NAN SHERWOOD
ON THE
MEXICAN BORDER

BY
ANNIE ROE CARR

THE WORLD SYNDICATE
PUBLISHING COMPANY
CLEVELAND NEW YORK

Published 1937 by
The World Syndicate Publishing Co.

Printed in the United States of America

TABLE OF CONTENTS

NAN SHERWOOD ON
the MEXICAN BORDER

CHAPTER I
UNEXPECTED GUESTS

Elizabeth Harley jumped down from her bicycle and dropped it noisily against the steps of the Sherwood back porch.

“Nan, oh, Nan!” she called.

There was no answer. She ran up the steps and into the cottage, letting the screen door bang behind her. A friend since primary school days of Nan Sherwood, she was like one of the family and always ran into the Sherwood home on Amity Street without the formality of ringing the doorbell or pausing to knock.

Now she was more than anxious to find Nan. She had something important to tell her, news, she felt, that had to be told right away.

Grace and Rhoda and Laura and Amelia, the whole crowd that had gone to England to see the king and queen crowned in Westminster the year before were coming to Tillbury by motor to spend a couple of weeks. Nan and Bess had invited them during the last busy days at school, but Bess had only just now received a telegram saying they could come. Oh, there was so much to do!

“Nan, Nan!” she called again. They would have to have parties and picnics and hikes. Bess’s mind was busy planning even as she wondered where in the world Nan was. They would have a steak fry down on the shore of the lake. They would stay late and after the moon was up, they would sit on the shore and sing and talk and build the fire up high and then when the embers were low, they would toast marshmallows and talk some more until it was time to go home. But where was Nan?

Bess called again. Again there was no answer, but Bess heard the sound of voices in the front of the house. She walked on through. Excited herself, she failed to notice the excitement in the voices that attracted her, so when she stuck her head through the door between the hall and the Sherwood front parlor, she was taken completely by surprise.

There were strangers in the room! Bess withdrew her head in embarrassment, but Nan had seen her and came towards her laughing.

“Oh, Bess,” she said, reaching her hand out toward her friend and pulling her into the room. “Come on in, you are just the person we wanted to see.”

“Yes, Bess, it’s so,” Mrs. Sherwood nodded her head reassuringly at her daughter’s young friend.

“Yes, lassie, come in,” one of the strangers, a white-haired old man spoke up. “Come over here by me, and let me look at you.” His bright blue eyes twinkled as he noted the blush on the girl’s cheek but he did nothing to relieve her embarrassment. On the contrary, he adjusted his glasses on his nose, and carefully looked her up and down.

“Hm-m-m, a pretty bit,” he smiled as he rendered his verdict and then reached over and drew Nan, who was standing close beside Bess, near to him. “So this is another of the lassies who went over to see the good king crowned,” he addressed his remark to Nan. “And I gather you are pretty good friends.”

Nan and Bess both nodded at this.

“And you go to the same school and you pay attention to your lessons and you mind your own business?” The old gentleman tried to look severe as he asked these questions.

“We try to, sir.” Bess found her voice at last.

“You obey your elders and you think you are going to spend your vacation here in Tillbury, a God-forsaken place, with a half dozen bright lassies like yourself?”

“Yes, sir. No, sir. Yes, sir.” Bess didn’t know what to answer. This strange old man was like no one she had ever met before. She wanted to protest that Tillbury was not a God-forsaken place, that she and Nan both liked it, but she didn’t quite dare. She wanted to speak up and tell him that vacation in Tillbury with all her friends would be fun, but she didn’t dare do that either. She didn’t quite know what to think of this white-haired gentleman who seemed so fond of Nan and was so outspoken. In her confusion, she was tongue-tied.

But he wasn’t. Each time that he opened his mouth, the words that came forth were more astonishing than they had been before. Bess found herself listening in amazement.

“Well, you’re not going to stay here in Tillbury for the summer,” he continued his discussion of Bess and Nan’s vacation. “I won’t have it. And your friends aren’t going to either. You’re all coming with me. England one summer, and Tillbury the next. Forsooth! I thought you all had more imagination than that. You, Nan, I’m disappointed in you.” His eyes twinkled merrily as he looked at his young cousin, for the stranger was Adair MacKenzie, first cousin to Mrs. Sherwood, and a wealthy Memphis, Tennessee, business man.

“Now, let’s see, when can we start?” He took out his watch as he spoke. “Hm-m-m. It will take a little time to pack,” he reflected. “Lassies are such fussy creatures. They have to have two or three dresses—”

“Two or three!” Nan exclaimed, “Why, cousin Adair, we have to have just dozens if we are going to stay away all summer.”

“Who said you were?” The old Scotchman roared and then threw back his head and laughed long and heartily at the young girl who seemed so self-possessed no matter what he said or did. Nan laughed with him and then, turning toward Bess, she introduced her eccentric old relative and his pretty daughter, Alice, a young lady about five years older than Nan who, up to this time, had said nothing, but had watched her father with amusement.

At the introduction, Adair MacKenzie bowed gracefully and, taking Bess’s hand lightly in his, kissed it quickly. “You’re a nice lassie,” he said then. “Now let’s all sit down and talk a while about this trip to Mexico.”

“To Mexico!” Bess was wide-eyed as the exclamation slipped off her tongue. “Are we going to Mexico?”

“Why, yes. That was all settled weeks ago,” MacKenzie knitted his brows as he looked at Bess. “Such a bright young lassie and yet she didn’t know that!”

“Don’t mind father,” Alice took Bess’s hand in hers. “He goes about planning all these things and never says anything to anyone until he has everything all ready. It used to wear me out, but now I think it is quite charming of him. Of course, it keeps everyone at home in a constant state of turmoil and it makes the housekeeper furious, but then we manage.”

“Manage!” the old man exploded again. “Manage! Why, you imp, you, you love it and you know you do. It’s the spice of life to you. Mexico, Europe, Alaska, South America, Egypt, why, the world’s a place to live in, not just to read about. India and China and Japan, these are places we haven’t been.”

“And daddy, we’re not going just yet.” Alice acted as though she wanted to forestall any possibility of their starting off the next day or the next hour for the Orient. “Remember, it’s Mexico we’re going to this summer. We’re going to live in that big hacienda that was dumped into your hands when you sued those clients of yours that were exporters in Mexico City. Oh, daddy, remember, when you came back the last time, you said it was a grand old place with gorgeous vines flinging scarlet sprays all over everything.”

“Yes, I remember. I said that the sunsets were more gorgeous, the birds more brilliant, the flowers brighter, the moon more silver, the sea bluer than anything we’ve ever seen.”

“And that wasn’t all you said,” Alice seemed to be baiting her father now.

“I know it.” He fell right into the trap of the daughter whom he adored. “I said also that there was a bunch of darn Mexicans cluttering up the place down there who put the politeness of us Southerners to shame. Never saw anything like it,” he turned to Mrs. Sherwood with this. “They fall all over themselves every time they turn around, and women just eat it up. Can’t stand it myself. Never get anything done. Have to change that.”

Mrs. Sherwood laughed softly at this. Adair had not changed a bit since she saw him last, and that was longer ago than she liked to remember. That was at her wedding. She smiled now to herself in recalling it. She and Bob, in their anxiety to escape from the wedding reception without being followed, had taken Adair into their confidence. He had promised to get them a horse and buggy, to see that they got off safely to the train that was to bring them up North on their honeymoon. He had told them to leave everything to him, and, in their innocence, they had.

Adair had meant well, but somehow or other in his peremptory handling of events, he got everything in such confusion that practically the whole town turned out to see the Sherwoods off. They, in their turn, almost missed the train, for the horse and buggy never did arrive. However, it had all turned out happily, and when the bride and groom stood on the back of the train and waved to their friends, they had an especially fond feeling for Adair. He, however, felt pretty glum, and their last view of him was of a perplexed young man standing off alone on one corner of the station platform, wondering how in the world all of the people had happened to be there.

No, Adair, she could see, hadn’t changed a bit. He still liked to manage people, still liked to follow up any impulsive idea that came to his active mind. Through the years, tales of his adventures had reached her by letter from friends and relatives. Adair himself was not given to writing. “Takes too much time,” he said. “Can’t sit still that long.”

His visit now was a surprise. He had arrived, unannounced, when she and Nan were in a turmoil unpacking the trunks that Nan had brought back from school with her. Only the peremptory peal of the doorbell had announced his coming. When she opened the door, he had taken her in his arms and kissed her and then, without even introducing Alice whom she had never met, he began immediately to call for Nan.

“Where’s that girl?” he asked almost before he was inside the door. “Come all the way up here from Memphis to see her and then she doesn’t even come to greet me.” In his impatience, he pounded on the floor with his cane. Mrs. Sherwood called her daughter.

“You’re Nan,” he said positively, when Nan finally entered the room. “I’m Adair. I would have known you anyplace. You look and walk and talk (Nan hadn’t said a word) just like your mother. The same eyes, the same hair, the same determined chin. Now I believe everything I’ve been hearing about you. Didn’t before. Sounded like a bunch of nonsense to me.”

“Young school girl takes part in English coronation. Young school girl saves child from rattlesnake. Young school girl saves life of old lady. Didn’t believe a word of it. Now I do. You’re going to Mexico with me.”

“Adair MacKenzie!” Mrs. Sherwood exclaimed. “Will you please lay your cane aside, take off your coat, put your hat down and have a chair before you go sweeping Nan off her feet with your scatterbrained ideas.

“Nan, don’t worry, darling,” she turned toward her daughter and laughed. “This man is really quite harmless. He is Adair MacKenzie, our cousin. Remember, the one we wrote to some years ago when we were in such trouble. He can’t help being like this. He’s always been so.”

“Well, well, well!” Adair grinned rather winningly at Mrs. Sherwood. “I must say, Jessie, you haven’t changed either. Still think you can manage me, do you? Alice,” he turned toward his daughter now for the first time, “this woman you see here is the only woman who ever thought she could wind me around her finger.”

Mrs. Sherwood and Alice exchanged sympathetic glances at this. Alice, too, if her father only knew it, had her ways of managing him. Nan’s mother knew this instinctively and liked Alice.

Nan liked her too. She was tall, slender, with blond curly hair and deep blue eyes. She was pretty and happy looking. And she liked Nan and hoped against hope that her father could work out his plan to induce Nan and her friends to come to Mexico with them. She sat quietly by while he plunged into the matter.

“Come here, Nancy,” he commanded when he had taken off his coat. Nan walked across the room and stood in front of him. “You want to go to Mexico?”

Nan hesitated. She had never before thought of going to Mexico.

“You want to go to Mexico? Yes, or no?”

“Why, I can’t.” Nan hesitated as she answered.

“No such word. Never say can’t to me. Don’t like it. Why can’t you?” Adair MacKenzie frowned at Nan.

“Why, sir, I have friends coming to stay with me for a few weeks. I can’t run away from them.” Nan hardly knew what to say.

“You like them?”

“Of course.”

“Are they as nice as you?”

“Nicer.”

“Don’t be modest. They couldn’t be. When are they coming?”

“I’m not just sure. Perhaps next week.”

“That’s all right then. They’ll come with us. We’ll all go to Mexico together. Now, that’s taken care of.”

It was on this decision, that Bess had entered the room so unexpectedly.

CHAPTER II
YOU’RE GOING WITH ME

“But do you think the others can go?” Bess asked anxiously when Adair MacKenzie and Alice had driven off in search of Mr. Sherwood. “To bring him home where he belongs when he has visitors,” Adair had said.

“What do you think, Momsey?” Nan referred the question to her mother. The three were in the kitchen where Mrs. Sherwood was bustling about preparing a company dinner.

“The good Lord only knows,” Mrs. Sherwood shook her head as she sifted more flour on her biscuit dough and then kneaded it lightly and expertly. “I can only tell you two girls this. When Adair MacKenzie sets out to do something, he usually does it. He has a way about him that almost always wins people over to his side.”

“Yes, but to Mexico. He wants to take us all to Mexico and he doesn’t even know us!” Bess couldn’t believe it, not even after seeing and hearing the old Scotchman. “And if I can’t believe it,” she questioned, “how in the world will the others when they haven’t even seen him or heard him talk?”

“Don’t you worry, Bessie,” Mrs. Sherwood looked affectionately at this girl who was almost a second daughter to her. “They’ll be both seeing him and hearing him talk before long now. If I know Adair MacKenzie at all, he’ll be at work on this thing before another day is up. And if he’s one-half the man he used to be, you might just as well begin packing tonight.”

“You mean to say you are sure we will all go?” Bess was incredulous.

“Yes, you’ll go and have the grandest time you ever have had,” Mrs. Sherwood said confidently. “There never was another man like Adair MacKenzie.”

“Then I’m going?” Nan had, despite her cousin’s assurance, been somewhat doubtful. She knew that her mother had wanted her to stay at home this summer, that she had been lonesome without her daughter the summer before and was planning all sorts of little surprises for this vacation.

“Go! Of course you’re going!” Mrs. Sherwood nearly dropped her biscuit dough in her surprise at Nan’s question. “And I shouldn’t be a bit surprised if your father and I were to go at least part way with you. Adair said something about it. Aye, but he’s a thoughtful soul.”

So it came about that Rhoda Hammond, Grace and Walter Mason, Amelia “Procrastination” Boggs, and Laura Polk, all school chums of Bess and Nan, in the days that followed, received telegraphic invitations to spend the summer with Nan in Mexico.

While each of them is laying her plans, packing her clothes and wiring “Santa Claus”, as Laura Polk immediately dubbed Cousin Adair, let’s briefly review the adventures of Nan Sherwood and her friends up to this point.

Nan was born in Tillbury, a pleasant little town, some distance from any big city, and her early school days were spent with Elizabeth Harley, the only one of Nan’s many friends who has followed her through all of her adventures.

In the first book of the series, “Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp” or “The Old Lumberman’s Secret” Nan and Bess are pals at Tillbury High School. Here Nan is extremely popular with all of her classmates and excels in sports. She and Bess have grand times together, though the Sherwoods live on a reduced income while Bess, the daughter of one of Tillbury’s wealthiest families, has everything that money can buy.

The first big disagreement the girls ever have comes in the opening chapters of this book when Bess, having decided to go away to an exclusive boarding school on the shores of Lake Michigan, tries to induce Nan to go with her. Though Nan wants with all her heart to go, she absolutely refuses to ask her parents because she knows that they cannot afford to let her. She is happy later at her decision, because on the eve of it, she discovers that her father has lost his job in the Tillbury Mills. Everything looks extremely dark for the Sherwoods. Momsey Sherwood is ill and Papa Sherwood, because of his age, is complete at a loss as to know where to turn for a job.

However, when things are darkest, Mrs. Sherwood receives two letters. One from Scotland informs her that she is sole heir of a fortune in Scotland, and the other, from her cousin Adair MacKenzie, whom we have already met, promises her aid until such time as she can collect on her inheritance. With this, Nan’s parents leave for Scotland and pack Nan off to Northern Wisconsin where she spends an exciting year in the lumber country with an uncle and aunt. Here, in chapter after chapter that are full of thrills for Nan, those about her, and the reader, the plucky young girl solves a mystery that, in the end, clears her uncle’s title to a valuable piece of property.

In the next volume of the series, “Nan Sherwood at Lakeview Hall” or “The Mystery of the Haunted Boathouse” our young heroine goes off to school with Bess. And there never was a nicer school anyplace than Lakeview Hall. Situated on a bluff overlooking the lake it’s like an old castle. Mrs. Cupp, assistant to Dr. Beulah Prescott, is the keeper and the girls, early in the volume, learn to respect her, if not to admire her. Here, they make the acquaintance of a number of new friends.

There are Grace Mason and her brother Walter, children of a wealthy Chicago family; Laura Polk, a red-headed girl whose lively imagination and ready tongue are constantly getting her into difficulties; Amelia Boggs, a serious book-loving soul with a roomful of clocks; and finally, Linda Riggs, a snobbish, spoiled child, who is extremely jealous of Nan and her well-deserved popularity.

Last, but not least, there is the boathouse ghost around whom is woven a mystery that brings Nan and Walter Mason together in such a way that they develop a keen admiration for one another. This book is chock full of adventure, excitement and mystery and Lakeview Hall is the center of it all.

Her friendship with Grace and Walter bring about her next big experience, a visit to Chicago. In “Nan Sherwood’s Winter Holidays” or “Rescuing the Runaways” the Lakeview Hall crowd spends Christmas vacation in Grace Mason’s palatial Chicago home. The story of Nan’s meeting with a very famous movie star and her solution to the mystery surrounding the strange disappearance of two young farm girls who have come to the city to go into the movies is recounted in this volume.

Next, Nan and her friends go off on a visit to a western ranch, the home of Rhoda Hammond, a school chum. Here the northern girls get their first taste of what it is to live in the wide open spaces of the west. The story of lost treasure that is told in this volume of the series, “Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch” or “The Old Mexican’s Treasure” is one that no admirer of plucky Nan Sherwood would want to miss.

The year that follows this western adventure is a pleasant one at Lakeview Hall and at its end, we find Nan and her friends trekking off to Florida and Palm Beach. So, in “Nan Sherwood at Palm Beach” or “Strange Adventures Among the Orange Groves” in a background of wide sandy beaches, beautiful graceful palms, and a hotel that overlooks the sea, a villain who has tried to cheat one of Nan’s many acquaintances out of her fortune, comes to a well-deserved end, and Nan emerges a heroine once more. At the end of this volume, we find that Walter and Nan are becoming more and more fond of one another, and we see the Lakeview Hall girls teasing them about it again and again.

In the sixth volume, Mrs. Sherwood’s Scotch connections bring about an invitation to Nan to visit Scotland and the family estate of her mother’s people. Bess is heartbroken that her friend is going away without her. However, she tries to conceal her disappointment and joins with Nan’s other friends in planning a grand farewell party. The party proves to be a surprise all round and the great day ends with an announcement by Dr. Prescott that she is taking a party of six girls abroad to see the king and queen of England crowned! Such excitement! Such last minute rush! Such fun! Never was there a happier, more exciting, more adventurous crossing of the ocean than the Lakeview Hall crowd enjoyed on the S. S. Lincoln. And the whole is rounded out in the last chapter with Nan as a lady-in-waiting to the Queen at the coronation. How this all came about is a story that all Nan Sherwood fans will want to read.

It was the part his little cousin had played in the coronation that made Adair MacKenzie resolve to hunt her up. It was this that brought him to Tillbury and the cottage on Amity street on the day the present volume opens.

“Good biscuits!” Adair MacKenzie bit off a piece of their lightness the evening the present story opens. They were all sitting at the Sherwood dinner table. There he sat, chewing reflectively, as he glanced down the table at young Nan.

“So you helped crown the good queen,” he remarked, “And it didn’t go to your head. You’re a good lass. You Blakes,” he turned to Mrs. Sherwood now, “were always a bunch of modest creatures. That’s why I like you. Now, Bessie there,” he pointed to Bess who had stayed for dinner, “she’s not so modest, but she’s kind and loyal. She’s a little spoiled, but she’ll get by.”

Bess blushed all shades of the rainbow at Adair’s frankness. Used to being babied and somewhat pampered at home, his outspokenness troubled her. She felt strangely like crying. Nan caught her eye and smiled encouragingly. Mrs. Sherwood patted her hand beneath the tablecloth. And Alice, well, Alice was a dear, for she turned the conversation toward school, and both Nan and Bess utterly forgot themselves in telling of the horse show in which they had both taken part during the last week at school.

“So you think you can ride, eh?” Adair MacKenzie was secretly pleased at both of the young girls. “Well, we’ll see. I’ll put you each on a Mexican mule and let you try to climb a mountain and see what happens.” He chuckled at the thought.

Alice laughed merrily at this. “Well, you’ll never get me on one,” she vowed. “Once was enough. Instead of the mule pulling me up the narrow path, I pulled the mule up. I never worked harder in my life.”

“Oh, my sweet, you never worked at all.” Adair shook his finger at his daughter. “But you’ll work this summer—if that old housekeeper of ours keeps her resolution not to go down to that dirty hole which we call a hacienda. The words are hers,” he explained to Nan and Bess.

“She once, when she was a very young girl, spent a summer on a sugar beet farm here in the north. A lot of Mexicans worked on it. They were miserably treated and poorly paid. As a result their huts were like hovels. She saw some of them and now she says that wild horses couldn’t drag her into that country down there. She’d rather see me starve first. But I’ll get her yet.” Adair MacKenzie smiled as though he liked opposition. “I’ll show her who is boss,” he ended.

“Of course you will, daddy,” Alice agreed. “But now tell us, when are we going? How long are we going to stay? And whom have you invited?”

This last question put Adair MacKenzie in a corner and he knew it. Really, a very kind and extremely impulsive soul, when he went on these summer jaunts for pleasure he was apt to go about for weeks, inviting all his friends. As a result, no matter how large the house was he rented, it was always too small, and no matter what preparation Alice made for guests, they were always inadequate.

Now, as he sat thinking, a mischievous light came into his eye. “There is only one that I’ve invited,” he teased, “besides these girls that will interest you.”

“And that is—?”

“Walker Jamieson, that smart-alecky reporter that we met in San Francisco a couple of years ago. Remember?”

“Remember? Of course I remember and he wasn’t smart alecky. He was kind and sweet and—” But Alice didn’t finish her sentence, for she became conscious of the fact that all the eyes around the dinner table were on her. She blushed prettily.

“Anyway,” she justified herself, “he’ll be a help in handling you, for he’s smart, almost as smart as you are, daddy.”

“A reporter! You mean to say a real newspaper reporter will be down there with us?” Nan couldn’t contain herself any longer.

“Yep, a no good reporter.” Adair MacKenzie tried hard to look disdainful as he said this, but he didn’t succeed very well and both Nan and Bess guessed that he had a genuine regard for the “young scamp” as he called him. “Got to have someone around,” he muttered as he drank his coffee, “to help handle you women, even if it’s a young scalawag who spends all his time tracking down stories for your worthless newspaper.”

“Stories!” Bess and Nan were wide-eyed.

“Now, see here,” Adair shook his finger in the direction of the two young girls, “reporters are no good. They’re a lazy lot that hang around with their feet on desks pretending to think. Think! Why, I never knew one yet that had a thought worth telling, let alone writing.

“This one that you are going to meet is no better than the rest. M-m-m, and no worse either,” he conceded as he noted the expression on Alice’s face. “I asked him to come along because he has a knack of making things lively wherever he is.

“Soon’s he gets those two big feet of his down off his desk, he makes things hum. That’s the way he is, lazy one minute, full of action the next. If there’s absolutely nothing happening, he knows how to stir things up. I rather like a man like that—not that I like him,” he added hastily, “but if we’re going to go across the border this summer, got to have someone like him around. Might just as well be Jamieson as anyone else.”

“And will he write stories while we’re there and will they be in the paper?” Nan was reluctant to let the conversation about the young reporter drop.

“Never can tell anything about people like him,” Adair MacKenzie shook his head as though he would be the last person in the world to predict anything about reporters. Could he have looked into the future he would have shaken it even more violently, for in the next few weeks Walker Jamieson, with the help of Nan and the Lakeview Hall crowd, was to uncover in Mexico one of the biggest stories of the year.

CHAPTER III
ADAIR MACKENZIE SPEAKS UP

It all started in Laredo, Texas, just after Nan and her guests had been met by Adair MacKenzie, Alice, and that amazing young newspaper man, Walker Jamieson.

“Got everything?” Adair MacKenzie asked gruffly when the bevy of pretty young girls, all in their early teens, had stepped, one after the other, from the streamlined train that had brought them from St. Louis. They had met in that city, all except Rhoda whose home, as those who have read “Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch” will remember, was in the South. She, therefore, had joined the party at beautiful San Antonio. From there on, the girls had all been together.

“I-I-I guess so,” Nan answered her eccentric old cousin slowly as she looked about first at her friends and then at the suitcases and bags that the porters were setting on the station platform beside them.

“Looks it.” Adair MacKenzie agreed laconically. “Got almost as many bags as Alice here and I thought that she carried more junk than any other woman alive. So these are the girls. H-m-m.” He looked at the Lakeview Hall group in much the same manner that he had appraised Bess just three weeks before.

“Let’s see,” he began, and Nan’s eyes twinkled as she realized that he was not going to keep his conclusions to himself any more than he had before. “You’re Laura,” he said positively, picking the red-headed girl out of the crowd as though he had studied a photograph of her until he couldn’t possibly mistake her features.

“And that red hair’s going to get you in trouble sometime,” he continued his characterization. “Got a temper now. I can see that. A ready tongue too, I’ll wager. But you’ll get by if you can go on laughing at yourself. You’ve got a sense of humor. Keep it.”

“Yes, sir,” Laura answered as meekly as she could. She had already been warned, on the train, by Bess as to what to expect, so this frank analysis of her character did not take her altogether by surprise.

“And you, Miss,” the old Scotsman went on around the circle of girls enjoying himself hugely as he characterized his young cousin’s friends, “you,” he was looking at Amelia as he spoke, “are the one that has all of those clocks. You’re too serious. You’ll learn down here in this lazy country that time just doesn’t matter. Ask anybody to do anything for you and he’ll nod his head slowly and mutter, if he’s got enough pep, ‘Si, si, señor, mañana!’ He’ll do anything in the world you want him to do, mañana, and mañana never comes.

“However, you and I will get along. I like you. You are punctual. It’s a virtue. Never been late for anything in your life, have you?”

Amelia hardly knew what to answer, for Adair had made time seem both important and unimportant.

“Speak up,” the old man looked at her kindly now. “Don’t be modest like my young cousin here. Well, never mind,” he passed Amelia by as he saw that he had embarrassed her beyond her ability to speak. “I’ll take care of you later,” he ended before he turned to Rhoda.

“From the West, aren’t you?” he questioned the proud brown-eyed young girl. “Can tell in a minute. That carriage, the way you hold your head, your clear eyes. Even if I hadn’t heard that Western accent, I would have known.” Adair MacKenzie was proud of his ability to read character, and as he went from one of the young lassies to the other, he was pleased with himself and pleased with them, for their quiet acceptance of his outspokenness.

“A city girl. Just a little too shy.” Grace’s turn came last, and she had been dreading it. “You’ve got to learn to stick up for your own rights,” he had struck home here, he knew, and though he realized that Grace could take it with less equilibrium than any of the rest, he wasn’t going to spare her.

“Say, ‘boo,’ to you,” he went on, “And you’ll run. Isn’t it so?”

Grace said nothing, but nodded her head.

“Try saying ‘boo!’ back sometime,” he advised in a quieter tone than he had used to any of the other girls, “and see what happens. If the person you say it to doesn’t run, stand your ground and say it again, louder. But be careful,” he patted Grace on the shoulder, “and don’t scare yourself with your own voice.”

At this everyone laughed, including Grace, and Alice MacKenzie took her father by the arm and started toward the station. “If you don’t look out, father,” she warned, “I’ll say ‘boo!’ to you and then you’ll jump.”

“Oh, go along with you,” Adair MacKenzie pounded his cane on the wooden platform, and then shook it at his daughter, “If you don’t behave yourself, I’ll give you one last spanking that will hold you until you are as old and gray as I am.”

For answer, Alice laughed provocatively up into his face.

“Now, come on, you girls,” Adair frowned as best he could under the circumstances, “we’ve got to get along. And you too, you get a move on,” he pointed his cane, with this, at a tall, lanky blond young man.

At this, Nan and Bess, Rhoda and Grace, Laura and Amelia with one accord turned their eyes on Walker Jamieson.

“It’s real, girls.” Walker grinned down into their faces. “It moves and speaks, eats and sleeps just like the rest of the world. It does everything but work.” So saying, he winked quite openly at Alice and lengthened his steps so that he walked beside her father.

“First truth I’ve ever heard you utter,” Adair MacKenzie tried to sound brusk, but didn’t succeed very well. The truth was, of course, that he was intensely pleased with the prospect of spending his summer with this crowd of young people. And, though he would be the last person in the world to admit it, he was intensely flattered that this brilliant young newspaper man was in the party. “Not that he came,” he thought to himself as he noted, with some satisfaction, the regard with which Walker seemed to hold Alice, “to keep me company.” He sighed deeply as he finished the thought. Alice was his only child.

“Got everything?” Adair MacKenzie repeated the question with which he greeted the girls as they all approached the customs office. “Baggage checks? Tourist cards?”

At this, they all opened their purses and rummaged around in them.

“Shades of Glasgow.” Laura murmured into Nan’s ears. “Seems good to be going through this red tape again, doesn’t it?”

Nan nodded. She felt much the same as she did the day they had first stepped foot on foreign soil, an unforgettable experience that they all had talked over again and again since that morning in May when the great boat had been moored to the dock and they had walked, one after the other, down the gangplank to set their feet in Scotland for the first time. The adventures that had followed had made their vacation the most exciting of their lives as those who have read “Nan Sherwood’s Summer Holidays” all agree. Now, as they all walked forward toward the offices of the Mexican officials, Nan wondered idly what further adventures were in store for her.

“Señorita, your bag, señorita.”

“Why don’t you answer when you are called?” Walker Jamieson dropped back into step beside Nan. “Lady,” he prodded Nan with his elbow, “the handsome young Mexican with the neat little mustache that is running after us, is calling you.”

“Me?” Nan’s voice had a surprised ring to it. “Am I Señorita?”

“None other, for months to come, now.” Walker Jamieson answered. “You are Señorita Sherwood and you had better answer when these Señores call or they will be so much insulted that they will never recover.”

“Oh, I’m sorry,” Nan looked genuinely regretful as she turned to the tall thin native that had been following her.

“It is nothing,” he dismissed her concern with a wave of his hands, “but the Señorita has dropped her purse. May I give it to her?” He bowed gracefully as he presented it, and Nan felt that he couldn’t possibly have presented the finest gift in the world with more grace.

However, before she could possibly thank him, he disappeared. She turned to follow the others into the offices, rummaging through her purse, even as they had done, as she went.

“Why, it’s gone!” Nan looked first at her purse and then in the direction in which the obliging young Mexican had vanished.

“Uh-huh, we should have guessed,” Walker Jamieson shook his head sadly. “Dumb of me. What did he get?”

“My visitor’s pass!” Nan exclaimed. “Now, what will I do?” Involuntarily, they both looked toward Adair MacKenzie who was just disappearing through the door. Then they laughed.

“I don’t know, kid,” Walker liked this youngster that Alice had already filled his ears with tales about. “But you’re in for it. It’s tough, these days, getting duplicates of the things. Shall I break the news to the ogre,” he nodded in Adair MacKenzie’s direction. “He’ll explode, but you’ve just got to take it.”

CHAPTER IV
TROUBLE AT THE BORDER

“Here, here, what’s eating you two?” Adair MacKenzie came bursting forth from the door he had entered just a few moments before Nan’s encounter with the Mexican. “H-m-m, lost your pass, I’ll wager.” With the uncanny instinct of many peppery old gentlemen, Adair MacKenzie as soon as he saw the baffled expression on Nan’s face, jumped immediately to the right conclusion.

“Might have known that would happen. Should have taken care of them all myself. Can’t depend on women and girls. Always tell Alice that. Ought to have a safe place to keep things. Old pouch my mother used to strap around her waist was a good idea.”

Nan couldn’t restrain the smile that came to her eyes at this. She had known one person in her life who tied a bag around her waist. That was grim old Mrs. Cupp, assistant to Dr. Beulah Prescott, principal at Lakeview Hall. Legend had it that Mrs. Cupp had a dark secret the key to which she carried in the black bag which someone, in days long before Nan and Bess descended on Lakeview Hall, had seen. Whether or not it was so, Nan didn’t know, but at Lakeview Hall, the words “Keep it a secret” were generally expressed by saying “Put it in the black bag.”

“Laughing at me, Miss!” Adair’s roar brought Nan out of her reveries. She jumped, and looking up into his face, she winged her way from Lakeview Hall on the shores of the Great Lakes back to Laredo, Texas and the immediate problem of the lost visitor’s pass.

“I said you should take care of your things the way I do,” he roared again. “See,” he pushed his hand inside his topcoat pocket, “Always know where my things—” the end of the sentence was lost in a sputter, as Adair MacKenzie searched frantically in pocket after pocket for his visitor’s pass. It was gone!

“W-w-why, somebody’s picked my pockets. Can’t allow this. Where’s a policeman? You, you, why don’t you do something instead of standing there and laughing?” Adair shook his cane at Walker Jamieson who was grinning broadly at the spectacle of the old man fuming and sputtering now, not at his own negligence, but at the inefficiency of a government that would allow such things to happen. His tirade against Nan and her carelessness were utterly forgotten.

But it wasn’t necessary for Walker to do anything. Adair, in his outburst, railing against governments in general now, calling down the wrath of the gods on the heads of all policemen, and expressing himself most forcibly on the subject of newspaper men in particular, attracted a crowd. Shortly, English and Spanish words were being flung this way and that and everyone was arguing, but what it was all about no one seemed to know.

“Why, daddy, what has happened?” Alice having heard the excitement from her seat in the office where her father had left her had worked her way through the crowd, and now put a restraining hand on his arm.

Immediately, he was quiet. “I’m sorry, dear,” he looked down at her shamefacedly, “but these blundering Mexicans have lost not only that poor young girl’s,” he pointed to Nan with his cane, “visitor’s pass, but mine too. It’s an outrage! That’s what it is, an outrage. And I won’t stand for it.”

“Oh, Walker,” Alice turned to the young reporter now, “What shall we do?”

“I beg your pardon, Miss,” the voice was that of a Texas Ranger with a big ten-gallon hat who had watched the whole scene with some amusement, “but if you’ll step right over to the offices there” he nodded in the direction of the door from which Alice had emerged a moment before, “Mr. Nogales will take care of you.”

“Thanks,” Walker acknowledged the information, grinned, as though he was sharing a joke with the stranger, took both Alice and her father by the arm, and, with Nan, worked his way out of the crowd.

“It’s a difficult problem.” Lozario Nogales gave a slight Spanish accent to his words as he spoke to the Americans who, a few moments after the scene above, were ushered into his office. “You see, it’s like this—” he spoke slowly and fingered a pencil as he chose his words, for English did not come any too easily to him.

“Nonsense! No difficulties at all.” Adair MacKenzie was always impatient with slow speech, “all you have to do is write out another of those cards for each of us. Take you a minute. They’re nothing but a lot of silly red tape anyway. If I had my way about it, there would be no passports, no customs, no visitors’ passes, no anything that impedes free movement of people across the borders. It’s all foolishness the way you Mexicans do these things.” Thus, with utter inconsistency, Adair MacKenzie, in a moment’s time placed the whole burden of border regulations in the laps of the Mexicans.

“But Señor,” Lozario felt that he never would become accustomed to the ways of these Americans, and of this American in particular, “there are the rules.”

“Rules! What rules?” Adair stormed further, then he caught Alice’s eye and capitulated, “Well, what are we to do?”

“It’s simply this,” Mr. Nogales was more than grateful for Alice’s presence which gave him at last an opportunity to speak, “there has been a good deal of smuggling across the borders in the past few months, and your American government has made new rules about the issuing of duplicates when passes are lost.”

“Smuggling?” Walker Jamieson now spoke up for the first time since the party entered the office. “Smuggling what?”

“Well, the American gentleman knows that immigration laws prohibit the free passage of certain nationalities into the United States.”

Walker nodded. His work in San Francisco had brought this fact most forcibly to his mind again and again, for there he had worked often among the Chinese and the Japanese and numbered among them many close friends. These people admired him and respected him greatly. They thought that because he was a newspaper man, he could do anything in the world for them that he wanted to do.

As a consequence, they were constantly coming to him with tales of wives or mothers or children that they wanted to see, but could not get into the United States because of the immigration laws.

“And the señor knows that these people somehow or other manage to get across the border in spite of these laws?” Mr. Nogales continued. He liked this young man.

“Yes.” Walker knew that too. Often he had been amazed while covering his beat in Chinatown to meet the very mothers, wives, or children he had been asked to “get here for me, please, Mr. Jamieson” a few days after being asked.

However, as he threaded through the dark streets of the famous San Francisco Chinatown this surprise always wore off. The ways of the people he was among were so silent and mysterious, even to him working among them and calling them “friends”, that he had grown to take such sudden appearances for granted.

“Well, just lately,” Mr. Nogales went on, “there have been even more than the usual number of persons smuggled across. Your government and mine has been working hard on the problem of putting an end to this. One means of stopping it has been to check most thoroughly the issuance of all duplicate visitor’s passes.”

Nan was beginning to see light in the whole situation now. Immigration laws and the smuggling of aliens across the border was something she had studied about in social science classes at Lakeview. This scene in the Laredo offices was a school lesson brought to life.

Nan vaguely remembered, as she stood there listening and watching, that Laura had once had a special report to give on this particular subject. She remembered because it was at the time the girls were planning a big spread down at the boathouse, and Laura had been so excited about the whole thing that she had gone to class utterly unprepared. In the few minutes before the assembly bell rang Nan helped her out, and so Laura had managed to struggle through the social science hour.

Nan turned. She wished that Laura and the rest were here now, but she knew that they were waiting in an outer office.

“Then you think,” Walker Jamieson’s words brought Nan back to the present plight of herself and her cousin Adair, “that there is a regular trade in visitors’ passes, that the pickpocket who got ours wanted nothing else?”

“You had no money stolen, did you?” Mr. Nogales queried.

“Uh-h-h-” Adair MacKenzie had been silent for a long while for him. Now he rummaged through his pockets even as Nan checked on the contents of her purse.

