CHAPTER X
THE TREASURE OF ROSE RANCH
Walter Mason came running as hard as he could across the field; but he had only to seize Prince's reins and manage that excited animal. Rhoda had the grey pony well in hand.
"Well, you're a wonder for a girl!" exclaimed Grace's brother.
"Humph!" said Rhoda in return, "I don't consider that a compliment—if you meant it as such. Look out, or that black horse will step on you."
"She was just as cool as a cucumber," Walter told Nan and his sister afterward. "Why! I never saw such a girl."
"I guess," Nan Sherwood said shrewdly, "that we don't know much about girls who are born and brought up in the far West. Rhoda Hammond is a friend to be proud of. She has such good sense."
"And pluck to beat the band!" cried Walter. "I'd like to see that country she comes from."
"And me, too," agreed Bess Harley, who overheard this statement.
"'Rose Ranch,'" murmured Grace. "Such a pretty name! After all, she has said just enough about it to be very tantalizing," and the smaller girl smiled.
"Maybe she does that purposely," Bess remarked. "Perhaps she thinks we have so many things she hasn't obtained yet, that she wants to make us jealous a bit."
"I really don't think that Rhoda worries about what she doesn't have," Nan put in. "Perhaps she doesn't even see that she lacks anything that we have."
"Well, she never will go in for athletics," Bess declared.
"Athletics!" burst out Walter. "Why, there isn't another girl at
Lakeview Hall who could do what she did just now."
They were all agreed on that point. Even Dr. Prescott and the staff of instructors commented upon Rhoda's stopping the runaway. Professor Krenner, the mathematics teacher, and with whom Nan and Amelia Boggs took architectural drawing, selected Rhoda to be one of a small party at his cabin up the lake one spring afternoon. And the professor's parties were famous and very much enjoyed by those girls who understood the queer and humorous old gentleman.
He played his key-bugle for them, showed them how to bark birches for the purpose of making canoes (he was building one for his own use) and finally gave them a supper of wild duck, served on birch-bark platters, and corn pone baked on a plank before the embers of a campfire and seasoned mildly with wood smoke.
This incident cheered Rhoda up. She had begun to be dreadfully homesick as the good weather came. She confessed to Nan that she was very much tempted to run away from school and return to the ranch. Only she knew her father and mother would be terribly disappointed in her if she did such a thing.
"And besides that," Rhoda said, with a quiet little smile, "I want company when I go back to Rose Ranch."
"Oh, yes," said the innocent Nan. "You do know people in Chicago, don't you?"
"Humph! Mamma's friend, Mrs. Janeway. Yes," said Rhoda, still secretly amused, "I don't want to go away out to Rose Ranch alone and come back alone next fall. For I've got to come back, I suppose."
"Why, Rhoda!" exclaimed Nan, "I can't see why you don't like
Lakeview Hall."
"Wait till you see Rose Ranch. Then you'll know."
"But I don't expect ever to see that," sighed Nan; for she really had begun to think so much about Rhoda's home, and had listened so closely to the tales the Western girl related, that Nan felt herself drawn strongly toward an outdoor experience such as Rhoda enjoyed at home. It would be even more free and primitive, Nan thought, than her sojourn at Pine Camp.
"You are terribly pessimistic," laughed the Western girl in rejoinder to Nan's last observation. "How do you know you'll never see Rose Ranch?"
Even this remark did not make Nan suspect what was coming. Nor did
Bess Harley or the Masons have any warning of the plan Rhoda
Hammond had so carefully thought out. But the surprise "broke" one
afternoon at mail time.
Both Nan and Bess received letters from home, and they ran at once to Room Seven, Corridor Four, to read them. Scarcely had they broken the seals of the two fat missives when the door was flung open and Grace Mason fairly catapulted herself into the room in such a state of excitement that she startled the Tillbury chums.
"What is the matter, Grace?" gasped Bess, as the smaller girl threw herself into Nan's arms.
"Why! she's only happy," said Nan, holding her off and viewing her flushed and animated countenance. "Do get your breath, Gracie."
"And—when I do—I'll take yours!" gasped Grace. She held up a letter. "From mother. She—she says we can go—Walter and I—both of us!"
"Well, for mercy's sake!" exclaimed Bess, "where are you going?
Though I should say you, Grace, had already gone. Crazy, you know."
"To Rose Ranch!" almost shouted Grace.
In astounded repetition, Nan and Bess fairly shrieked: "To Rose
Ranch?"
"My goodness, yes! Haven't you heard about it? My letter says
Rhoda's invited both of you girls, too, and that Walter is going.
Is—it a hoax?"
Nan and Bess stared at each other in amazement for a single moment; then, like a flash, they tore open their own letters, both being those prized "mother letters" so dear to every boarding-school girl's heart, and unfolded the missives the envelopes contained. It was Bess who found it first.
