“If it seems best,” answered Gabriella Trent, tenderly stroking the fair cheek which seemed to have grown thinner and whiter during these last days before this parting.
“Next year? Why, my suz! You won’t much more than get there by that time, child alive. Three thousand miles is pretty consid’able of a step, seems if,” commented a voice which tried to be as cheerful as it was loud. But the words ended with a sob; that “three thousand miles,” which her own fancy had pictured quite breaking down the composure of Aunt Sally Benton, who had come with the rest of the Sobrante party to see Jessica Trent off for the Atlantic coast.
“Blow my stripes! If I ever knew there were so many folks all agog for travelin’! Uneasiest crowd ’t ever I see an’ noisiest. Well, captain, I hope they’ll get talked out ’fore sleeping time comes. If a body can sleep aboard a train of cars. Give me a good ship now—then you sing! Here, you fool! What you jostlin’ into me for? Think this whole platform belongs to you, just because you’re one the know-nothin’ towerists?” cried Samson, the mighty herder and one-time sailor, as an anxious “tourist” bumped an armful of luggage against him.
A big crowd it certainly was. Mainly a happy and eager one as well; its winter’s outing and sight-seeing over, and home-going at hand. A few, indeed, were sad. Those who had come to California seeking health for some beloved one and failing to find it; leaving the helpless one to take his last sleep in that sunny land, or to carry him eastward to die under native skies.
But amid all the bustle and haste the group from Sobrante was quiet and separate, only Aunt Sally and Samson now and then breaking out into exclamations to relieve their overwrought emotions, and thereby attracting more attention than Mrs. Trent quite enjoyed.
Indeed, she would have preferred to keep these last moments to herself and Jessica alone, but could not. All the “boys” who could possibly be spared from the ranch had come to Los Angeles to see their little “Captain” depart; although John Benton, the carpenter, emphatically declared:
“It’s all a downright mistake. As if our ‘Lady Jess’ didn’t know more now than any ‘finished’ boardin’ school miss could even guess at. Figures? Huh! What does she need more’n to add up a few wages now an’ again, and she’s a likely head at that already. Sent ’way off to New York after an education that she could get right here in Californy if her mother’d only think so. I don’t hold with no such unnatural separations, I don’t.”
As to the girl herself, it seemed to all these devoted henchmen that she had grown suddenly older, graver, more dignified, almost careworn. On that very last day of all, when she had made a detailed visit to, and inspection of, every part of the big ranch, she had done so with a quiet, critical interest quite contrary to her usual careless gayety.
“This paddock needs attention, ‘boy.’ You mustn’t let things go to ruin while I’m away nor expect mother to look after them,” she had warned one ranchman, in a tone he had never heard her use before. Also, she had gone over his books with the man who now “plucked” the ostriches, whose feathers were such an important factor in the family income, and finding his accounts slightly incorrect had reprimanded him sharply.
It had been altogether another Jessica during these last days; but all felt her altered manner was due wholly to the grief of her home-leaving; and John Benton was not the only one of the devoted “boys” who considered her departure a mistake.