CHAPTER XIV
THE POOR LITTLE CALF
Nan awoke when it was still utterly dark. Nothing had frightened her, and yet she felt that something really important was about to happen—something wonderful! What it could be, she had no idea. Her imagination was not at all spurring her mind. She only knew that she was on the verge of a new and surprising experience.
There were three beds in the big room, and she could hear Bess and
Grace breathing calmly in their own cots. But she was wide awake.
Without speaking, or making any more sound than she could help, Nan Sherwood crept out of bed. The air from the open windows was chill, so she knew it must be near dawn.
She slipped her feet into slippers and shrugged her robe about her. Then she crept to the nearest casement. She had to kneel to see out, for the window, which looked to the east, was under the eaves of the ranch house. The sill was only a foot above the floor.
Nan folded her arms on this sill and looked out into the velvety darkness. A great silence seemed to brood over the country which she could not see. She remembered how lonely the ranch house seemed to be when she had first seen it the previous afternoon. Even the bunk houses where the help slept were at some distance, and not in this easterly direction.
Blackness seemed to have shut down all about the great dwelling, like a curtain. The roses weighted the air with their delicious scent. She even had to reach forth and separate the prickly vines carefully so as to make an opening through which she hoped soon to see.
For she knew now what it was that had awakened her—what it was that was about to happen. Dawn was coming! The sun would soon appear! A new day was in the making just below the horizon which she could not see.
A haze had been drawn over the stars; therefore there was absolutely no light in the world. Not yet. But—
There it was! A pale gray streak was drawn along the very edge of the world, far, far away. It was just as though a brushful of gray paint had been dashed along that line where the earth and the sky met.
The gray line remained, though growing more distinct, while above it a band of faint pink rimmed the east as far as she could see. Nan drew her kimono about her shoulders and shivered ecstatically. This was the wonderful thing that she had awakened with in her mind.
Sunrise!
A gun could have shot the earth away out there across the rolling plain no more suddenly with yellow than now was done by the sun's reflection. It had not come into sight yet; but Nan could see the colors reaching upward toward the zenith. A riot of color hurried everywhere, over the earth and up in the sky; and then—
"There he is!" shouted Nan aloud, as the edge of a fiery red ball appeared.
"What is the matter with you, Nan Sherwood?" complained Bess, from her bed.
"Oh, what is it? Nan!" shrieked Grace, sitting straight up in bed and evidently expecting that the very worst had happened.
"It's morning, you lazy things," whispered Nan. "Sh! Get up and see the most wonderful sight you ever did see."
"I bet the sun is getting up in the west," gasped Bess, hopping out of bed at this announcement.
Already there was a stir about the place. Down at the bunk houses the dogs began to yap and some full-throated cow-puncher sent forth a "Yee! Yee! Yee! Yip!" that acted as rising call for all the hands. As the three girls from so much farther east gathered at the low window to peer out, there sounded another cowboy salute and there dashed by with the drumming of hoofs a little party of mounted men who rode just as the cowboys do in the moving pictures.
Rhoda burst into the room and ran to hug her three friends. She was already dressed.
"There goes Dan's bunch already," she said. "And see 'em turn and look back. They're just showing off; they know we sleep on this side of the house. Daddy will give them a wigging, for maybe Mrs. Janeway wants to sleep."
Breakfast was an early repast at Rose Ranch. Mrs. Hammond and Mrs. Janeway were served in their rooms; but the rest of the family were soon at the table. It was a bountiful repast, with Ah Foon, the Chinese cook, coming to the door every few minutes to see for himself if the flapjack plates did not need replenishing.
"We are going to get our ponies first of all," Rhoda announced. "Oh!
I am so hungry for a ride—a good ride—again."
"But, goodness! don't we have to be fitted to them?" demanded Bess, the incorrigible. "I would not like to walk right up to a pony and say 'You're mine!'—just like that!"
"Hess will pick them out for us, won't he. Daddy?"
"I reckon so," said her father, without looking up from his mail that one of the Mexicans had brought in the minute before.
"Goodness!" exclaimed Grace. "We'll never be able to get the ponies to-day, then, that is sure. He won't be able to answer you so quickly."
"That's all right," laughed Rhoda. "I asked him about them last night"
They ran out to the corral as soon as the girls got into their new riding habits. They had had them made something like Rhoda's.
"You see," the latter had said, "our ponies are not often trained for side-saddles and skirts. And, then, they are dangerous."
The silent Hesitation was on hand. He had a bunch of ponies gathered in a particular corral, and pointed to them in answer to Rhoda when she asked if they were perfectly safe. About the time the girls and Walter had looked them over and chosen those they liked, the horse wrangler said:
"All broke for tenderfoots. You can trust any of 'em as long as you keep your eyes open."
"Well," murmured Bess, "I certainly do not intend to ride horseback when I am asleep."
Nan chose for herself a cunning little fat pony, with brown and white patches and a pink nose. In the East it would have been called a calico pony; but Rhoda called it a pinto.
