“Yes, Stacy, and I forgive you for trying to make me think you had suffered the bandit to shoot at you while you lay behind a bush,” smiled Elfreda.
“Not if my legs were in good working order. I wouldn’t lie behind any bush or anything else and let a sure-thing gunman blaze away at me,” declared Stacy Brown with an earnestness that raised a merry peal of laughter.
“Time to break camp,” announced Tom Gray. “We can chatter after we have made a new camp, which will not be many miles from here.”
“Where are we bound for?” asked Hippy.
“Three Mile Pass.” Captain Gray’s face wore a broad smile, and Grace, knowing him so well, regarded him suspiciously.
“Tom has something up his sleeve,” Grace confided in Elfreda.
“They all have,” observed Miss Briggs. “These honest men who have opened their hearts to us have not yet opened the aforesaid hearts far enough.”
“Boots and saddles!” cried Hippy, and the Overland Riders with their guests took to their mounts. It was a happy ride that morning; the air was cool, birds were twittering, and Hippy was trying to sing, his efforts in that direction raising a perfect storm of protest.
No stop was made, except now and then to water the horses, until nearly noon. Then they halted, apparently for no cause at all, the visitors and Tom Gray fussing with saddle girths, all the time regarded narrowly by Grace and Elfreda.
At last they started on through a rapidly broadening pass, following the dry course of a mountain stream. The sunlight flooded the pass as their trail bore more to the right, and at the turn Tom Gray held up his hand, a signal to halt.