Miss Gatling stood up, a slim, trim figure in her riding-boots and well-tailored breeches and with a gay little sweater drawn snugly down inside her waistband and held there by a broad brilliant girdle of squaw's beadwork. She settled a white sombrero on her bobbed hair and stepped away from them over the pine-needles and thence down toward the roaring creek. The morning sunlight came slanting through the lower tree boughs and picked out and made shiny glitters of the heavy Mexican silver spurs at her heels and the wide Navaho silver bracelet that was set on her right wrist. She passed between two squared boulders that might have been lichened tombs for Babylon's kings. "Continue, I pray you, dear parents, to sit and invite your souls, if any," she called back. "I go to make sure they're putting plenty of cold victuals in the lunch kit. Yesterday noon, you'll remember, we darn' near starved. For you, the beckon and the lure of the wonderland. But for me and my girlish gastric juices--chow and lots of it!" Mr. Gatling said nothing for a minute or two, but he took off his cap as though to make more room for additional furrows forming on his brow. A deer-fly alighted where he was baldest and promenaded to and fro there, across the great open spaces. The thinker too deeply was abstracted to shoo away the little stranger; he let her promenade. "Mmph!" he remarked presently. Mrs. Gatling emerged promptly from her own reverie. It was his commonest way of engaging her attention--that _mmphing_ sound was. Lacking vowels though it did, its emphasis of uneasiness was quite apparent to her schooled ears. "What's wrong, dear?" she asked. "Still sore from all that dreadful horseback riding?" "It's that girl," he told her; "that Shirley of ours. She's the one I'm worried about." "Why, goodness gracious!" she cried; "what's wrong with Shirley?" "Look at her. That's all I ask--just look at her." Mrs. Gatling, who was slightly near-sighted in more ways than one, squinted at the withdrawing figure. "Why, the child never seemed happier or healthier in her life," she protested, still peering. "Why, only last Monday--or was it Tuesday; no, Monday--I remember distinctly now it was Monday because that was the day we got caught in the snow-storm coming through Swift Current Pass--only last Monday you were saying yourself how well and rosy she was looking." "I don't mean that--she's a bunch of limber young whalebones. Look where she's going! That's what I mean. Look what she's doing!" "Why, what is she doing that's out of the way, I'd like to know?" demanded his puzzled wife, now jealously on the defensive for her young.