Aunt Everett had been horrified at this arrangement. Aunt Everett was her father’s relative, who, on two formidable occasions, had descended upon the rancho and undertaken to revolutionize the household. This she did out of a sense of duty to Helen, who, she declared, was growing up in sheer savagery and ignorance.
Helen was twenty years old when Aunt Everett paid her second, and last, visit. It was then the momentous decision was reached that the girl should go to college. It was for the sake of his own youthful dream of Harvard, that had never come true, that Morgan Anderson had fixed upon Radcliffe, and Helen’s four beautiful years had become a fact.
She sighed again, recalling those years.
“They were so lovely,” she murmured, “and they have sent me back—how is it old Marcus Aurelius phrased it?—‘free from all discontent with that to which thou returnest.’
“Free from discontent?” she cried, taking in another deep, long breath of the buoyant air, “I should say I am! I was never in my life so aboundingly happy!”
The pony was walking slowly, and as Helen looked about she became aware that Patsy was not in attendance upon them.
She halted, anxiously, the dog was a recent acquisition, given her by Sandy Larch, on her return from college, she was training him to keep with her. This was the first time she had really forgotten him. She reproached herself as she rode back over the way they had come, for letting her wits go wool-gathering.
She called the terrier, reining in from time to time, but there was no response, and becoming at last thoroughly alarmed, she dismounted, dropping the pony’s reins over his head to the ground, and started on foot to investigate among the cacti.
“He’s found a gopher-hole somewhere,” she said to herself, as she went whistling about among the greasewood and cacti.
She ceased to whistle, presently, vexed at Patsy’s lack of response, and continued her search in silence until, rounding a cactus-grown knoll, strewn with loose stone, she suddenly halted, warned by a familiar, burring sound that for an instant made her heart jump.