It was still raining next morning, which was, as Aunt Anna said, “a merciful providence, considering how much mending there is to do, and how little we stay indoors to do it on a bright day.”
They sat around the fire talking and sewing busily, for it was true that much had been neglected in the enjoyment of other things. Beatrice, the least enthusiastic seamstress of the three, was the one whose wardrobe needed the most repair, since her scrambles over the mountains had wrought more ruin than she had realized. If Aunt Anna had not mended the rent in her riding skirt and Nancy had not sewed up the rip in her sheepskin coat, she would never have come to the end.
“I seem to have strewed the whole State of Montana over with buttons,” she declared with a sigh, “but, oh, how much I have seen while I have been doing it! If it is still raining to-morrow, I think Buck will kick out the side of his stall, he is so impatient to be off again, and so am I.”
There was a promise of clearing at sunset, for the clouds began to lift, and patches of blue sky showed to the westward, a hopeful sign for the morrow. The peak of Gray Cloud Mountain, visible from their doorstep, loomed through the mist that had shrouded it from view and before dark showed its towering outline, clear-cut against the clouds. And never, never, so Beatrice and Nancy thought, had they seen a more glorious day than the morrow turned out to be. With the whole world washed clean, with the dripping water dried up in an hour by the all-conquering sunshine, it seemed that nothing could be more perfect.
Before they had finished breakfast, there was a loud trampling of hoofs outside, announcing a cavalcade—Hester Herrick on her pinto pony, Dr. Minturn with her, and Olaf riding behind leading a packhorse.
“It is the day of all days for a picnic,” Hester announced. “All the time you have been here, we have talked of going to Eagle Rock, and you promised to come with me the first day I could arrange it. Christina will spend the day with Miss Deems, this horse that Olaf is on will do for Nancy to ride; and everything we could possibly need is packed on old Martha here. Dr. Minturn rode by our house this morning, and thought he would come over with me; though he is in a hurry to get to the village. He will come back this evening after we have got home to make your aunt a real, proper visit. Do say you will come.”
Her eagerness and the inviting beauty of the day were not to be denied, so that in a moment Nancy and Beatrice were running to and fro in hasty preparation.
“Bring warm coats and your swimming suits and hurry,” Hester directed. “Olaf will saddle Buck while you are getting ready.”
It was well that Olaf was there to deal with Beatrice’s pony, for with the gathered energy of two days’ vacation, Buck went through all the tricks in his repertoire during the cinching of the saddle. He was off down the trail like an arrow the moment his mistress was in the saddle, leaving the others trailing far behind. They came together soon, however, and climbed merrily upward, looking back at the valley mapped out below them and at the bare, brown slopes of the range opposite. They looked so near in the clear air that Beatrice shouted, “to see if there would be an echo.”
“Hardly,” commented Hester, “for they are twenty miles away.”
Beatrice tried many times, as they went along, to think of some question to put to Hester that might bring forth information about John Herrick, but no matter how often she led up to it, she was never able to think what to say. She had told Nancy of that strange scene in the moonlight, and she was afraid now of her sister’s blunt frankness, should the talk touch upon that matter of which both their minds were so full. In the end, therefore, she said nothing.
They reached Eagle Rock well before noon, unsaddled their horses, removed the generous bundles of lunch from the back of the willing pack-pony, and turned all four out to graze. Above them rose abruptly a huge gray mass of granite, set in the midst of a smooth slope of grass and scrubby trees. A clear stream swept in a curve below the foot of the rock, spread to a broad pool, and then ran babbling out of sight among the trees. Hester, who was, in her own sphere, a capable and self-reliant young person, showed them how to hobble the horses lest they stray too far, how to build a fireplace of stones with its back to the wind, and then brought out her fishing tackle and set about teaching the two girls how to catch rainbow trout.
Beatrice succeeded very badly, displaying a great talent for tangling her hook in the bushes when she tried to learn to cast. She laid down her rod after a little, stretched herself upon her back on the warm grass, and fell to watching the fleet of towering white clouds that went drifting overhead. One of them, which looked even more than the others like a tall vessel with curved and shining sails, had come to grief on the jagged shoulder of Gray Cloud Mountain and hung there, beating itself to pieces, growing thinner and thinner as it spread out in long wreaths across the glowing blue sky. Some of Beatrice’s cares and worries seemed to be fading from her mind in much the same way, blown afar by the brisk, warm gusts of wind.
“I believe everything will come out right after all,” she thought, “and I shall know, when the time comes, what I ought to do.”
She got up at last and went to join the others, who greeted her with reproaches for having made so little effort to catch any fish.
Nancy, more patient and painstaking, had come into better fortune. She had learned to cast, after a fashion, and had managed to dangle her gay-colored fly in the water at the edge of a riffle just as Hester had instructed her. Then came the first tug at her line, a magic quiver which seemed to send an electric shock of excitement all up her arm. In that second she became a fisherman.
They landed twelve trout between them, although Hester’s share was by far the greater, and they ate all twelve for the lunch that they spread on a flat, sun-warmed shelf of Eagle Rock. Such a feast as it was, with sizzling fried bacon, toasted cheese sandwiches, hot cocoa, and the trout cooked to a turn by Hester. Afterward they sat and talked for a very long time, talked of everything and of nothing, until Hester jumped up and said there was only just time for a swim before going home.
“I did not know,” said Nancy a little doubtfully, “that swimming was one of the usual sports in the Rocky Mountains.”
“Most of the water is too cold to be pleasant,” replied Hester, “but this pool is warm enough. It is the only one I know of. Roddy found it long ago, and taught me to swim here. He says perhaps it was beavers that helped to dam it and went away years before we discovered it. The stream is fed by melted snow, like all the others, but it runs very shallow for miles above here, out in the open where the sun can warm it. By mid-afternoon, like this, it is not cold at all.”
She donned her bathing suit and dropped into the water with a splash. After a moment of doubt and hesitation, her two friends followed.
“Oh!” cried Beatrice and “Oh,” echoed Nancy, “I did not know it would be like this!”
A person who has never bathed in the clear, rock pools of the high mountainsides cannot know what real exhilaration is. The two girls caught their breath with delight and wonder, with a pleasure that was quite indescribable. To plunge into the crystal-blue water, to know that it has poured down from the vast glaciers and great, empty snow-fields where no human foot ever comes, to feel all the tingling freshness of the water without its deadly cold—there are few things like it in the world. The girls laughed and splashed and swam and floated until Hester warned them that it was not wise to stay in too long, and they came out reluctantly to dry themselves in the sun.
They scrambled almost to the top of Eagle Rock, found a shelf that was sheltered from the wind, and sat down in a row, swinging their feet over the void beneath and looking out over the long ranges of hills and mountains, brown, russet, red, and chrome-yellow, fading to the blue peaks in the far distance.
“That must be a mountain sheep, that dot moving there opposite us,” Hester observed. “And you can see Gray Cloud Pass over beyond the shoulder of this nearest hill. The tuft of green above is that stretch of woods growing around the lake, but see how bare the slope is where it goes up beyond—nothing but solid rock and overhanging cliffs to the very top. There is a little trail that picks its way back and forth over the face of the mountain; it is called Dead Man&............