CHAPTER XII
ROSE RANCH AT LAST
The closing of school came at length. Bess had said frankly that she feared it never would come, the time seemed to pass so slowly; but Nan only laughed at her.
"Do you think something has happened to the 'wheels of Time' we read about in class the other day?" she asked her chum.
"Well, it does seem," said merry Bess, "as though somebody must have stuck a stick in the cogs of those wheels, and stopped 'em!"
Both Tillbury girls stood well in their classes; and they were liked by all the instructors—even by Professor Krenner, who some of the girls declared wickedly was the school's "self-starter, Lakeview Hall being altogether too modern to have a crank."
In association with their fellow pupils, Nan and Bess had never any real difficulty, save with Linda Riggs and her clique. But this term Linda had not behaved as she had during the fall and winter semester. This change was partly because of her chum, Cora Courtney. Cora would not shut herself away from the other girls just to please Linda.
Linda had even begun to try to cultivate the acquaintance of Rhoda
Hammond—especially when she had heard more about Rose Ranch. But
Rhoda refused to yield to the blandishments of the railroad
magnate's daughter.
"I suppose it might be good fun to take a trip across the continent to your part of the country," Linda said to the Western girl on one occasion. "You get up such a party, Rhoda, and I'll tease father for his private car, and we will go across in style."
"Thank you," said Rhoda simply. "I prefer to pay my own way."
"No use for Linda to try to 'horn in'—isn't that the
Westernism—to our crowd," laughed Bess, when she heard of this.
"The 'Riggs Disease' is not going to afflict us this summer, I
should hope!"
Cora Courtney, too, had tried to cultivate an acquaintance with Rhoda. But the girl from Rose Ranch made friends slowly. Too many of the girls had ignored her when she first came to Lakeview Hall for Rhoda easily to forget, if she did forgive.
The good-bys on the broad veranda of Lakeview Hall were far more lingering than they had been at Christmas time. The girls were separating for nearly three months—and they scattered like sparks from a bonfire, in all directions.
A goodly company started with the Tillbury chums from the Freeling station; but at each junction there were further separations until, when the time came for the porter to make up the berths, there were only Nan, Bess and Rhoda of all their crowd in the Pullman car. Even Grace and Walter had changed for a more direct route to Chicago.
They awoke in the morning to find their coach sidetracked at Tillbury and everybody hurrying to get into the washrooms. Nan could scarcely wait to tidy herself and properly dress, for there was Papa Sherwood in a great, new, beautiful touring car—one of those, in fact, that he kept for demonstration purposes.
Nan dragged Rhoda with her, while Bess ran merrily to meet what she called "a whole nest of Harley larks" in another car on the other side of the station. It had been determined that Rhoda should go home with Nan.
"Here she is, Papa Sherwood!" cried Nan, leaping into the front of the big car to "get a strangle hold" around her father's neck. "This is our girl from Rose Ranch, Rhoda Hammond. Isn't she nice?"
"I—I can't see her, Nan," said her father. "Whew! let me get my breath and my eyesight back."
Then he welcomed Rhoda, and both girls got into the tonneau to ride to the Sherwood cottage. "Such richness!" Nan sighed.
The little cottage in amity looked just as cozy and homelike as ever. Nothing had been changed there save that the house had been newly painted. As the car came to a halt, the front door opened with a bang and a tiny figure shot out of it, down the walk, and through the gateway to meet Nan Sherwood as she stepped down from the automobile.
"My Nan! My Nan!" shrieked Inez, and the half wild little creature flung herself into the bigger girl's arms. "Come in and see how nice I've kept your mamma. I've learned to brush her hair just as you used to brush it. I'm going to be every bit like you when I get big. Come on in!"
With this sort of welcome Nan Sherwood could scarcely do less than enjoy herself during the week they remained in Tillbury. Inez, the waif, had become Inez, the home-body. She was the dearest little maid, so Momsey said, that ever was. And how happy she appeared to be!
Her old worry of mind about the possibility of "three square meals" a day and somebody who did not beat her too much, seemed to have been forgotten by little Inez. The kindly oversight of Mrs. Sherwood was making a loving, well-bred little girl of the odd creature whom Nan and Bess had first met selling flowers on the wintry streets of Chicago. Of course, during that week at home, the three girls from Lakeview Hall did not sit down and fold their hands. No, indeed! Bess Harley gave a big party at her house; and there were automobile rides, and boating parties, and a picnic. It was a very busy time.
"We scarcely know whether we have had you with us or not, Nan dear," said her mother. "But I suppose Rhoda wants to get home and see her folks, too; so we must not delay your journey. When you come back, however, mother wants her daughter to herself for a little while. We have been separated so much that I am not sure the fairies have not sent a changeling to me!" and she laughed.
