The trip to Laramie was uneventful, and though the ranch girls slept three in a bed, and talked till almost morning that they might enjoy to the full the novelty of the experience, their first night at Mrs. Peterson's boarding house was equally without excitement.
By eight o'clock the following morning the girls set out on their first regular shopping expedition, and by four in the afternoon Jean sank dejectedly down on a stool in a grocery store. "Girls," she declared wearily, "we have shopped all day and shopped all night and shopped again until broad daylight. At least, I feel as if we had, and if you don't take me somewhere to rest I shall surely die." But the girls had scrimped and saved pennies all day in order to buy the sleeping bags for Ruth and Freida, and would not give up until they were purchased.
Poor Jean was forcibly dragged from her resting place by Olive and Jack, and the three girls set out down the street again, gazing in all the shop windows. "For mercy's sake, what kind of a store would keep a sleeping bag, Olive?" Jean inquired mournfully, leaning heavily upon Jack, who walked next her. "I have seen a punching bag in Jim's room at the rancho, and I have heard somewhere of carpet-bags, but I have no more idea of what a sleeping bag is like than the old man in the moon."
"Well, I don't know exactly either, Jean," Olive confessed, walking a little in advance of her friends, with her eyes on the ground. Her frightened "Oh!" and stumble against Jack brought the entire party to a standstill. A young man had been marching along the street toward them in an entirely abstracted state of mind and had run into Olive.
"I beg your pardon," he stammered apologetically. "I am not a native of this place and——"
Jack's eyes flashed with indignation and Olive flushed, with the soft color that was peculiar to her rising in delicate waves from her throat to her forehead, but mischievous Jean giggled. "Is it the custom to bump into people in the place you do come from?" she inquired innocently. "Because, crude as we are, it isn't the custom here."
Jack frowned at Jean's frivolity, indicating very plainly that Miss Bruce was not to enter into a conversation with a stranger, but she need not have worried, because the young man was not paying the least attention either to her or Jean. He was staring at Olive, not rudely, but with a curious, questioning gaze that made her drop her dark eyes until her long, straight lashes touched her cheeks.
"I hope I didn't hurt you," the young fellow protested awkwardly. Olive shook her head without glancing up, but the other two girls got a good look at him. He was almost as dark as Olive herself, although he had none of her foreign appearance, and was big and broad-shouldered, and seemed to be an eastern college fellow, twenty or twenty-one years old.
Jack engineered her party into a near-by department store, leaving the young man still staring after them with his hat in his hand.
"Great Scott, what a boor I was!" he exclaimed to himself a second later. "But I never had anything strike me so all of a heap as that girl's face in my life." And he strode away looking tremendously puzzled.