The Pages had been six weeks at the Hot Springs. The invalid, quite recovered, was able to join them in all their expeditions. The children had enjoyed every waking moment of their stay, and the sleeping moments also, it might be said, if one should judge of that by the soundness of their repose.
"Our vacation is nearly over," said Mr. Page one morning, looking up from a letter he had been reading.
"Oh, papa," cried Walter and his sister, "do we have to go home soon?"
"Pretty soon," was the reply. "This letter calls me home. Mr. Dillon has business in Arizona, and wants to start not later than the first of September."
Mr. Dillon was Mr. Page's partner. He had already postponed his departure beyond the time originally set. Mr. Page did not feel that he could ask him to do so again, and the elder members of the party were beginning to feel that home would be welcome.
Not so the children. Rugged with health, bubbling over with happiness, and almost as brown as the young Indians, they deplored the necessity of leaving a spot with which they had become thoroughly familiar, and whose strange, peculiar people they had learned to know and love. The Indians are slow to make friends among the whites, but their confidence once given, they do not soon withdraw it. Walter and Nellie had long since been initiated into the mysteries of herb gathering, fruit drying, blanket and basket weaving, rug making and beef jerking. They could talk quite intelligently on all these subjects.
That which interested them most, appealing strongly to their tender sympathies, was the subject of the removal of the Indians from the Springs.
"They talk of it everywhere we go," said the boy to his father one evening. "They are always asking us if we think perhaps the government will let them stay, papa, and what you think of it.