"The stage-driver—and he's lying near the old Mission, with his leg broken. The horses shied in the storm and overturned the stage, and I was the only passenger, and I crept out of it, and the driver couldn't move any more, and told me to unhitch the horses and come this way for help, and—oh! do come now!" She ended her harangue, delivered with flying breath and little attention to rhetoric or inter-punctuation.
"And you came those nine miles all alone, gal?" asked the old man.
"Oh, I think I must have come a hundred miles," she replied, with a wild look at the faces on the porch and in the open doorway; "and it is so cold!" She drew the dripping garments closer about her, while father and son consulted together, with their eyes only, for a brief moment. Then the old man said she must be taken in, and they must get the wagon ready, and waken Pedro and Martin.
Without a word Frank gave a lantern to Johnny, lifted the girl from the horse and carried her into the room, brushing the drenched hair back from her face, when he sat her down, as he would have done a child's. But she pleaded excitedly, "Indeed I cannot stay—let me go back, and you can follow."
"So you shall go back, my gal," said Mr. Sutton, "as soon as the wagon is ready. See how she's shivering, mother; get her some hot tea, and give her your fur sack—for she'll go back with us or die."
"My fur sack?" repeated the old lady, incredulously; "my best sack—out in this rain!"
"Best sack be ——," he shouted, angrily; "I'll throw it in the fire in a minute!" And the best sack quickly made its appearance, in spite of the threat of speedy cremation.
The tea was brought by Johnny, hastily drank, and then the girl repeated her wish to move on. Frank's own cloak was thrown over "the best fur sack"—not, I fear, so much from a desire to save this garment as from the wish to keep the shrinking form in it from shivering so painfully.
It was New-Year's day—though the light had not yet dawned before the sufferer was comfortably lodged at the Yedral Ranch, and Hetty, as well as the Sutton family, slept later into the morning than usual. The sun had risen as serenely cloudless as though no storm had passed through the land but yesternight; and Father Sutton, thinking he was the first one up, was surprised to encounter Hetty with Johnny, her new-found cavalier. He hailed her in his unceremonious fashion: "I'm glad to see you up bright and early, gal—make a good farmer's wife some day. Did you come down this way to live on a ranch?"