“So tell Will to tell Tom Benson,” Betty wrote, “that Miss O’Toole isn’t a handful. I’m almost afraid she’ll turn out a dig or a prig or something of that kind, she seems so anxious to do good work. But all the nicest girls like her, so I guess I needn’t worry about her not having a good time.”
The day before Mountain Day the history condition was removed from Miss Montana Marie O’Toole’s record of scholarship, and Betty congratulated her freshman warmly and went off to spend the holiday in Babe’s wonderful house on the Hudson feeling as care-free and irresponsible as if she were a freshman herself.
Georgia’s riding-party was to take horse—this knowing expression was also Georgia’s—at the Belden at nine o’clock sharp. At a quarter before the hour Montana Marie, the only off-campus member, arrived at the rendezvous. Her habit was brown corduroy, her hat a flapping sombrero, her lovely hair was coiled in a soft knot in her neck. It looked as if it would fall down before she had mounted, but not a lock was out of place that night, when Montana Marie rode the dripping, drooping Imp into his stable-yard half an hour ahead of the others, and sweetly asked the liveryman if he would mind giving her a real horse the next time she hired one.
“Because if you can’t, I guess I’ll ask my father to send one of his East to me,” she explained, reaching down to unbuckle her big saddle before she slipped easily out of it. “I don’t mean to compare this horse with old Polly or that silly roan,” she added politely. “But I do like a little real excitement when I go for a ride.”
If Montana Marie had found her Mountain Day tame, the rest of the party had not lacked for “real excitement” in generous measure. Montana Marie had ridden decorously enough between Georgia and Susanna Hart out of the town and up Sugar Hill to White Birch Lane. At the turn into the woods she had produced a magenta silk bandana and knotted it coquettishly at the back of her neck.
“Now I’m a real cow-girl,” she explained. “Ma can educate me all she wants, but she can’t educate the West out of me. She’d never have sent me this wild and woolly outfit. She’d have written her New York tailor to come right up here and fit me out. But I like these things best, so I just telegraphed to Dad, and he did as I said. He always does. Now why don’t we race up the next hill?” Montana Marie started off the Imp with a yodeling shout and a wildly waving arm that made even sedate old Polly take a keen interest in following. Susanna Hart’s horse reared, and Fluffy Dutton shrieked hysterically. Then the skittish roan Gold Heels bolted down a side-path with the groom from the stable, and before he could get back to his charges’ assistance, a Belden House sophomore, who was always unlucky with horses, carelessly fell off the Captain’s back. True to his training the big horse stopped dead in his tracks, and Montana Marie, having seen the accident over her shoulder, rushed the Imp back, dismounted, and assisted the unlucky sophomore to her feet with the sincerest apologies for having “made any one any trouble.”
“If you’d had a saddle like mine you wouldn’t have fallen off,” she ended regretfully. “You can’t enjoy a real wild ride on those little flat seats.”
“We’re not out for a wild ride,” Georgia rebuked her sternly. “If you want to race and make a general disturbance you must ride way ahead alone. But if I were you——”
“Oh, I shouldn’t think of stirring up anything more,” declared Montana Marie demurely, pulling the Imp into a decorous park-trot beside the unlucky sophomore, who was luckily not a bit the worse for her tumble. “I’m only a little freshman, and I want to learn the college ways in riding as in other things.” She secreted her magenta neckerchief again, and “rode like a perfect lady,” to quote from Georgia’s account of the matter, all the way to Top Notch Falls, and all the way back against the sunset, until——
Little Eugenia Ford’s horrified description of what happened next was perhaps the most vivid of those furnished to eager inquirers.