“Hush, now! Easy!” she commanded her mount, who obeyed her voice quite as well as though she had tugged at the reins. “Now we’ll go back quietly and trail this useless one along with us.
“Come up, Buck! Easy, Rose!” So she urged them into the same gait, returning in a wide circle toward the path up which she had climbed before the sun went down—the trail to Sunset Ranch.
“Yes! I can do it!” she cried, thinking aloud. “I can and will go to New York. I’ll find out all about that old trouble. Uncle Starkweather can tell me, probably.
“And then it will please father.” She spoke as though Mr. Morrell was sure to know her decision. “He will like it if I go to live with them a spell. He said it is what I need—the refining influence of a nice home.
“And I would love to be with nice girls again—and to hear good music—and put on something beside a riding skirt when I go out of the house.”
She sighed. “One cannot have a cow ranch and all the fripperies of civilization, too. Not very well. I—I guess I am longing for the flesh-pots of Egypt. Perhaps poor dad did, too. Well, I’ll give them a whirl. I’ll go East——
“Why, where’s that fellow’s fire?”
She was descending the trail into the pall of dusk that had now spread over the valley. Far away she caught a glimmer of light—a lantern on the porch at the ranch-house. But right below here where she wished to see a light, there was not a spark.
“I hope nothing’s happened to him,” she mused. “I don’t believe he is one of us; if he had been he wouldn’t have raced a pony so close to the edge of the bluff.”
She began to “co-ee! co-ee!” as the ponies clattered down the remainder of the pathway. And finally there came an answering shout. Then a little glimmer of light flashed up—again and yet again.