"It's here! It's here! Just think of Rhoda Hammond keeping this secret from us! She wrote her folks and they wrote to mine—and to yours, Nan—and Gracie's. Oh! Oh! We're going, going, going!"
"Isn't it fine?" cried Grace, dancing up and down in her delight.
"Delightsome! Just delightsome!" agreed Bess, coining a new word to express her own joy. "Three cheers and a tiger! And a wildcat! And a panther! And—and—Well! all the other trimmings that may go with three cheers," she concluded because she was out of both breath and inspiration.
"And Rhoda's folks must be awfully nice people," Grace said warmly.
"And her mamma—"
But Nan was deep in her own letter from Momsey, and here follows the part of it dealing with this wonderful news which had so excited all three of the girls:
"Your new friend, Rhoda, must be a very lovely girl, and I want you to bring her home to Tillbury the day school closes. I know she must be a nice girl by the way her mother writes me. Her mother is blind, but she has had somebody write me that she wants very much to 'see' Nan Sherwood, who has been so kind to her Rhoda during the latter's first term at Lakeview.
"This makes me very happy and proud, Nan dear; for if your schoolmates love you so much that they write home about you, I am sure you are doing as well at school as Papa Sherwood and I could wish you to. And this Mrs. Hammond is very insistent that you shall visit Rose Ranch this summer. Mrs. Harley came to see me about it, and we have decided that you and Elizabeth can go home with Rhoda, if the Masons likewise agree to let Grace and Walter go. There is a lady going West to Rose Ranch at the same time—a Mrs. Janeway—who is a friend of Mrs. Hammond's. She will look after you young folk en route, and will return with you.
"But we must have you a little while first, my Nan; and you must bring Rhoda here to the little cottage in amity for a few days, at least, before the party starts West. And—"
But this much of the letter was all Nan would let the other girls hear. She was quite as happy as either Grace or Bess. And all three of them tripped away at once to find Rhoda and try to tell her just how delighted they were over this plan.
"It never seemed as though I should see Rose Ranch," Nan sighed ecstatically when they had talked it all over. "It is too good to be true."
As the term lengthened the girls were pushed harder and harder by the instructors, and Bess and others like her complained a good deal.
"The only thing that keeps me going is a mirage of Rose Ranch ahead of me," declared Nan's chum, shaking her head over the text books piled upon their study table. "Oh, dear me, Nan! if anything should happen to make it impossible for us to go with Rhoda, I certainly should fall—down—and—die!"
"Oh, nothing will happen as bad as that," laughed Nan.
"Well, nothing much ever does happen to us," agreed Bess. "But suppose something should happen to Rhoda?"
"Shall we set a bodyguard about her?" asked Nan, her eyes twinkling. "Do you think of any particular danger she may be in? I fancy she is quite capable of taking care of herself."
"Now, Nan!" cried Bess, "don't poke fun. It would be awful if anything should happen so that we couldn't go to Rose Ranch with her."
Perhaps this was rather a selfish thought on Bess Harley's part. Still, Bess was not notably unselfish, although she had improved a good deal during the months she had been at Lakeview Hall.
But Nan had occasion to remember her chum's words very clearly not long thereafter, for she did find Rhoda Hammond in trouble. It was one Friday afternoon when Nan was returning from her architectural drawing lesson at Professor Krenner's cabin, up the lake shore. Amelia had not gone that day, being otherwise engaged; so Nan was alone on the path through the spruce wood that here clothed the face of the high bluff on which Lakeview Hall was set.
A company of jays squalling in a thicket had been the only disturbing sounds in the sun-bathed woods, when of a sudden Nan heard somebody speak—a high and angry voice. Then in Rhoda's deeper tones, she heard:
"What do you mean, confronting me like this? I do not know you. You are crazy!"
"Maybe I am cr-r-razy!" cried the second voice, its owner rolling her "r's" magnificently. "But I am not a thief. You, Senorita Ham-mon', are that! You and all your fam-i-lee are the thiefs—yes!"
Nan's thought flashed instantly to the Mexican girl in the shop in Adminster. She had spoken in just this way. And she had given at that time every indication of hating Rhoda.
The girl from Tillbury pushed into the thicket from which the voices sounded. Rhoda replied to the castigation of the other's tongue only by an ejaculation of amazement. The harsher voice went on:
"The tr-r-reasure of the Ranchio Rose—that ees what you have stolen. You and your fam-i-lee. Those reeches pay for your dress—for your ring there on your han'—for all your good times, and to make you a la-dee. But me—I am poor that you and yours may be reech, Senorita Ham-mon'. The treasure of the Ranchio Rose belong to me and to my modder—not to you. Thiefs, I say!"
Nan burst through the bushes at this juncture. Rhoda had uttered another cry. She was backing away from a girl with flushed countenance and uplifted, clenched hand—a girl that Nan Sherwood very well remembered.