. . .Microby's broom. As she dabbed at her eyes and nose with a small and ridiculously inadequate handkerchief, she was conscious of an uncomfortable lump in her throat, and the moisture that dampened the handkerchief could not all be accredited to the sneeze tears. "What if I have trouble locating the mine and have to stay here all summer?" she was thinking, and instantly recalling the Watts ranch with its air of shiftless decay, the smelly Watts blankets in the overcrowded sleeping room, the soggy meals, the tapping of chickens' bills upon the floor, and the never ending voice of Ma Watts, she smiled. It was a weak, forced little smile, at first, but it gradually widened into a real smile as her eyes swept the little valley with its long vista of pine-clad hills that reached upward to the sky, their mighty sides and shoulders gored by innumerable rock-rimmed coulees and ravines. Somewhere amid the silence of those mighty slopes and high-flung peaks her father had found Eldor. . . Read More