The Ranch Girls and Their Heart's Desire

by Margaret Vandercook

Certainly Jack had not been able to imagine the degree of excitement and controversy aroused by the simple fact that a comparatively unknown young woman had been nominated for membership in the Congress of the United States. If it were in her power and the power of the men and women voters supporting her she intended to be elected. Nevertheless, Jack had not understood either the amount or the character of work that would be required of her personally to accomplish this result.

In the past electioneering had appeared as a fairly amusing pastime. Living in England, she had often seen Englishwomen engaged in it. They had not at that time been electioneering for themselves, but for their husbands or brothers, fathers or friends. Their method had been to drive about from one village to another talking to the village people and asking their support, or else stopping to argue or plead with the passers-by along the country roads. At big political meetings, which men and women attended together, speeches were made and questions put to the speakers. In the past Jack had frequently accompanied her husband to these gatherings, where she had been greatly entertained. Then she had been a spectator with no personal rôle to fill. Now the situation was wholly changed.

A curious fact, but in the United States, supposedly less conservative a country than England, the nomination of a woman for a high public office was creating a greater storm of protest and of indignation than had been aroused in England by the same act. True, Jack was not the first woman chosen for this same office in a western state. But the fact that the number should increase, many persons in Wyoming declared to be alarming.

Now when Jack went to political gatherings, she found herself not only a center of attention and of controversy, but more often than not was compelled to make a speech. Never regarding herself as a good speaker, and always frightened, she never learned to enjoy the opportunity.

Moreover, as Frieda had warned her and as she had not fully appreciated, there was hardly an issue of the daily papers in which some information or misinformation concerning her personal history did not appear.

At first Jack refused to allow her photograph to be reproduced, insisting that people might wish to know what she thought and why she thought it, but certainly could have no interest in her appearance. Yet this was so absurd a position, as her friends and acquaintances agreed, that Jack was obliged to surrender. Afterwards she was forced to see photographs of herself, or at least what claimed to be photographs, in papers and magazines throughout the entire country, so that if ever she had possessed any personal vanity Jack considered that it would have been hopelessly lost. Now and then she used to carry the newspapers containing her pictures to members of her family, asking them if it were really true that she looked as the pictures indicated? Sometimes the family cruelly said the likeness was perfect and at others they were as annoyed as Jack herself.

But she really did not enjoy the political meetings as she had expected, or the notoriety, or the personal enmity oftentimes directed toward her.

Since the afternoon of her meeting with Peter Stevens by the Rainbow creek he had declined to do more than bow to her in public. The reason Jack did not fully comprehend. She had not intended to be frivolous or ungrateful concerning his proposal. She had not believed for a moment that he really cared for her. Peter was a confirmed old bachelor and always freely expressed himself as disapproving of her from the afternoon of their first re-meeting after many years. At the time she had been engaged in an escapade which had annoyed Peter Stevens almost as much as her present one.

Peter had not resigned as her political opponent. The only remark he had made to Jack which was at all friendly was to say to her one day when they were passing each other on the street in Laramie, that the greatest kindness he could pay her was to defeat her in the present election.

Yet notwithstanding all the worry and the work, Jack did not agree with him. She did not intend to be defeated. She meant to win, else why the struggle and the fatigue and, more often than she confessed, the heartache?