THE Overton girls’ equipment wagon, as was customary, went ahead of the outfit next morning, and had been gone for nearly two hours when the party decided to start on their way.
Hippy Wingate saddled their horses for them, and gallantly assisted them to mount.
“That husband of mine must have learned how to assist ladies to their saddles when I wasn’t looking,” frowned Nora.
Grace shook her head.
“It is the thought of how near he has come to losing us all in the battles with the bandits that has softened Hippy’s heart,” corrected Grace Harlowe.
“I wish I could believe it,” muttered Nora Wingate.
The outfit started out, led by Lieutenant Wingate, who took a circuitous route to reach the Apache Trail, in order to avoid the steep ascent that they would have encountered had they taken a more direct course to the trail.
The eyes of the Overton girls were sparkling. For the moment they had forgotten their troubles, forgotten the peril-laden mysteries of the Apache Mountains, forgotten all but the glorious morning, and the wonders that lay all about them.
The first halt made was at the Great Forest of Sahuaro, a forest of giant cacti which flourishes all through the Apache and other mountain regions in that immediate section. Some of these great, awkward plants are all of fifty feet high, and from their spiny, fluted trunks issue branches which almost equal the trunks in diameter.
Crowning this weird, ungainly invention of nature is a brilliant red waxen flower of great beauty.
“That is the state flower of Arizona,” Grace informed her companions, pointing to the sea of red that stretched away for a long distance. “I propose that we dismount, have our luncheon here and chat for an hour or so.”
“Motion carried,” cried Emma, slipping from her saddle.
Ponies were tethered, and while Hippy was seeking water “for man and beast,” as he expressed it, the girls got out their mess kits and rations. Grace built a little cook fire, and, in remarkably short time, the mess call was heardat the edge of the cactus forest, while the ponies nibbled at what they found.
“I’ve been thinking,” began Hippy, “that—”
“Marvellous,” murmured Emma.
“That only weaklings faint away,” finished the lieutenant.
“Is that all you had in your mind beside thought of food?” Emma came back spiritedly.
“No, not all. What I really was about to say, was that this outfit should have a name.”
“Perhaps we already have a name among certain persons who have smelled our powder,” twinkled Grace Harlowe.
“I too have been thinking that we, as an organization, should call ourselves something,” agreed Elfreda.
“Aren’t we the Overseas Girls?” questioned Nora.
“Not now. We may be all at sea, but we are not overseas,” answered Grace.
“I move we call ourselves the Rough Rider Patrol,” suggested Hippy.
“Awful!” objected Emma. “This is not a part of the State Constabulary.”
“I have it!” cried Hippy. “You’ll say it’s a stroke of genius when you hear it. I have the name that fits this outfit from the ground up. ‘The Automobile Girls on Horseback,’ that’s the name for you children,” glowed Hippy.
A chorus of laughs greeted the suggestion.
“Instead of being a stroke of genius, I should call that a stroke of paralysis,” declared Nora.
“Such is the support that Hippy Wingate gets from his wife,” complained the lieutenant.
“Can you blame her?” teased Grace. “Anne, Elfreda, we have not heard from you.”
“While you people have been making sport of Hippy’s suggestions, I wish to say that he has made an excellent one,” asserted Elfreda.
“Oh, Elfreda!” cried Anne and Nora in one voice.
“I will give you to understand that I am no automobile girl on horseback,” asserted Emma indignantly. “I won’t ride under any such name, either. I—I’ll faint away first. There now!”
“Save the heroics, Emma. Nothing is further from my mind than to call our outfit by that name,” replied Elfreda.
“I call that downright mean,” objected Hippy, with mock indignation. “You raise my hopes to the skies, shower me with compliments, calculated to prove that I am not a paralytic, then you drop me over the edge. I leave it to Nora if that isn’t cruelty to animals.”
“It is,” agreed Nora gravely, whereat the Overton girls broke into a peal of merry laughter.
“You are both wrong and right, Hippy Wingate. I stand on what I said a few moments ago, that you made an excellent suggestion,” declared Miss Briggs. “I did not mean that your title was wholly good, for it isn’t.”
“Awful,” interjected Emma Dean.
“For the love of goodness, give our legal talent a chance,” begged Hippy, frowning at Emma.
“Hippy mentioned the Rough Rider Patrol, which gave me the idea for a name that I think will grow upon you as you sleep over it.”
“Not on Hippy. Only snores follow in the wake of Morpheus when he’s headed in my direction,” retorted the lieutenant.
“Elfreda, what is your suggestion?” asked Grace.
“My suggestion is that we be known asGrace Harlowe’s Overland Riders!”
