"Say, when do we eat?" demanded Joy suddenly. "I'm famished! I can't do another thing until I get my lunch."
"Poor starved child!" laughed Enid. "Do you suppose you could roll down the hill so we can build a camp fire by the stream? If you think you can't, we might fix up a stretcher and carry you."
Joy answered with a toss of her head and a puckered-up grin. "I think
I can manage to crawl there, if I am sure of a feed immediately."
The girls scrambled down the steep cliff side and began to unpack the lunch. Joy chose a large granite rock in the middle of the stream and perched thereon, she surveyed her surroundings.
"Isn't that a lovely copper stain? And to think it's coming from our mine!" she enthused in a mocking tone, while the other girls unpacked the lunch or hustled around to find sticks for a fire.
Their lunch preparations were to be quite elaborate, roast potatoes and corn on the cob and steak. Enid and Kit built the fire with care and soon a bed of coals was ready. While the two girls worked over the fire and Shirley gave attention to spreading the feast, Bet sat on the cliff, dreaming of the mine to be.
"This is adventure! This is romance!" she cried to her friends.
"Romance!" chuckled Joy. "It's not what I call romance."
"Dark brown eyes and a heavenly smile on the face of a boy, is your only idea of romance. You are a silly girl!" Bet shrugged her boyish shoulders and laughed at Joy as she undid her long rope, and standing up straight, tried to send the loop over a stump in the manner approved by Tommy Sharpe, her teacher. Her efforts were not very successful. Out of twenty attempts she managed one that coiled over the spot that she was aiming at. Bet decided then and there that she would not make a good cowboy. While she practised the throw again and again, she continued to talk to Joy who seemed half vexed as she snapped:
"You needn't talk about liking boys, Bet Baxter. I don't blush every time the mail arrives and a letter is handed me. And you seem to have no objection to dreamy brown eyes yourself. I've seen the way you looked at Phil Gordon. Now Phil's eyes haven't got enough snap in them for me—they're altogether too brooding to suit me. I think that young Mexican's eyes are much more exciting."