“We’ll go far as we can,” Reed answered.
He had to go into low long before they reached the dugway. Just beyond it was a stretch of road so precipitous that the car balked. The cowman became convinced that the machine could go no farther.
“Have to walk the rest of the way,” he said.
Betty looked at her little sister dubiously. “It’ll be a hard climb for those little legs, and she’s too heavy to carry far. We’d better leave her in the car.”
“Maybe we had,” assented her father, and added, in a low voice: “If she’ll stay alone.”
“Oh, Ruthie doesn’t mind that. Do you, dearest, a big girl like you? You’ll have Baby Fifi, and we’ll not be gone half an hour.”
Ruth accepted her sister’s judgment without demur. She would rather play with Baby Fifi than tire herself climbing the long hill.
“Stay right in the car, dear. Daddy and Betty won’t be long,” the young woman said, waving a hand as she started.
Betty breasted the slope with the light, free step of a mountaineer. Though slender, she was far from frail. Tested muscles moved with perfect coördination beneath the smooth satiny skin.
At sight of her an eye leveled behind a surveyor’s transit became instantly alive. The man caught his breath and watched eagerly. In her grace was something fawnlike, a suggestion of sylvan innocence and naïveté. Was it the quality of which this was an expression that distinguished her from a score of other nice girls he knew? Did she still retain from the childhood of the race a primal simplicity the others had lost by reason of their environment? What was it Wordsworth had written?—