Patty promised, and unsaddling, picketed her horse, and joined the girl in the dusty interior of the cabin. The musty hay, the discarded garments, and the two bushels or more of odds and ends with which the pack rats had filled the cupboard made a smudgy, smelly bonfire beside which Patty paused with an armful of discarded magazines. "Wouldn't you like to take these home?" she asked. "Which?" inquired Microby, deftly picking a small stick from the ground with her bare toes and tossing it into the fire. "These magazines. There are stories and pictures in them." "No, I don't want none. We-alls cain't read, 'cept Ma, an' she's got a book--an' a bible, too," she added, with a touch of pride. "Davey, he kin mos' read, an' he kin drawer pitchers, too. Reckon he'll be a preacher when he's grow'd up, like Preacher Christie. He done read outen a book when he babitized us-uns. I don't like to read. Ma, she aimed to learn me onct, but I'd ruther shuck beans." "Maybe you didn't keep at it long enough," suggested Patty. "Yes, we did! We kep' at hit every night fer two nights 'til hit come bedtime. I cain't learn them letters--they's too many diffe'nt ones, an' all mixed up." Patty smiled, but she did not toss the magazines into the fire. Instead she laid them aside with the resolve that when opportunity afforded, she would carry on the interrupted education. Microby's literary delinquency in no wise impaired her willingness to work. She had inherited none of her father's predilection toward eternal rest, and all day, side by side with Patty, she scraped, and scoured, and scrubbed, and washed, until the little cabin and its contents fairly radiated cleanliness. The moving in was great fun for the mountain girl. Especially the unpacking of the two trunks that resisted all efforts to lift them until their contents had been removed. But at last the work was finished even to the arrangement of dishes and utensils, the stowing of supplies, and the blowing up of the air mattress that replaced the musty hay of the sheep herder. And as the long shadows of mountains crept slowly across the little valley and began to climb the opposite slope, Patty stood in the door of her cabin and watched Microby mount the superannuated Indian pony and proceed slowly down the creek, her bare feet swinging awkwardly in the loops of rope that served as stirrups of her dilapidated stock saddle.