The express from the East would be due in an hour.
Jack and Jim paced restlessly up and down the station platform, with their arms locked. Jim looking even more wretched and unhappy than Jack. He wondered how in the world he was to treat the old lady cousin when she came out to them, and whether she would shut off from caring for his adored ranch girls.
Jim had not the remotest idea of Miss Ruth Drew's age. The name had an elderly sound to it and Jack had described her as an old maid; consequently Jim's mental picture showed a small, grey-haired woman with corkscrew curls, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty, with thin lips and a penetrating eye. She would probably reduce him to powder with a single glance, but he meant to be as polite to her as he humanly could and to speak to her only when it was absolutely necessary.
"Jim," Jack suggested finally, "you have sighed like a human bellows three times in the past five minutes. If you meet Cousin Ruth with that expression, she'll think we are sorry she has come. Please go over into the town and buy yourself some tobacco or something to cheer you. I'll get on Tricks and ride up and down near the track for a while, and then we will both be in a better humor when the train finally does get in."
Miss Ruth Drew sighed. She was sitting in the Pullman car with her eyes closed and an expression of supreme fatigue on her sallow but not unattractive face.
It seemed to her that she had been traveling ever since she could remember. Were there people in the world idiotic enough to think there was beauty in the western prairies? For days she had looked out on bare stretches of endless brown plains rising and falling in one monotonous chain. The sand was in her eyes, in her ears, in her mouth; worst of all, it had piled up in a great mass of homesickness on her heart.
How could she have turned her back on dear New England villages, with their sleepy, green and white homesteads and trim gardens, for this vast desert? "Of course, she was doing her duty in coming to look after four motherless girls," Ruth remembered, with a pang, but her duty at the present moment did not appear cheerful.
When the conductor announced that the next station was hers, Ruth sat up and arranged her hat and veil neatly. She adjusted her glasses on her thin nose and put back the single lock of hair that had strayed from its place. Her heart began to flutter a little faster. Was she actually arriving in the neighborhood of Rainbow Ranch? It didn't seem possible!
If you can imagine a very prim, grey mouse kind of girl, who looked a good deal older than she was, with ash brown hair and eyes and a neat tailor-made suit to match, you will get a very good impression of Miss Ruth Drew. Her figure was very good and her mouth might have been pretty, except that it looked as though she disapproved of a great many things, and that is never becoming. But she was tired and homesick and it was not a fair time to judge her.
It would be another fifteen minutes before she would get into Wolfville, and Ruth closed her eyes again. There was nothing to see out of her window that was in the least interesting and she preferred to think about the ranch girls. She wondered if they would be very hard to get on with, if they were very wild and reckless. It made her shudder: the idea of her cousin's children growing up with only a common cowboy for their friend and adviser.