In her next big adventure, recounted in “Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch or The Old Mexican’s Treasure”, our heroine and her friends meet Rhoda Hammond a pretty, young westerner at school and accompany her to her home, a big ranch, for their vacation. What a vacation that is! A raid! An antelope hunt! A stampede! Lost treasure! And a pretty Mexican girl, Juanita! This is a volume brimming over with new experiences.
From Rose Ranch, Nan and her chums return once more to Lakeview to work and study. They do well, so when Mrs. Mason invites them all to accompany Grace and Walter to Florida, they have no trouble getting permission from home. In “Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach or Strange Adventures among the Orange Groves” they all have a part in solving poor old Mrs. Bagley’s troubles, and Walter has cause to admire again the boundlessness of Nan’s pluck.
She is as generous as she is plucky, and so the Saturday afternoon on which this chapter opens, Nan is down in Freeling, the village below Lakeview Hall, working away in Mrs. Bagley’s cottage.
“By the way, how is Mrs. Bagley?” Rhoda asked, in an effort to keep herself from watching the windows so constantly.
“Oh, she’s getting along all right, I think, since she got her money. But you know how Nan is. She’s always afraid something might happen. Why, I honestly believe that she still fears that those horrid men who tried to get the deed to Mrs. Bagley’s property away from her might turn up again after they get out of prison.”
“Why, Bess Harley, I don’t believe she thinks any such thing!” Rhoda exclaimed. “You are the one. You know you have been frightened half to death of the dark ever since Nan had those awful scares down in Palm Beach!”
Bess looked guilty. “Well, maybe it is me,” she conceded ungrammatically. “But I do worry, at times about Nan. Sometime something’s going to happen to her—”
“Going to happen to whom?” queried a new voice and Laura Polk, red-headed and freckle faced and homely but withal very likable, bounded into the room.
In the confusion that followed the question went unanswered. Grace and Amelia Boggs were right at Laura’s heels. “Don’t ask me why we are late,” Laura grinned impishly, “Or I might tell.”
“That is just what I am afraid of,” Bess replied.