After she and Peggy had mounted, they watched with curious eyes to see how Miss Prudence manipulated that queer skirt. When they saw her unbutton the front panel and fold it back and refasten it on another set of buttons, they saw that it was a divided skirt after all.

Peggy leaned over from her horse to murmur to Jo Ann, "It looks like a pair of floppy-legged pajamas now."

Jo Ann nodded, then added, grinning, "I prefer to sleep in pajamas and ride in trousers. It's so much more modest."

Peggy suppressed a giggle with difficulty at the thought of the proper Miss Prudence's ever wearing anything but the most correct clothes.

Notwithstanding the queer skirt, they found that Miss Prudence rode unusually well, handling her horse with the ease of an experienced horsewoman.

Up the steep mountain trail they began climbing in single file, José in the lead. The sheer precipice at the edge looked so dangerous to Jo Ann that she tried to keep from looking over. One good thing, they had an excellent guide in José. He had led her and Florence over worse places than this.

On nearing the mine a strange feeling of tenseness filled the girls and Carlitos; and yet that was not surprising, as the mine had been the scene of the most thrilling adventures they had ever experienced. It was here that they had been rescued from the treacherous mine foreman who had stolen the mine from Carlitos's father.

On their arrival at the great stone house that this foreman had so proudly built for his own use, they found José's wife, Maria, the nurse who had reared Carlitos as one of her family. Though she was only a poor ignorant woman of the peon class, the girls as well as Carlitos loved her.

"Maria has a heart of gold," Jo Ann told Miss Prudence as they watched her enfold Carlitos in her arms and kiss him on each cheek. "She loves him as she does her own Pepito and her girls."

A few minutes later Maria proudly showed Carlitos to his room, into which she had put the best of everything, then took Miss Prudence and the girls to adjoining rooms, which looked bare and forbidding with their concrete floors, scant furniture, and curtainless, iron-barred windows.

"Looks like a soldiers' barracks," Miss Prudence said crisply after a swift glance about.

Jo Ann laughed, then 

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