“And will he write stories while we’re there and will they be in the paper?” Nan was reluctant to let the conversation about the young reporter drop.
“Never can tell anything about people like him,” Adair MacKenzie shook his head as though he would be the last person in the world to predict anything about reporters. Could he have looked into the future he would have shaken it even more violently, for in the next few weeks Walker Jamieson, with the help of Nan and the Lakeview Hall crowd, was to uncover in Mexico one of the biggest stories of the year.
CHAPTER III
ADAIR MACKENZIE SPEAKS UP
It all started in Laredo, Texas, just after Nan and her guests had been met by Adair MacKenzie, Alice, and that amazing young newspaper man, Walker Jamieson.
“Got everything?” Adair MacKenzie asked gruffly when the bevy of pretty young girls, all in their early teens, had stepped, one after the other, from the streamlined train that had brought them from St. Louis. They had met in that city, all except Rhoda whose home, as those who have read “Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch” will remember, was in the South. She, therefore, had joined the party at beautiful San Antonio. From there on, the girls had all been together.
“I-I-I guess so,” Nan answered her eccentric old cousin slowly as she looked about first at her friends and then at the suitcases and bags that the porters were setting on the station platform beside them.
“Looks it.” Adair MacKenzie agreed laconically. “Got almost as many bags as Alice here and I thought that she carried more junk than any other woman alive. So these are the girls. H-m-m.” He looked at the Lakeview Hall group in much the same manner that he had appraised Bess just three weeks before.
“Let’s see,” he began, and Nan’s eyes twinkled as she realized that he was not going to keep his conclusions to himself any more than he had before. “You’re Laura,” he said positively, picking the red-headed girl out of the crowd as though he had studied a photograph of her until he couldn’t possibly mistake her features.