“Well,” concluded Connie, “God certainly wanted a few old maids to leaven the earth, and I think I have the making for a good leavener.  So I write stories, and let other women wash the little Julias’ faces,” she added, laughing, as Julia, unrecognizably dirty, entered with a soup can full of medicine she had painstakingly concocted to make her daddy well.

CHAPTER XX

LITERARY MATERIAL

Connie wanted to see something out of the ordinary.  What was the use of coming to the wild and woolly if one never saw anything wilder than a movie of New York society life, or woollier than miles of properly garbed motorists driving under the guidance of blue-coated policemen as safely and sanely as could be done in Chicago.

It was Julia who came to the rescue.  She discovered, on a neighbor’s porch, and with admirable socialistic tendencies appropriated, a glaring poster, with slim-legged horses balancing themselves in the air, not at all inconveniencing their sunburned riders in varicolored silk shirts.

“Look at the horses jump over the moon,” she exulted, kissing a scarlet shirt in rapture.

Upon investigation it turned out to be an irresistible advertisement of the annual Frontier Days, at Fort Morgan.  Carol explained the pictures to Julia, while Connie looked over her shoulder.

“Do they do all it says?” she asked.

Carol did not know.  She had never attended any Frontier Days, but she imagined they were even more wonderful than the quite impossible poster.  Carol’s early determination to adore the Westland had become fixed habit at last.  It was capable of any miracles, to her.

“How far is it up there?” pursued Connie, for Connie had a very inartistic way of sticking to her subject.

“I do not know.  About a hundred miles, I believe.”

“A nice drive for the Harmer,” said Connie thoughtfully.  “How are the roads?”

“I do not know, but I think all the roads are good in Colorado.  Certainly no road is impassable for a Harmer Six with you at the wheel.”

“I have a notion to drive up and see them,” said Connie.  “Literary material, you know.”

“I want to see the horsies fly, too,” cried Julia quickly.

Carol thought it might do David good, and David was sure Carol needed a vacation.  They would think it over.

Connie immediately went down-town and returned with a road guide, and her arm full of literature about frontier days in general.  Then it was practically settled.  A little distance of a hundred miles, a splendid car, a driver like Connie!  It was nothing.  And Carol was so excited getting ready for their first outing in the years of David’s illness, that she forgot his medicine three times in succession, and David maliciously refused to remind her.

They all talked at once, and agreed that it was very silly and dangerous and unwise, but insisted it was the most alluring, appealing madness in the world.  David, for over three years limited to the orderly, methodical, unstimulating confines of a screened porch, felt quite the old-time throbbing of his pulse and quickening of his blood.  Even the doctor waxed enthusiastic.  He looked into David’s tired face and said: