“Hush! I reckon Crab lost it when you fell in the water and stirred us all up so,” returned the boy, with a grin.
“Lost that paper?”
“Yes. You see, it’s a page torn from the Sunday edition of a New York daily. On this side is a story of some professor’s discoveries in ancient Babylon.”
“Couldn’t have interested Jack Crab much,” remarked Ruth, smiling.
“That’s what I said myself,” declared Tom, hastily. “Therefore, I turned it over. And this is what Crab was showing that Nita girl, I am sure.”
Ruth looked at the illustrated sheet that Tom spread before her. There was a girl on a very spirited cow pony, swinging a lariat, the loop of which was about to settle over the broadly spreading horns of a Texas steer. The girl was dressed in a very fancy “cow-girl” costume, and the picture was most spirited indeed. In one corner, too, was a reproduction of a photograph of the girl described in the newspaper article.
“Why! it doesn’t look anything like Nita,” gasped Ruth, understanding immediately why Tom had brought the paper to her.
“Nope. You needn’t expect it to. Those papers use any old photograph to make illustrations from. But read the story.”
It was all about the niece of a very rich cattle man in Montana who had run away from the ranch on which she had lived all her life. It was called Silver Ranch, and was a very noted cattle range in that part of the West. The girl’s uncle raised both horses and cattle, was very wealthy, had given her what attention a single man could in such a situation, and was now having a countrywide search made for the runaway.
“Jane Ann Hicks Has Run Away From a Fortune” was the way the paper put it in a big “scare head” across the top of the page; and the text went on to tell of rough Bill Hicks, of Bullhide, and how he had begun in the early cattle days as a puncher himself and had now risen to the sole proprietorship of Silver Ranch.