"Don't you feel scared, Polly?" asked Dan, as he left her at her dish-washing.
"Scared? Not I!" and she walked down the path with him, drying her hands on a dish-towel.
It was a delicious morning in late September; the air dry and sparkling as a jewel, the mountains baring their shoulders to the morning sun. The Peak had already a dash of winter on his crown, but the barren slope of rock below looked like an impregnable fortress. Polly and Dan were never tired of wondering at the changing moods that played so gloriously upon that steadfast front.
"Seems as if they must almost see him from Fieldham this morning, he's so bright," said Polly.
"That's so," Dan agreed. "I say, Polly, isn't he enjoying himself, though?"
"Course he is!" Polly answered. "Isn't everybody?"
Then Polly went back to her splashing water and flopping dish-towels, and was busy for an hour about the house. By and bye she sat herself down in the little porch and proceeded to put good honest stitches into a child's frock, for the making of which she was to receive twenty-five cents. Not very good pay for a day's work, but "twenty-five-hundred-million per cent. better than nothing," as she had assured the doubtful Dan.
Life looked very different to her since those two bright words had been added to the sign. Not that it had looked otherwise than pleasant before; but there was so little originality in the idea of doing needlework that it had scarcely merited success, while this,--of course it must succeed!
In truth, she had sat there hardly an hour, when she distinctly heard the occupant of a yellow buckboard read the sign, and then turn to her companion with a word of comment. Polly had always had an idea that one of those yellow buckboards would be the making of her fortune yet. The one in question was drawn by a pretty pair of ponies, and two young girls were in possession of it.
"I have an idea they'll notice it again, when they come back this way," Polly surmised. "But if they're going up the cañon they won't come back till just as I'm getting dinner."
And, sure enough, the mutton stew was just beginning to simmer, when there came a rap at the door.
The front door opened directly into the little sitting-room, and was never closed in pleasant weather. As Polly emerged from the kitchen, her face very red from hobnobbing with the stove, she found one of the girls of the yellow buckboard standing in the doorway.