do hope those two keep their
distance. We'll be simply choked with dust."

"I wonder," said Grace, as she rubbed her dust-filled eyes, "if they
don't have any rain in this part of the world."

"Of course they do; only this happens to be the dry season," said
Mollie, instructively, from the heights of her superior intelligence. At
least, that is what she called it.

"I'll say it's dry," grumbled Grace.

"Ooh, look," Amy interrupted ecstatically. "Isn't that a cactus over
there? Oh, I've wanted all my life to see some real cacti. Now I know
we're in the West."

The girls were silent for a moment, gazing out over the rolling plain--a
plain studded with stunted trees and sickly-looking bushes with here and
there a cactus plant for variety's sake--out to the hazy mountains
beyond, serene, calm, majestic, jutting jaggedly into the dazzling blue
of a cloudless sky.

"The mountains!" murmured Betty, half to herself. "How I love them. The
plains are fascinating in a cruelly romantic way, but somehow the
mountains make one think of hidden springs rushing swiftly into noisy
foolish little brooks, of bird songs, and the smell of cool damp earth,
of the crackling of dry twigs under one's feet, and the pungent woodsy
smell of camp fires--but there," she broke off confusedly, as she
realized the girls were regarding her with fond amusement. "I didn't
mean to wax so poetic."

"It's all right, honey," said Mollie, giving her hand a warm little
squeeze. "You rave right along. I know just how you feel, for I get that
way myself sometimes."

"There _is_ something mighty wonderful about the mountains," added Grace
softly.

"Oh, I love them, too," broke in Amy, adding with such earnestness that
the girls looked at her wonderingly. "They are everything that Betty has
said. And yet when Betty spoke of the plains as being cruel I couldn't
help wondering if the mountains weren't sometimes like that, too."

"What do you mean?" they queried, with quick interest.

"I was thinking," Amy continued slowly, "that the mountains might not
seem so kind to one who was lost in them--without a gun perhaps. I have
heard Will say that a person who had no knowledge of woodcraft would
find it almost impossible to recover his path, once he had lost it.
And," she added, with a shudder, her eyes fixed steadily on the distant
mountain range, "there are wild animals in those forests."

"Of course there are," agreed Betty lightly, as she saw how serious