“Wh-why I th-th-thought you would be coming with us as usual,” said the surprised Cheerio.
“No thank you, and I’m quite able to saddle my own horse when I want to go,” said Hilda, and returned to a deep perusal of the dictionary. But the crestfallen and puzzled Cheerio did not see her, as on tiptoe, she stole around the side of the house, to catch a last glimpse of him as he rode out with Sandy beside him. Her cheeks were hot and her eyes humid with undropped tears as over the still evening air her brother’s shrill young voice floated:
“Hilda not coming! Gee! we’re in luck! Now we can go over the cliff!”
Hilda didn’t care just then whether that brother of hers went over the cliff or not. She felt forsaken, bitter, ill-used and extremely unhappy and forlorn. But she had had her last ride in the magical evenings on a dinosaur quest.
CHAPTER VII
“Say, Hilda, guess what I found to-day? I didn’t reckernize it at first until he said it was his. Viper rooted it up right under his window outside the bunkhouse. Well, I found that picture of his girl that he keeps in that locket. It must’ve slipped out, and Viper nearly chewed it up. So I yipped to him to come on out and I give it up to him and I says: ‘Whose her nibs anyway,’ and he says: ‘Someone I used to know,’ and I says: ‘Don’t you know her still?’ and he says: ‘Oh, yes, oh, yes,’ and he was lookin’ just as if he wasn’t hearin’ a word I was saying and he says as if he was talking to himself; ‘She was to have been my wife, you know.’ Just like that. Then he got up and he looked kind of queer, and he went on inside and come on out again with that locket in his hand and he sits down beside me on the steps and smokes without saying a word. So then I said, just to kid him: ‘Say, I’ll give you two of my buffalow skulls for that bit of dinky tin,’ meaning the locket, and he dumps his pipe and gives me the laugh and he says: ‘Nothing doing, old man. The sweetest girl in the world is enshined’—that’s what he said—‘right inside that “dinky bit of tin”!’”
CHAPTER VIII
Sitting in the sunlight on the wide steps of the ranch house, chin cupped in her hands, her glance far off across the mountain tops, her thoughts wandering over the seas that stretched between the Dominion of Canada and the Mother-land, Hilda McPherson came out of her deep reverie to find the object of her thoughts standing before her. He had a book in his hand and with the sunny, engaging almost boyish smile that was characteristic of him he was tendering it to the girl on the steps.
For some days Cheerio’s discourse on mastodons, dinosaurs and the various species of the prehistoric days had been extremely vague and unsatisfactory to his disciple. Matters reached a climax upon this especial Sunday, when he had wandered from the matter of a fossil skeleton recently discovered on the Red Deer River, said to be one hundred and sixty feet long and at least seventy feet tall, with a sudden question that brought a snort of disgust from the intensely-interested Sandy.
“What’s she got to do with the Mezzozoic age?” he exploded.