The boys, of course, could not dig very fast. The shovels they had were
rather small, and did not hold much dirt. But they were fully large
enough for two such little boys.

The earth was somewhat sandy, and there were not many large stones on
Uncle Fred's ranch. Of course, the digging was not as easy as it had
been at the beach where Cousin Tom lived, but Russ and Laddie did not
mind this. They were digging for fun, as much as for anything else, and
they really did not have to do it.

So they dug away, first one and then the other getting down in the hole,
until they had made it so large that, even when Laddie stood up in it,
his head hardly came up to the top of the ground. Russ, being taller,
stuck a little more out of the hole than did his brother.

"Do you see any water yet?" asked Laddie, when Russ had been digging, in
his turn, for some little time.

"No, not yet," was the answer. "It's awful dry."

"We could get some water from the spring and pour it in," said Laddie.
"Then it would look like a well."

"But all the water would run out, if we just poured it in, same as it
ran out when we dug a hole at the beach and let the waves fill it,"
objected Russ. "We'll dig down until we come to some regular water. Then
it will be a real well."

But long before they reached water Laddie and Russ became tired of
digging. They got to a place where the earth was packed hard, and it was
not easy to shovel it out, and finally Russ said:

"Oh, I'm not going to make a well!"

"I'm not, either," declared Laddie. "What'll we do?"

"Let's go for a ride on our ponies," suggested Russ.

"All right!" agreed Laddie. "That'll be fun."

So, dropping the shovels at the side of the hole they had dug, instead
of taking them back to the barn, as they should have done, Russ and
Laddie went to the house to ask their father or mother if they might go
for a ride on the little ponies.

Mr. Bunker was out on the ranch with Uncle Fred, but Mother Bunker said
the two boys might ride over the plain if they did not go too far.

Russ and Laddie went to the corral to get their ponies. The boys got one
of the cowboys, who was working around the barn, to put the saddles on
for them, as this they could not do for themselves, and then they set
off, Russ on "Star," as he called his pony, for it had a white star on
its forehead, while Laddie rode "Stocking." His pony had been named that
because one leg, about half-way up from the hoof, was whit