After dinner, as the girls went out on the verandah, they looked as though they had dressed to illustrate the name of the Rainbow Ranch. Weary of their traveling costumes they had put on their best summer muslins. Jack wore a violet organdie, Jean a red one, Olive was in pale yellow and Frieda in blue. Ruth never dressed in anything except white in the evenings. Jim went off to inquire for his mail, asking Ruth to wait for him. He was beginning to feel anxious to hear how things were going on at the ranch in his absence.
Peter Drummond stood a short distance off watching the little group. In coming west, he had made up his mind to have nothing to do with the people he ran across in the course of his travels. He saw too much of society in New York. Wealthy, of an old Knickerbocker family, with a home on the south side of Washington Square, life had given him everything he desired until three short months before. Then, when he was forty years old, for the first time in his life he had fallen in love, and the woman he cared for refused to marry him for what seemed to Peter a perfectly absurd reason. Therefore Mr. Drummond had determined forever to forswear the company of women. He was wondering if girls need be included in his decision, when Frieda solved the problem for him. Slipping away from the others she crossed the piazza. Peter suddenly discovered a pair of serious blue eyes gazing straight into his.
"If you want that stone back that you gave me this afternoon you may have it," she said. "You see I did cry a little bit when I fell, so perhaps it isn't exactly fair of me to keep it."
Mr. Drummond's face was quite as serious as Frieda's.
"I should hardly like to be called an 'Injun giver', would you?" he asked. "I don't know how girls feel about it, but when I was a boy if another fellow tried to get back a thing he had given away he was thought to be a pretty poor kind of person."
"Girls feel the same way," Frieda felt compelled to answer honestly.
"Then, for my sake, won't you please keep it?—and shaking hands makes it a bargain," Peter returned, extending his hand to clasp Frieda's. With her fingers still in his, he joined Ruth and the other girls, who had been trying not to laugh at the little scene.
Few eastern people, who have had no experience of life in the West, realize how much more unconventional and informal it is. Strangers meeting on a train talk as freely during the journey as though they had been formally introduced; friendliness is in the very atmosphere.
So, though Mr. Drummond was surprised at his own behavior, the ranch girls accepted his approach quite simply. First, he inquired of Ruth if Freida had really been hurt in her accident of the afternoon; ten minutes later he knew the names of the five girls, something of their history, had heard of Jim Colter and Ralph Merrit, and had given a brief account of himself in exchange, and for the first time in three months was actually enjoying himself.
The moon was just rising behind the dark circle of evergreen forests that bordered the Yellowstone Lake on three sides. Going out on the lawn, Olive was first to discover a dark figure with his hands in his pockets strolling quietly up and down. Perhaps because in the early days, when first brought home to Rainbow Ranch, she too had sometimes felt like an alien, now she was the only one of the caravaners to guess why Ralph had gone away from them wishing to be alone.