“Father says he’s going to clean them out for good this time—they’ve cost us thousands of dollars in the past three years. Oh, you can’t understand what a low-down bunch of scrubs those rustlers are!”
“Maybe not,” Frances said, giving it up with a little sigh.
“I’ve got to go back to mother this morning, right away, but that little fuss up the river doesn’t need to keep you from going home with me as you promised, Frances.”
“I shouldn’t mind, but I don’t believe father will want me to go out into your wild country. I really want to go—I want to look around in your garden for a glove that I lost there on the night of the ball.”
“Oh, why didn’t you tell me?” Nola’s face seemed to clear of something, a shadow of perplexity, it seemed, that Frances had seen in it from time to time since her coming there. She looked frankly and reprovingly at Frances.
“I didn’t miss it until I was leaving, and I didn’t want to delay the rest of them to look for it. It really doesn’t matter.”
“It’s a wonder mother didn’t find it; she’s always prowling around among the flowers,” said Nola, her eyes fixed in abstracted stare, as if she was thinking deeply of something apart from what her words expressed.
What she was considering, indeed, was that her little scheme of alienation had failed. Major King, she told herself, had not returned the glove to Frances. For all his lightness in the matter, perhaps he cared deeply for Frances, and would be more difficult to wean than she had thought. It would have to be begun anew. That Frances was ignorant of her treachery, as she now fully believed, made it easier. So the little lady told herself, surveying the situation in her quick brain, and deceiving herself completely, as many a shrewder schemer than she, when self-entangled in the devious plottings of this life.
On the other hand there sat Frances across the table—they were breakfasting alone, Mrs. Landcraft being a strict militarist, and always serving the colonel’s coffee with her own hand—throwing up a framework of speculation on her own account. Perhaps if she should go to the ranch she might be in some manner instrumental in bringing this needless warfare to a pacific end. Intervention at the right time, in the proper quarter, might accomplish more 146 than strife and bloodshed could bring out of that one-sided war.