"Great guns! I should hope not," said Allen, with a flash of his white teeth. "I would rather face a dugout full of Boches than try to keep tabs on you girls. See here," he added, suddenly serious. "Do you mean to tell me that you were really caught in that cave with your horses and nothing to dig your way out with but your hands?"
"And a few sharp stones that we found," Betty nodded soberly.
Allen whistled softly.
"No, I should think not," he said slowly. "It's a wonder that with you and your horses, too, in that small space, you didn't smother before aid could reach you."
"We should have," spoke up Amy quickly, "if it hadn't been for Betty. She was the one who kept us at it when we were ready to give up."
"Yes, and she was the one that kept at it when the rest of us had given up," Mollie reminded her. "She was the one who kept digging until she forced the hole through. If it hadn't been for her we would have all given up and just died there, I guess."
Betty, who had been getting redder and redder through this recital of her heroism, found it hard to meet Allen's eyes as he turned to her with all his heart in his own.
"The girls give me altogether too much credit," she protested. "Anybody will fight when he has his back against the wall. And now let's take Allen to see Dan Higgins' mine," she added lightly. "Dan Higgins and his daughter Meggy are great friends of ours, Allen, and I know you will love them as much as we do."
"Your friends will always be mine," Allen assured her gallantly, and they rode off gayly toward Gold Run.
On the way they told him a good deal of Dan Higgins and Meggy, and Allen listened with sympathetic interest.