“And please,” Fanny began, “will your messenger take a note for me to Miss Rayborne. Do you know her?”
“Know Inez! I rather think we do,” the landlord replied. “Everybody knows Inez; the wild rose of the valley, we call her. I knew her mother, too,—a pretty little woman,—went off like a flash. Heart trouble they said. The whole neighborhood turned out to her funeral, visitors and all. The hill was black with ’em. John,—that is Mr. Rayborne,—has never been quite the same man since.”
He was inclined to be very talkative, but Fanny was in a hurry to write to Inez and finally left him in the middle of a sentence. When the messenger returned he brought a note for her from Inez, who wrote: “I am delighted to know you are in the valley, and sorry father is not here to guide you on the trails. Perhaps he will come before you leave. I am so lonely with only Nero for company. I thought of you when that robbery occurred and was glad you were not on the road. I have something to tell you about it when I see you. Father came home that night, but Tom has not been here since. I expect him in a few days. Write me when to come for you. Inez.”
Mrs. Prescott was a good deal disappointed that she could not have Mr. Rayborne for a guide, and because she could not she did not go on a single trail. As she cared little for scenery and there were but few people at the hotel of what she called her set she was ready to leave at any time.
“Not till I have made my visit to Inez,” Fanny said, and after they had been at the hotel a week it was arranged that she should spend a day with her friend and be taken up the next morning by the stage which was to pass the cottage and leave the valley by way of Inspiration Point.
CHAPTER VI.
AT PROSPECT COTTAGE.
It was one of the loveliest of all the summer days in the Yosemite when Inez drove up to the hotel in a buggy which had seen a good deal of service and was not like anything Fanny had ever ridden in. But she did not care. She was delighted to see Inez, who appeared at her best on her native heath and received the warm greetings of those who knew her with the grace and dignity of a young queen. Mrs. Prescott was invited to accompany Fanny, but declined, and the two girls set off alone for Prospect Cottage. Inez was very happy.
“I am so glad to have this little bit of you,” she said, giving a squeeze to Fanny’s hand and then dropping it again. “And we will have such a good time to-day all by ourselves. I haven’t much to do. I was up at four o’clock to get my work done, baking and all, and have made a lot of things I think you will like. One is huckleberry pie.”
Fanny had never seen one, but was sure she should like it, and anything else Inez chose to give her.
“It won’t be like the hotel, nor your New York home,” Inez said, “I do everything myself and oh, isn’t it lovely here among the mountains with this pure air which makes me feel so strong as if I should live forever.”