“No, no!” protested Grace. “Give some one else a chance. Why not as well call us Lieutenant Wingate’s Overland Chasers?”
“Grace Harlowe’s Overland Riders! That’s the name. Yip, yip, yeow!” shrilled Emma Dean.
“Look out, she’s going to do the fainting act again,” warned Hippy sharply, whereat Emma subsided.
“We are all agreed on the question of thename suggested by Elfreda,” announced Anne. “It is a fine name, and cannot be improved upon.”
“Neither can the Overland Riders,” interjected Emma.
“Of course, if you girls wish it that way, I have no objection, but it does seem to me that the name ‘Overland Riders’ should be sufficient without having to hook my name ahead. ‘Overland’ sounds like Overton and is a good word for us, a lucky word.”
“Grace Harlowe’s Overland Riders it is, now, always and forever,” announced Elfreda.
“So long as the unearthly, ghostly, weirdsahuaroshall flourish and grow red flowers,” added Hippy Wingate amid the laughter of his companions.
“Overland Riders, boots and saddles!” called Grace, springing up.
The Riders followed her, each running to her pony, quickly coiling the lead rope about the pommel of her saddle and mounting.
“That was well done, girls. Only Lieutenant Wingate bungled,” called Captain Grace as she started away at a gallop.
“I missed my stirrup,” answered Hippy lamely, but no one heeded, if she heard.
“We make camp at Summit, do we not?” asked Elfreda, riding up beside Grace.
“That was the word that Mr. Fairweather left for us. He says we shall have a wonderful view there, and that an excellent camping site is to be had just off the trail. I hope we shall not be visited by the trouble-makers to-night.”
“So do I, but I actually believe you would be in the dumps, in a regular blue funk, were we to be allowed to move along peaceably without excitement or thrills,” averred Miss Briggs.
Grace smiled and clucked to her pony.
It was four o’clock in the afternoon, when, after a day of toiling up steep grades, along precipitous cliffs, scattered mesas and buttes, they rode out on a level stretch of trail with a view spread before them such as none of those joyous, happy girls ever before had gazed upon.
“The Summit!” shouted Grace. “Did you ever see anything so perfectly gorgeous?” Grace removed her sombrero and sat gazing in silent enjoyment of the scene.
Roosevelt Lake, an emerald gem set in the vari-colored mountains, lay twenty-seven miles below them. To their left, against the skies, loomed the famous Four Peaks Mountains, and, to the right and below them, the Sierra Ancha Range, all a mass of gorgeous colors in the light of the late afternoon sun.
Hippy could repress his bubbling spirits no longer. He cleared his throat loudly.
“Hippy is going to make another speech,” said Anne.
“If he does I’ll run,” wailed Emma.
“Ladies and gentlemen—that includes myself—you are gazing on the largest artificial body of water in the world—Roosevelt Lake—a body of water completely walled in by mountains, thirty miles long and four miles across at its widest part. Set in the—”
“Please defer your oration until it is too dark to see,” begged Grace laughingly. “I prefer to enjoy the view now.”
“Hippy being wound up, you can’t stop him. I know, for I have tried many, many times,” whispered Nora.
“Set in the sapphire rocks of the great colorful mountains, held back by the dam, like Hoppi, the Nile God, at whose magic touch the mighty Egyptian River brings forth such abundance, our prosaic Uncle Sam is causing the desert—Whoa! Wha—”
Lieutenant Wingate’s pony, left to its own devices while its master was lost in the glory of his own oratory, had nosed off the trail to browse, and stepped on a rounded rock. The pony, in trying to recover its balance, went down violently on its knees. Hippy went over the animal’s head, landing on his back in the dirt at the side of the trail.
Hippy uttered a grunt when he struck the ground.
“He’s killed! He’s killed!” cried Nora. “Serve him right if he is.”
“Oh, Nora, don’t say that,” begged Grace, restraining her laughter.
Hippy sat up slowly and picked up his sombrero.
“As I was saying when, for the moment checked by this trifling brute-interruption,” spoke Hippy, “our prosaic Uncle Sam is causing the desert to bloom as the rose. The dam is two hundred and eighty feet high. That is the distance through which the overflow falls into Salt River Canyon. Ladies and gentlemen—that includes myself—I have finished.” Hippy got up and began brushing the dirt from his clothes.
“The kind Fates be thanked,” murmured Elfreda Briggs.
“Hippy must have been studying a new guide book,” observed Anne mischievously.
“He has not painted the picture a stroke too gorgeously,” averred Grace. “This truly is a glimpse right into fairyland.”
Hippy Wingate’s chest swelled with pride.