“I’m ever expectin’ to have this train crash right into another,” said the old lady. “And I want to be ready for it.”
“Do you think you’ll be any more ready sitting up than you will be lying down, dear Mrs. Petterby?” Dorothy asked.
“Seems as if I would,” returned the old lady. “I tell you what! I sha’n’t come out to see my baby no more. I shall tell him that. And I dread the going back.”
“Perhaps you will like Colorado so much that you will want to stay.”
“What? And never see Rand’s Falls, Massachusetts, again?” exclaimed Mrs. Petterby, in horror. “I—guess—not.”
“I hope we shall see her baby when she meets him,” Doro said, tenderly. “And I hope he’s all she expects him to be.”
“A cow-puncher at forty-five a month,” sniffed Nat.
“Oh! but cowboys are awfully romantic,” said Tavia, quickly.
“Look out for her, Dot,” begged Ned. “You’ll have to blindfold her to get her past any cow-punching outfit we may meet. I can see that.”
On the following day when the train crossed the first ranges and they beheld little bunches of five hundred or a thousand head of “longhorns,” Tavia went into raptures.