Best of all, Rhoda liked to sit in Number Seven, Corridor Four, with Nan and Bess and others who might drop in and talk. If Rhoda herself talked, it was almost always about Rose Ranch. Sometimes about her mother, though she did not often speak of Mrs. Hammond's affliction.
To Nan, Rhoda had once said her mother had been a school-teacher who had gone from the East to the vicinity of the Mexican Border to conduct a school. Her eyes had been failing then; and the change of climate, of course, had not benefited her vision.
"Daddy Hammond," said Rhoda, speaking lovingly of her father, "is twenty years older than mother; but he was so kind and good to her, I guess, when she had to give up teaching, that she just fell in love with him. You know, I fell in love with him myself when I got big enough to know how good he was," and she laughed softly.
"You see, he knows me a whole lot better than mother does, for she has never seen me."
"Doesn't that sound funny!" gasped Nan. "Fancy! Your own mother never having seen you, Rhoda!"
"Only with her fingers," sighed Rhoda. "But mother says she has ten eyes to our two apiece. She 'sees' with the end of every finger and thumb. It is quite wonderful how much she learns about things by just touching them. And she rides as bravely as though she had her sight."
"My!" exclaimed Nan, with a little shudder. "It would scare me to see her."
"Oh, she rides a horse that is perfectly safe. Old Cherrypie seems to know she can't see and that he has to be extremely careful of her."
It was when Rhoda told more about the ranch, however—of the bands of half-wild horses, the herds of shorthorns, the scenery all about her home, the acres upon acres of wild roses in the near-by canyons, the rugged gulches and patches of desert on which nothing but cacti grew, the high mesas that were Nature's garden-spots—that Nan Sherwood was stirred most deeply.
"I think it must be a most lovely place, that Rose Ranch!" she cried on one occasion.