Helena advanced with an air of authority:
“Milliken, this is absurd! Please get back your common sense. Remember we are guests and have no right to object to anything.”
The chaperon bridled, but kept silence, till Mr. Ford explained:
“Thirteen doesn’t mean the whole party. There’ll be three drivers, besides. Possibly more men picked up along the road. Moreover, thirteen is my ‘lucky number,’ if ‘luck’ is anything. Well, Mrs. Ford, have you arranged the company?”
“No, I cannot. I know them so slightly, as yet, and the best way is to draw lots. How many will the first buckboard carry?”
“Eight, all told. A dozen, if need be. Well, time’s precious! Here’s a lot of matches. The whole ones go in number one, the next lengths in wagon two, and the little ones in the last. See, I’ve snapped them off, and Miss Milliken, as head of the expedition, please draw first!”
The lady flushed and drew. Her lot was in the last and smallest buckboard which would carry but two more beside the driver; and it fell out that her companions would be Alfaretta and Monty Stark. The driver was known as Silent Pete, and it certainly was an odd combination which had resulted from the first “drawing.”
To the leading wagon the “lots” assigned the three Fords and Jedediah, their colored “boy,” with Molly, Helena and Herbert—their driver, Lem Hunt, the most talkative man at San Leon but, also, the crack whip of the ranch.
The driver of the second team was “Tenderfoot Sorrel,” so called because of his red hair and his comparatively recent arrival from the east. He was less familiar with the country than the other two teamsters and had been assigned to the place in the middle of the little cavalcade, so that “he can’t lose hisself afore or ahind, ary way,” as Lemuel explained it.
Naturally, everybody was disappointed at the result of the lots, Mrs. Ford protesting that it was inhospitable to put all her family in one vehicle, and that the best, but that “a Ford should have been in each.”