“Do my ears hear right?” Babs said dramatically, in a low undertone, while Virginia was gladly accepting the proffered treat. “Barbara,” the western girl called, “you and Megsy come here. I want Mrs. Wells to meet the newest addition to the V. M. family and if we like, we may each have a glass of buttermilk.”
“Wall, now, Miss Barbara, you’ve come to stay on the desert for a spell, hev yo’?” the motherly woman asked as she smiled down at the petite Babs. Then she added, “Yo’ aren’t much bigger than a pint o’ honey, and I can easy tell by your sunny face that you’re most as sweet.”
Virginia took two of her sugar cookies over to the waiting Lucky who had spent most of the hour discussing desert topics with Mr. Wells.
Babs gazed at the lean, sinewy, sun-browned cow-boy with unconcealed interest, and when she was introduced, she extended her small gloved hand saying eagerly, “Oh, Mr. Lucky, you do look like Bill Hart, don’t you? He’s the cow-boy I’m best acquainted with, but he always has a gun sticking out of his hip pocket or somewhere. I don’t suppose that you carry a gun, do you?”
The cow-boy replied, with his good-natured drawl, that he usually “packed” along a couple or so, and to prove this statement, he produced two small guns. After a whispered hint from the fun-loving Margaret, Lucky threw an empty bottle high in the air and then, firing three times in rapid succession, he shattered the bottle, much to the delight of the newly arrived easterner.
Later, when Babs and Margaret were on the back seat of the “Rollabout” the former confided in a low voice, “I’m so glad to find that cow-boys are really like moving pictures. The girls in school said they knew I was going to be disappointed, but I’m not! Everything is just as I had expected, only heaps more so!”
Megsy reached out and took her friend’s hand. “You’ll love it here, Babsie,” she said, “and, too, you will love Virginia and Malcolm.
“I care for my guardian now just as though he were my own brother,” she added, trying to convince herself that her words were true. Then she leaned back, wondering where her guardian might be at that moment. Babs, too, was glad to be quiet that she might look about at the desert and mountains and rejoice that at last she was in the land of which she had so long dreamed.
Uncle Tex was waiting on the porch of the ranch house, and, if Babs wished to see a character who would have rejoiced the heart of a moving picture director, she surely did in the old man who had been a cow-boy since those early days when the desert teemed with exciting adventure.
“Miss Virginia, dearie,” he drawled, when he had carried in the luggage, “that thar Injun boy was here twict while yo’ all’s been gone.”