“You must have been very young when you came out here—to seek your fortune, I suppose?” pursued Tavia.
“Tuh git cl’ar of my old man’s strap,” chuckled Lance. “He and I didn’t hitch wuth a cent. But he was a good old feller at that.”
“And you never went back?” asked Dorothy, becoming interested herself.
“Never got the time for it. Yuh see, Miss, it does seem as though a man never gets caught up with his work. That’s so!”
“I should think you’d be homesick—want to see your folks,” the insistent Tavia said.
“Jerusha Juniper! My fam’bly was right glad to git shet of me, I reckon; all but my mother. But I reckon she’s too old to travel out yere, an’, as I say, it’s hard for a man like me to git time and money both together for a vacation. I ’low I’d like to see the ol’ lady right well,” he concluded.
Scarcely had he spoken when a rattle of ponies’ hoofs behind them startled their own spirited mounts. The ponies tried to “break” and run, too, as they heard the rat-tat-tat of the hoofs approaching.
“Whoa, thar, Gaby!” commanded Lance. “Ain’t yuh got a bit o’ sense?” Then to Dorothy and Tavia he shouted: “Pull hard on them bits, ladies. They got mouths like sheet-iron—an’ that ain’t no dream!”
The girls pulled their ponies in, as instructed. As they did so two other ponies appeared beside them in the trail. The girls from the East could identify the riders as a man and a girl.
“Jerusha Juniper!” yelled Lance, stopping Gaby from bolting with some difficulty and swinging her across the path of the eastern girls’ mounts, so as to halt them. “Jerusha Juniper! what yuh tryin’ tuh do? Comin’ cavortin’ along the trail this a-way?”