Only the day before the three ranch girls, accompanied by their chaperon, Ruth Drew, had made their initial appearance at Primrose Hall to begin their first year of fashionable boarding school life. But once the girls had been introduced to the principal of the school, Miss Katherine Winthrop, and Ruth had had a talk with her and seen the rooms assigned to the ranch girls, she had been compelled to take the next train back to New York, a journey of twenty or more miles, for Jack had been left behind in a hospital and must not be long alone. There she lay awaiting the verdict of the New York surgeons to know whether after her accident at the Yellowstone Park the summer before she might ever expect to walk again. The chief reason of the trip from the Rainbow Lodge in Wyoming to New York City had not been to give the ranch girls an eastern education and to fit them for a more cosmopolitan life now that so great wealth was being brought forth from the Rainbow Mine, but to find out what could be done for Jack.
Now even while Olive was thinking of her best loved friend, a faint, chirrupy noise and a flutter of unfolding wings sounded along the outside walls of Primrose Hall. Lifting her head with a smothered cry of delight, the girl spied a thin streak of light shining across the floor. A moment later, back in her own room with the door closed behind her and her own window open, her eyes were soon eagerly scanning the unfamiliar scene before her. Dawn had come at last!
The young girl drew a deep breath. In the excitement of her arrival at school the day before, in the first meeting with so many strangers, Olive had not spared time to see or think of the surroundings of Primrose Hall, but now she could examine the landscape thoroughly. Set in the midst of one of the most beautiful valleys along the Hudson River, this morning the fields near by were bright with blue asters, with goldenrod and the white mist-like blossoms of the immortelles; the low hills in the background were brown and red and gold with the October foliage of the trees. Beyond the fields the Hudson River ran broader and deeper than any stream of water a ranch girl had ever seen, and across from it the New Jersey palisades rose like hoary battlements now veiled in a light fog. Surely no sunrise on the river Rhine could be more wonderful than this sunrise over the Hudson River; and yet, as Olive Ralston gazed out upon it, its beauty did not dry her tears nor ease the lump in her throat, for what she wanted was home, the old familiar sights and sounds, the smell of the Rainbow Ranch—and nothing could be more unlike the low level sweep of their Wyoming prairie than this Hudson River country.
“Heimweh,” the Germans call this yearning for home, which we have named homesickness, but a better word theirs than ours, for surely this longing for home, for accustomed people and things in the midst of strange surroundings, may be a woe very deep and intense.
From the first hour of the ranch girls’ planning to come east to boarding school Olive Ralston had believed that the change from the simple life of the ranch to the more conventional school atmosphere would be more difficult for her than for either Jean or Frieda. True, she had not spoken of it, but Olilie, whom the ranch girls had renamed Olive, had never forgotten that she was in reality an unknown girl, with no name of her own and no people, and except for her friends’ generosity might still be living in the dirty hut in the Indian village with old Laska.
After talking it over with Ruth and Jack, they had all decided that it would be wiser not to mention Olive’s strange history to her new schoolmates. Now in the midst of her attack of homesickness, Olive wondered if the girls would not at once guess her mixed blood from her odd appearance, or else might she not some day betray her ignorance of the little manners and customs that reveal a good family and good breeding? In the two happy years spent at the Rainbow Ranch she had learned all she could from Ruth and the other three girls, but were there not fourteen other ignorant years back of those two years?
A charming picture Olive made standing at the open window with her quaint foreign face framed in the high colonial casement. But now, finding both the autumn air and her own thoughts chilling, she turned away and began slowly to dress. She was still blue and yet at the same time ashamed of herself, for had she not been indulging in the most foolish habit in the world, feeling sorry for herself? Here at Primrose Hall did she not hope to find the beginning of her big opportunity and have not big opportunities the world over the fashion of starting out with difficulties to be overcome? When Olive’s education was completed she had made up her mind to return once more to the Indian village where she had spent her childhood and there devote her life to the teaching of the Indian children. Though Jack and Frieda Ralston, since the discovery of the gold mine near Rainbow Creek, were probably very wealthy and though it was but right that Jean Bruce as their first cousin should share their fortune with them, Olive did not feel that she wished to be always dependent even on the best of friends.
Having slowly dressed with these thoughts in her mind, the young girl’s mood was afterwards a little more cheerful, and yet she could not make up her mind how best to amuse herself until the half-past seven o’clock bell should ring for breakfast. She might write Jack, of course, but there was no news to tell her at present, and stirring about in her room hanging pictures or arranging ornaments would surely awaken Jean and Frieda, who were still slumbering like the seven famous sleepers. No other girl shared Olive’s room because Ruth and the four ranch girls hoped that after a few weeks’ treatment in the New York hospital Jack would then be able to join the others at school.
Idling about and uncertain what to do, Olive came again to her open window and there stood listening to the “chug, chug, chug” of a big steamer out on the river and then to the shriek of an engine along its banks. Suddenly her face brightened.
“What a goose I am to be moping indoors!” she exclaimed aloud, “I think I will try Jack’s old remedy for a bad temper and go and have a good walk to myself before breakfast.”