e fish for
her luncheon."

Olive gave a startled cry and Jean made a dive for her. But Olive did
not tumble into the water. She gave a quick jerk to her fishing line,
hooked and drew in a good-sized trout. Then Olive slipped up the bank to
the others. Ruth looked curiously at the dark, rich coloring of her
face; she did not seem like an Indian, and yet she certainly bore no
resemblance to an American girl. Cousin Ruth felt that she would be an
interesting study, although Olive was too shy to say more than a dozen
words of greeting.

"Come on, let's walk a little farther along the creek, Jack won't be
home for a while yet," Jean declared. "Jack thinks the ranch would go to
rack and ruin unless she were around to boss things."

"Don't you think maybe it would?" Olive questioned gently.

Jean laughed. "Oh, I expect so, Olive; but how you do take up for Jack!
Cousin Ruth, you will have to protect Frieda and me. Olive thinks Jack
is perfection and agrees to anything she says."

"Look, look! Oh, please don't talk," Frieda cried in excitement,
pointing up in the sky above the bed of the creek.

A weird troop of birds was flying toward them, uttering a queer,
guttural noise. They were some distance off, but their short wings
seemed to clack like Spanish castanets and their long legs looked like
dangling bits of string.

"What on earth are those creatures?" Ruth asked helplessly. She was
surely seeing interesting sights in what she had thought a barren and
desert land.

"They are sand cranes," Olive whispered softly. "Let's be quite still.
They are flying so low, I think they mean to alight. They must have
mistaken the creek for a river."

Frieda snickered and put her hand to her mouth.

"Shsh, Frieda," Olive cautioned. "These funny birds are as shy as deer.
If they do alight, they will probably come down in the cleared field."

The birds swept slowly down nearer the earth in a half circle, still
uttering their curious cries. It was as Olive said, they were moving
toward an open field.

The four girls crept breathlessly through the trees and bushes, until
they could find peepholes.

The cranes dipped down. One of them touched the ground, then another
descended, and the third joined them; the birds stood each with a long
thin leg drawn up out of sight, until the whole flock had landed in a
circle on the ground. The leader must have squawked: "Bow to your
partners, swing your corners," for the birds immediately st