CHAPTER III
DEAN WOLCOTT sent a dignified and satisfying design for the bridge, and Ginger had it executed in rough stone brought down from the hills. When it was finished it was a sincere and lasting thing, and she never went over it too quickly to rest her eyes on the plate set into the rock which bore Aleck’s name and the dates of his birth and death, and, beneath—“From his sister and his friend.”
After a little time the letters had begun to come; long, fluent, vivid letters; realistic stories of the life he and Aleck had lived together. Ginger read them with laughter and with tears, and wrote short, shy answers on cheap stationery. Ordinarily, she would have used the official ranch paper, with the name at the top—“Dos Pozos, Virginia Valdés McVeagh, sole proprietor,” and a neat cut of a long-horned steer at one side and a bucking horse at the other—but she had a dim sense of what the other Mr. Wolcott’s expression would be when he saw. Therefore, she used tablet paper and envelopes which did not quite match; sometimes she used the regular stamped envelopes. Her writing was unformed and uninteresting; she loathed composing letters and they sounded and looked as if she did. She had never cared about getting them, save Aleck’s. The Los Angeles and San Francisco relatives wrote chiefly to ask if they might come and bring the children for a little visit with dear Virginia, and grateful bread-and-butter notes after they had gone home. She liked getting letters now, however; she found Dean Wolcott’s many-sheeted ones the most enthralling reading she had ever done. He was steadily gaining weight and strength and poise again, he told her. In the early summer he began to talk about coming, and in July he announced that he would arrive at San Luis Obispo on the twenty-sixth.
Ginger sat a long time with this letter in her hand. Then she went to the telephone and called up her favorite aunt by long distance, in San Francisco, and asked if she might come up to her next day and do some shopping.
Her Aunt Fan was cordial and kind. She was really very fond of Ginger; fond enough to like having her with her for little visits but not quite fond enough to visit her on the ranch. Aunt Fan’s idea of the country was a tiresome geographical division through which you passed on your way to a city. Besides, it was a place of beguiling cream and broilers and hot breadstuffs; a place where one invariably and weakly ate too much.
Now she said that Ginger was to come at once and they’d have a wonderful time together; she’d been meaning to send for her, anyway.
Ginger took the day train from San Luis Obispo and reached San Francisco in the evening; this, she knew, was an easier time for her aunt to meet her than in the morning. Aunt Fan had a taxi waiting and bundled her delightedly into it.
“Dearie, are you simply dead? I told the doctor we might join him at Tait’s for a little while, to hear the music and— But I don’t know—” she broke off, looking at her niece’s costume, and shaking her head. “My dear child, where did you get that dress?”
It was a one-piece thing in blue serge of ordinary quality, listlessly trimmed with black braid, and the neck line was just too low and a good deal too high.
“In San Luis,” said Ginger, meekly. She was always meek with her aunt on the subject of clothes. “It was only twenty-two fifty.”