Mr. Harwood had intended to visit it, and spend three or four days in looking about the city and endeavoring to learn something about the manners and customs of the people that inhabited it, but several of the party were anxious to reach their destination, and for that and many other reasons they passed the dwelling place of the Mormons by. Although the children were greatly disappointed at not being able to go into the city, they could not help speaking and thinking with delight of the beautiful country they had passed over to reach it.
"It seems to me," said Aggie one day when they stopped to rest, "that four seasons had wandered out of some years and lost themselves up among those mountains."
"You're crazy!" said George contemptuously.
"I think not," said Guy kindly, "but what could have put such a queer idea as that into your head, Aggie?"
"Why you know," she said, "the grass was fresh and green there as if it was spring time, and yet very often while you were gathering buttercups to make me a chain, George and Gus would be pelting you with snow-balls, while the summer sun was shining upon us all the day long."
"That's so," exclaimed George, "I should never have thought of it again. It's the queerest place I ever saw in my life, except this very great valley which we are in now. Papa says it is over three hundred miles from the Rocky Mountains to the Sierra Nevadas, yet although we haven't been out of sight of the first for more than a week, we shall see the tops of the others in a few days, and then, hurrah! we've only to cross them and we shall be in California! Won't that be glorious?"
"Yes, I shall be glad," said Aggie, "for I was beginning to think as mamma said the other day, 'that we never should see a house again.' And won't you be glad, Guy, not to have to get up so early to make the fires in the morning, and to work so late at night, often after walking over the hot sands all day?"
"I don't know," said Guy rather sadly, "You have all been very kind to me here, and though I have often worked very hard, I guess it won't be all play for me in California."
Little Aggie often thought of these words of Guy in the days that followed, as they drew nearer and nearer their destination, and each member of the company spoke of his or her hopes or prospects. She noticed that upon that Guy, as well as his mother, was always silent, and many, many hours she sat in the wagon puzzling her little head as to what would become of their favorite.
She even spoke of it to Guy when they were alone together, but he seldom would say anything about it. He was not like some people that find comfort in talking over perplexing questions, and it certainly was a very perplexing question to him, how he was to support his mother in the strange country to which he had induced her to come, for though young, Guy was too wise to think that gold lay all over the land, and all that any one had to do was to stoop and pick it up, though many older than himself in the train still believed that old fable, which deceived many in the time of Cortez, over two hundred years before.