Patty smiled, but she did not toss the magazines into the fire. Instead she laid them aside with the resolve that when opportunity afforded, she would carry on the interrupted education.
Microby's literary delinquency in no wise impaired her willingness to work. She had inherited none of her father's predilection toward eternal rest, and all day, side by side with Patty, she scraped, and scoured, and scrubbed, and washed, until the little cabin and its contents fairly radiated cleanliness. The moving in was great fun for the mountain girl. Especially the unpacking of the two trunks that resisted all efforts to lift them until their contents had been removed. But at last the work was finished even to the arrangement of dishes and utensils, the stowing of supplies, and the blowing up of the air mattress that replaced the musty hay of the sheep herder. And as the long shadows of mountains crept slowly across the little valley and began to climb the opposite slope, Patty stood in the door of her cabin and watched Microby mount the superannuated Indian pony and proceed slowly down the creek, her bare feet swinging awkwardly in the loops of rope that served as stirrups of her dilapidated stock saddle.
When horse and rider disappeared into a grove of cottonwoods, Patty's gaze returned to her immediate surroundings--her saddle-horse contentedly snipping grass, the waters of the shallow creek burbling noisily over the stones, the untidy scattering of tin cans, and the leaning panels of the old sheep corral. She frowned at the panels. "I'll just use you for firewood," she muttered. "And that reminds me that I've got to wake up to my responsibility as head of the household--even if the household does only consist of one bay cayuse, named Dan, and a tiny one-room cabin, and two funny little squirrel-tailed pack rats, and me." She reached for her brand new ax, and picking her way from stone to stone, crossed the creek, and attacked a sagging panel.