For four days, “hand-running” as her mother said, the girl went to the cañon. The friendship ripened with tropical speed, so that she need not search for her quarry now, but found it coming to meet her, peering around this boulder, watching from that vantage point.
When she held out her arms to the child these last two times he had come leaping into them to cling to her neck in delirious gladness, while the sedate Collie, fast friend by this time and traitor to his sacred charge, fawned on her knee.
But on the fifth golden day trouble was in the atmosphere.
Sonny came with drooping head and a pucker of sorrow in his small brows.
“Why, what’s the matter with my little man?” said the girl, kneeling and holding him off to scan him searchingly. “Tell Nance, Sonny. What is it?”
And Sonny, dissolved in tears upon the instant, hiding his face in Nance’s neck.
“I—I had—” he hiccoughed, “to—to tell—Brand—a a—lie! An awful lie! And Brand, he—hates a liar!”
“A lie! Why, how—why——”
“He found your horse’s tracks down the cañon and—he asked me if I saw—any—any one strange,” wept the child.
Nance sat down and took the boy in her lap.