“I should think so, by the beaten path to it,” remarked Ruth. “You can’t lose your way, can you?”
The little path led down to the creek, and along its winding course until it turned a bend, and slipped into rapids around a rough, old butte that the children at the ranch had named Thunder Cloud, years before. Here the creek bed was full of rocks, as if, Polly said, years before, some giant had thrown them down there like a handful of pebbles. A little farther on, the creek broadened and deepened, and there lay the swimming hole.
“There are no rocks in it, here,” said Elspeth. “It’s only up to my shoulders at the center, excepting in early spring, when the snows melt, and then it’s a regular torrent through the whole valley.”
Ted and Sue waded out into midstream carefully. They had dressed in bathing suits up at the cabin, and even putting them on again had brought back the old joyous times at Lost Island last summer.
The water felt cool, but not chilling. Isabel and Ruth splashed about in the shore shallows experimentally, but Polly stood on a rock, and looked around her at the gorgeous scenery. The sun was well up in the heavens, but over everything there still clung the soft, hazy mist of a midsummer dawn. The distant mountains looked as if they had folded violet and pearl cloaks about them. The summits were veiled in straying, ever changing cloud wreaths. Even the near-by buttes of sandstone and shale, rugged and bare as they were, took on a certain beauty of their own in that tender, mellowing light. The bottom of the creek looked golden too, and the water was full of shimmering, shining ripples, as the girls splashed into it, with merry cries.
“I wish there was a long stretch of sandy beach, don’t you, girls?” said Isabel, as she hesitated, a mermaid without a resting place. “This shore is so rocky.”
“Rocky,” exclaimed Sue, floundering around vigorously. “Call this rocky after Maine. These rocks are pebbles.”
“Do you expect a Wyoming swimming hole to be a seaside sun-bath?” called out Ted. “Come on in, Polly. It’s splendid.”
“This used to be the old fording place, mother says, for westbound cattle bunches years ago,” said Jean, as she stopped a few minutes after a spurt up the river and back. “Some of the settlers went this way too. They named it Thunder Ford, so we called the old butte yonder Thunder Cloud. There used to be a chief of that name. I can just remember seeing him once when I was a little girl. I rode up to Sundance with father, and they had a sheriff’s sale of Indian ponies.”
“Oh, tell us about it,” Polly begged at once, wading towards her. “We can hear you.”