At that, for it was not a hearty laugh and Momsey's eyes glistened, if Nan had not given her promise, "black and blue," to Rhoda, she would have excused herself and not gone to Rose Ranch at all. She knew that Momsey was lonely.
But Mrs. Sherwood did not mean to spoil her daughter's enjoyment. And the opportunity to see this distant part of the country was too good to be neglected. Nan might never again have such a chance to go West.
So the three girls were sent off without any tears for the rendezvous with the Masons and Mrs. Janeway at Chicago.
They found Grace and Walter all right; but as the Masons had no idea what Mrs. Janeway looked like, and that lady had no description of the Masons, they had not met. Rhoda had to look up her mother's friend.
"What are you going to do, Rhoda?" asked the bubbling Bess. "Track her down as you would an Indian? Look for signs—?"
"I don't believe in signs," responded Rhoda. "I am going to look for the best dressed woman in Chicago. Such lovely clothes as she wears!"
"I guess that must be so," said Grace as Rhoda walked out of ear-shot, "for Mrs. Janeway chose Rhoda's own outfit, and you know there wasn't a better dressed girl at Lakeview."
"Wow!" murmured her brother. "What a long tale about dress! Don't you girls ever think of anything but what you put on?"
"Oh, yes, sir," declared Bess smartly. "And you know that Rhoda thinks less about what she wears than most. It's lucky her mother had somebody she could trust to dress her daughter before she appeared at the Hall."
"All on the surface! All on the surface!" grumbled Walter.
"Goodness, Walter," said his sister, "would you want us to swallow our dresses? Of course they are on the surface."
"It certainly is a fact," grinned Walter impudently, "that the curriculum of Lakeview Hall makes its pupils wondrous sharp. Hullo! here comes Rhoda towing a very nice looking lady, I must admit."
In fact, at first sight the three other girls fell in love with Mrs. Janeway. She was a childless and wealthy widow, who, as she asserted, "just doted on girls." She met them all warmly.
"I hope," said Walter, with gravity, as she shook hands with him, "that a mere boy may find favor in your eyes, too. Really, we're not all savages. Some of us are more or less civilized."
"Well," Mrs. Janeway sighed, but with twinkling eyes, "I shall see how well you behave. Now, for our tickets."
"I have the reservations," Walter said quietly. "A stateroom for you four ladies and a berth for me in the same car. In half an hour we pull out. And, girls!"
"Say it," returned Bess.
"Is it something nice, Walter?" asked his sister.
"There is an observation platform on our car—the end car on the train. It goes all the way through to Osaka, where we are going. I think we are fixed just right."
This proved to be the case. The young people pretty nearly lived on that rear platform, for the weather remained pleasant all through the journey. Mrs. Janeway sometimes found it hard work to get them in to go to bed.
The route this tourist car took was rather roundabout; but as Walter said, it landed them at the Osaka station, the nearest railroad point to Rose Ranch, in something like five days.
By this time they were getting a little weary of traveling by rail. Walter declared he was "saddle-sore" from sitting so much. When long lines of corrals and cattle-pens came in sight, Rhoda told them they were nearing Osaka.
"Why, there are miles and miles of those corrals!" cried Bess, in wonder. "You don't mean to say they are all for your father's cattle?"
"Oh, no, my dear. Several ranchers ship from Osaka," explained Rhoda. "And as we all ship at about the same season, there must be plenty of pens and cattle-chutes. Hurry, now. Get your things together."
Bess scrabbled her baggage together, as usual leaving a good deal of it for somebody else to bring. This time it was Walter who gathered up her belongings rather than Nan.
"I never do know what I do with things," sighed Bess. "When I start on a journey I have so few; and when I arrive at my destination it does seem as though I am always in possession of much more than my share. Thank you, Walter," she concluded demurely. "I think boys are awfully nice to have around."
"In that case," said Rhoda, leading the way out of the car as the train slowed down, "you are going to have plenty of boys to wait on you when you get to Rose Ranch. Those punchers are just dying for feminine 'scenery.' I know Ike Bemis once said that he often felt like draping a blanket on an old cow and asking her for a dance."
"The idea!" gasped Mrs. Janeway, who was likewise making her first visit to the ranges.
At that moment Rhoda cried:
"There he is! There's Hess with the ponies."
"Hess who?" asked Grace.
"Hess what?" demanded Nan, as the train stopped and the colored porter quickly set his stool at the foot of the car steps.
"Hesitation Kane," explained Rhoda, hurrying ahead. "Come on, folks! Oh, I am glad to get home!"
Bess, who was last, save Walter, to reach the station platform, gave one comprehensive glance around the barren place.
"Well!" she said. "If this is home—"
"'Home was never like this,'" chuckled Walter.
