“Hush! not so loud.”
“Is it a bear?”
“It’s a man. I can see him plainly now. He’s coming this way—up the gorge.”
“Well, that’s a mercy! For if there should be a bear, maybe the man has a gun.”
“Crowd in here beside me, Tavia,” commanded Dorothy. “I don’t want him to see you.”
“Why not?” asked Tavia, in surprise. “Do you think a sight of me would scare him?”
A clump of low bushes hid the ponies, and probably the girls themselves could not have been observed from the bottom of the gulch. They peered through a fringe of greenery into the hollow and observed the stranger advancing up the rock-strewn bottom.
“What under the sun, Doro, is he doing?” gasped Tavia, after a moment.
“That’s what I want to know,” returned her chum, seriously.
The man turned then and shouted down the gorge. A faint echo of his voice reached the girls, but what he said they could not distinguish.