks became and the wilder the scenery, the more delicately beautiful the flowers were.
“It is that way as far as you can go up the mountains,” Jean told them. “Even at the highest altitudes they find tiny flowers growing. Eleven thousand feet is what we call timber line, and after you pass that, you will find these tiny flowers.”
“What is the tree that trembles all the time?” asked Ruth. “I read some place that it grows out here.”
“Not as far north as we are. It is in Colorado. The aspen, you mean. It is a very beautiful tree. They say it trembles because it is the wood the Cross was made of. Oh, girls, look—there goes a goat.”
Just for a moment they caught a glimpse of him, a fleeing shadow along the line of rocks far above their heads.
“By jiminetty, mother,” exclaimed Mr. Murray, drawing rein, regretfully, “I wish I’d had my rifle ready for those horns.”