The Eastern girls were just a little doubtful of their mounts, because their tails and ears were always twitching and they seemed quite unable to "make their feet behave."
"Mine is just as nervous as I am," confessed Bess, as she gathered up the reins. "If he starts as quick as Walter's does, I know I shall be thrown as high as the cow jumped—over the moon."
"Have no fear, Elizabeth," advised Nan. "Try to copy Rhoda, and you'll stick on all right."
"Oh, I'll be a regular copy-cat," promised her chum. "I don't wish to be carried back to Tillbury in pieces."
The little cavalcade started off from the corrals in good order. They went past the house and waved their hands to Mrs. Janeway and shouted a greeting to Rhoda's mother. Then the ranch girl led them at a fast canter toward the west.
When Walter saw the small rifle tucked into a case under Rhoda's knee he expressed the wish that he had brought his own rifle West.
"Do you know, I never thought of it! You're not expecting to shoot
Indians, are you, Rhoda?" he said jokingly.
"You never can tell," she replied, smiling. "But they say I am a pretty good shot. I don't expect to shoot an Indian."
"I can shoot, too," said Grace quickly. "Walter taught me last year."
"Mercy! what did you shoot with, Grace?" demanded Bess. "A squirt-gun?"
"A pistol and Walter's rifle. I know I'm awfully scared of 'em, but
I wanted to know which was the more dangerous end of a gun."
"Bravo!" cried Nan, laughing.
"Why, if you want, I can supply you all with firearms," said Rhoda. "There are plenty at the ranch. And the boys most always lug around a 'gat,' as they call 'em, because of the coyotes."
"Oh, dear me! are they dangerous?" demanded Grace.
"The coyotes? Only to stray calves and lame cattle. We seldom see anything more dangerous. And as long as you are on horseback you are perfectly safe, anyway, even from a lion."
"There she goes talking about lions again," murmured Bess. "I feel as though I were on the African veldt."
"Let's all learn how to use firearms," said Nan eagerly. "Why shouldn't we?"
"Why, Nan Sherwood! you have the instincts of a desperado," declared her chum. "I can see that."
"I want to do just as the Western girls do while I am here," said
Nan.
"So I, I presume," Rhoda queried, "should wish to do just as the
Eastern girls do when I am at Lakeview?"
"Well, you'd get along better," Nan argued, quite seriously.
Out of sight of the ranch house they very quickly found themselves in what seemed to the visitors a pathless plain. Off to the left a huge herd of red and white cattle was feeding. It was broken up into little groups and the creatures looked no more harmful than cows back home. There was not a herdsman in sight.
"Why," said Bess, "I expected to see cowboys riding around and around the cattle all the time, and hear them singing songs."
"They do do that at night. The riding, anyway. And most of the boys try to sing. It takes up time and keeps 'em from being lonely," replied Rhoda. "But I am not sure that the cows are fond of the singing. They are patient creatures, however, and endure a good deal."
"Now, Rhoda!" exclaimed Nan, "don't squash all our beliefs about the cowpunching industry which we have learned from nursery books and movies."
Rhoda headed away from the herd, and by and by they descended a steep but grassy slope into the mouth of a rock-walled canyon. It was a wild-looking place; but there were clumps of roses growing here and there. Rhoda leaped down and let her pony stand, with the reins trailing before him on the ground.
"Isn't he cunning!" observed Bess. "He thinks he's hitched."
"They are trained that way. You see, on the plains there are so few hitching posts," said Rhoda dryly.
The others dismounted, too. Rhoda was hunting among the great boulders that littered the grassy bottom. When they asked her what she was looking for, she called back that she would show them a boiling spring if she could find it.
Suddenly Nan lifted her head to listen. Then she started up the canon, which, in that direction, grew narrower between the walls.
"Don't you hear that calf bawling?" she demanded, when Bess asked her where she was going.
"Oh, I hear it," said Bess, keeping in the rear. "But how do you know it is a calf?"
"Then it is something imitating one very closely," sniffed Nan, and kept on. The next minute she shouted back: "It is! A little, cunning, red calf. And, oh, Bess! it has hurt its leg."
She ran forward. Bess followed with more caution. Suddenly there was a crash in the bushes, and out into the open, right beside the injured calf, came a red and white cow. This animal bawled loudly and charged for a few yards directly toward Nan Sherwood.
"Oh, goodness, Nan! Come away!" begged Bess, turning to run. "That old cow will bite you."
But it was not the anxious mother of the calf that had startled Nan. She knew she could dodge the cow. But above the place where the calf lay, on a great gray rock that gave it a commanding position, the girl saw a huge, cat-like creature with glaring eyes and a switching tail.
She had never seen a puma, not even in a menagerie. But she could not mistake the slate and fawn colored body, the cocked ears, the bristling whiskers, and the distended claws, the latter working just like a cat's when the latter is about to make a charge.
And it looked as though the savage beast could quite overleap the cow and calf and almost reach Nan Sherwood's feet.