Читать книгу Grace Harlowe's Overland Riders at Circle O Ranch онлайн

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“What are we going to do with them?” wondered Tom Gray frowningly.

“Keep them, of course,” answered Grace. “Tom, they are a real treat, but if Stacy and Emma do not stop stirring them up we may have to send for the sheriff of the county. Just look at them now,” she added laughingly.

Jim and Sam were sitting back to back unrolling packs, each man muttering to himself his opinion of the other. Later in the evening the Overlanders got them talking and drew the guides out. It developed that the pair had been prospectors nearly all their lives; that they had loved and fought each other for so many years that they had lost count of them, and when their halting story had finally been finished, the Overland Riders looked upon Jim-Sam with new appreciation. Emma Dean characterized them as a pair of “beloved vagabonds.”

This having been their first day in the saddle since the previous season, the Overlanders were saddle-weary, and some of them were sore and lame. Miss Briggs hobbled about painfully and complainingly, and Nora Wingate lay by the little campfire rolled in her blanket, the picture of woe. Emma and Grace, however, appeared not to be suffering the slightest degree of discomfort.