A few board shacks, the station itself unpainted, sagebrush and patches of alkali here and there, and an endless trail leading out across a vista of flat land that seemed horizonless. The train steamed away, having halted but a moment. To all but Rhoda the scene was like something unreal. "My goodness!" murmured Grace, "even the moving pictures didn't show anything like this."
"They say the desert scenes made by some of the movie companies are photographed at Coney Island. And I guess it's true," said Walter.
Rhoda had run across the tracks toward where a two-seated buckboard, drawn by a pair of eager ponies, was standing. Beside it stood two saddle horses, their heads drooping and their reins trailing before them in the dust. The man who drove the ponies wore a huge straw sombrero of Mexican manufacture. When he turned to look at his employer's daughter the others saw a very solemn and sunburned visage.
"Oh, Hess!" cried Rhoda. "How are you? Is mother all right?"
The man stared unblinkingly at her and his facial muscles never moved. He was thin-lipped, and his hawk nose made a high barrier between his eyes. He did not seem unpleasant, only naturally grim. And silent! Well, that word scarcely indicated the character of Mr. Hesitation Kane.
"Come on!" shouted Rhoda, looking back at her friends, and evidently not at all surprised that the driver of the buckboard did not at once reply to her questions. "Mrs. Janeway, and Nan, and Bess, and Gracie—you all crowd into the buckboard. Walter and I are going to ride. Got my duds here, Hess?"
It was lucky Mr. Kane did not have to answer verbally. He thrust forward a bundle. Rhoda seized it and started for the station where there was a room in which she could change her clothes. Before she quite reached the platform the driver spoke his first word:
"Thanky, Miss Rhody. I'm fine."
Rhoda nodded over her shoulder, laughing at the surprise and amusement of her friends, and disappeared. Walter helped the girls and Mrs. Janeway into the odd though comfortable vehicle. In a few moments Rhoda reappeared in a rough costume that even Mrs. Janeway had to admit did not make the Western girl any the less attractive.
The full breeches and long coat and leggings gave her every freedom of action, and she had put on a wide-brimmed hat. Meanwhile Walter had brought forth from one of his bags a pair of leather riding leggings and buckled on small spurs. He had been forewarned of this ride by Rhoda before they left Chicago.
They mounted the two ponies, and the driver of the buckboard lifted his reins. Then he pulled the eager ponies to a stop again and turned toward Rhoda, answering her second question.
"Yes, ma'am, your mother's fine. She's fine," he announced.
"Don't that beat all!" exclaimed Walter, exploding with laughter as he cantered by Rhoda's side. "That is why we call him 'Hesitation, '" Rhoda said.
"Somebody taught him to count more than ten before speaking, didn't they?" commented Walter.
The trail was not wide enough for the pony riders to keep their mounts beside the buckboard; besides, the dust would have smothered Rhoda and Walter. The light breeze carried the dust off the trail, however; so the two riders could keep within shouting distance of the others.
In two hours or a little more they were out of the barren lands completely. Swerving down an arroyo, all green and lush at the bottom, they cantered up into the mouth of a broad gulch, the walls of which later became so steep that it might well be called a canyon.
The ponies never walked—up grade, or down. They cantered or galloped. Hesitation Kane never spoke to them; but they seemed to know just what he wanted them to do by the way he used the reins—and they did it.
"I don't see how he does it," said Walter to Rhoda. "It doesn't seem really possible that one could make a horse understand without speech."
"Oh, he can speak to them if it is necessary. But he says it isn't often necessary to speak to a horse. The less you talk to them the better trained they are. And Hess is daddy's boss wrangler."
"'Wrangler'?"
"Horse wrangler. Horse trainer, that means."
"But, my goodness!" chuckled Walter, "'to wrangle' certainly means quarreling in speech. I should think it was almost like a Quaker meeting when this Mr. Kane trains a pony."
"It is a fact," laughed Rhoda, "that the ponies make much more noise than Hesitation does."
As they entered this deeper gulch, the girls cried out in delight. The trail was narrow and grassy. Growing right up to the path—so that they could stretch out their hands and pick them—were acres and acres of wild roses. They scented the air and charmed the eye for miles and miles along the trail.
They rode on and on. Finally the little cavalcade wound out of the gap, down a slope, crossed a tumbling river that was yards broad but not very deep, and the ponies quickened their pace as they mounted again to a higher plain.
"There it is!" shouted Rhoda, and, waving her hat, she spurred her pony ahead and passed the buckboard at full speed.
On a knoll the others saw a low-roofed, but wide-spreading, bungalow sort of structure, with corrals and sheds beyond. The latter were bare and ugly enough; but the ranch house was almost covered to the eaves with climbing roses in luxurious bloom.