t to leave me. Let's go and tell Grandma and leave word with
her for Uncle Dick. Then you saddle up, and I'll get my bag."

Bob forbore to argue further, more because he thought that it was
best to get Betty away from the Watterby place on the main road to
Flame City than because he approved of her taking another long ride
after an exhausting day. The most disquieting rumors had come down
from the fields that afternoon, and Bob knew that every kind of
story, authentic and unfounded, would be promptly retailed over the
Watterby gate. If Mr. Gordon's life were in danger, and Bob feared it
was, it would be agony for Betty to be unable to go to him and be
forced to listen to hectic accounts of the fire.

"Well, well," said Grandma Watterby, when Betty told her that she had
found the Saunders place. "So you rode to the three hills, did you?
Ain't they pretty? Many and many's the time I've seen 'em. And Bob's
aunties--Hope and Charity--they living there?"

Betty explained briefly that they were ill and that she and Bob were
going to look after things.

"We may be gone two or three days or a week," she said. "You tell
Uncle Dick where we are if he comes, won't you? Doctor Morrison will
bring messages if you ask him. He's going to see them, too."

Grandma Watterby hurried to the pantry and came back with a glass jar
in her hands.

"This is some o' my home-made beef extract," she told them. "You take
it with you, Betty. There ain't nothing better for building up a sick
person. Dear, dear, to think of you finding Hope and Charity
Saunders. Do they know 'bout Bob?"

Betty said no, and the horses being brought round by Ki, who had
insisted on saddling them, she and Bob rode off. It was faintly dusk,
and a new moon hung low in the sky.

"Isn't it lovely?" sighed Betty. "In spite of sickness and danger and
selfish people, I love this country on an evening like this. What do
you think we ought to do about telling your aunts, Bob? I knew
Grandma would ask that question."

"Why, if they're sick, I think it would be utterly foolish to mention
a nephew to 'em," said Bob cheerfully. "They probably are blissfully
unaware that I'm alive, and trying to explain to them would likely
bring on an attack of brain fever. I'm just a neighbor dropped in to
help while they're laid up."

Betty could not bring herself to speak of the evident poverty of the
lonely Saunders home. She had built so many bright castles for Bob,
and the dilapidat