“Just as I thought,” Mr. Nogales nodded his head, as the two agreed that all their money was there. “Your visitors’ passes are the only thing missing. Just a moment, please, I’ll see what can be done.” With this, he disappeared into the office of his superior, and Adair MacKenzie followed him.

Nan, Alice, and Walker Jamieson looked hopelessly at one another as Adair disappeared from their view.

CHAPTER V
TELL US ABOUT THE HACIENDA

“What did you think?” Laura inquired afterwards when the girls were all settled in a hotel close to the border for the night. “That the walls of that inner office would just cave in when Mr. MacKenzie started bellowing.”

“Why, Laura Polk, how disrespectfully you talk!” Bess exclaimed from her place in front of the dressing table where she was brushing her hair. “And Mr. MacKenzie is our host too. If it weren’t for him we wouldn’t be down here now. At this minute we’d probably be on the shores of a lake near Tillbury.”

“Oh, Bess, you know I’m not one bit disrespectful, really,” Laura retorted. “I like Mr. MacKenzie real well and you know I do. I’d give anything in the world to be able to roar the way he does.” There was genuine longing in her voice as she spoke. “Just imagine,” she continued, “how handy that roar would have come in the night we routed the ghost. I just think,” she continued to play with the idea of making use of Adair MacKenzie’s roar, “how handy it would come in, if we were to meet Linda Riggs.

“Couldn’t we manage,” she was lying prone on the bed, and, as this new idea came to her, she cupped her chin in her hands and looked off into space, “to have your cousin around sometime when Linda Riggs was present. I’d love to have him analyze her the way he did us today. Such fun!” Laura’s eyes danced merrily at the thought.

“And then I’d like to have her open her mouth to protest,” Laura continued, “and have him roar at her. Oh, I’d give a million dollars, a trillion dollars,” she amended generously, “to hear that roar.”

“You and me too,” Bess joined in. “By the way, have any of you heard anything about her lately.”

“Not I,” Nan answered, “and I must say the less I hear about her and the less I see of her, the better. There was a rumor, you know, at school that she was going to be allowed to come back this fall.”

“I know it,” Bess somehow always managed to hear all the rumors, “and I can’t for the life of me understand why Dr. Prescott would ever let her reenter. Certainly, she’s no credit to Lakeview Hall, or to any school for that matter. If I were a principal I wouldn’t let her in my school. In fact, if I got the chance at all, I’d just slam the door right in her face.”

“Oh, Bess, do you ever sound as though you meant it? Cousin Adair should hear you talk now. He thinks that Laura has a temper. He should hear you sometimes.” Nan laughed at her pal.

“I know it, but I think I’m more than justified. She’s certainly caused us plenty of trouble from the very first time we ever met her. I’ll never forget how she embarrassed us on the train that took us to Lakeview the first time.”

“Nor how Professor Krenner took our part,” Nan added.

“Nor how you outwitted her and drove up to school in the back of Walter Mason’s car as though you were a princess returning to her palace,” Laura giggled. “There never was a freshman created more of a stir than you did that night. Boy, did we ever put our heads together in corridor four and decide that we would have to put you in your place right away,” she continued slangily.

“And did I ever hate you, Laura Polk,” Bess laughed now at the recollection. “You embarrassed me so about that lunch box that when I went to bed that night I cried myself to sleep.”

“Poor Bessie,” Laura sympathized. “You were such a proud little thing that I never in the world thought I’d ever be able to get along with you.”

“Get along with Bess!” Nan exclaimed, “if you had ever heard what Bess said about you that night, you would have been surprised that she ever spoke to you again.”

“What did you say, Bess?” Laura looked positively impish as she looked at Bess’s reflection in the mirror.

“Oh, I don’t remember.” Bess was obviously concealing the truth.

“You do too,” Amelia joined in as she wound the pretty little travelling clock that had been given her the week before.

“If you don’t tell, I will,” Nan was enjoying the situation as much as the rest, for she saw that Bess was not really embarrassed.

“Go ahead then and see if I care,” Bess retorted, giving a few final strokes to her hair.

“Well, you said,” Nan began slowly, “that that homely red-headed Polk girl was just as mean as she could be!”

“Did she say that?” Laura laughed heartily. Even in those days she would have been the first to laugh at herself. Now she could laugh doubly, for the homely red-headed girl had, since then, blossomed out into a pretty, fair complexioned curly headed miss with a very pleasing personality.

And so the girls continued for some time to talk over events and happenings that are recounted in other books of this series until Laura turned to Nan, “Anyway,” she said, “if we may return to the present and Laredo, Texas, will you please tell us just how your cousin managed to extract those passes from the authorities this afternoon? I respected his abilities to get what he wanted from the moment mother capitulated and let me come down here with what she called, ‘a perfect stranger,’ but I never respected them as much as I did when I saw that white uniformed official bowing you people out of that office as though you were the President’s party itself.”

“Wasn’t he just grand!” Nan’s eyes were alight at the recollection. “That man was none other than a special aid to the Mexican consular office here in Laredo, and he nearly fell all over trying to help us after cousin Adair ceased his storming and told those people who he was. I never saw anything like it in my life.

“It was ‘Si, señor, this,’ and ‘Si, señor, that’ until Alice and Walker and I began to think that we were really somebody, if only by reflected glory.”

“Well, you certainly looked like somebody very important when you came out,” Bess agreed. “I wondered for a moment whether I had really heard allright when you went in.”

“Then you did hear us?” Nan laughed.

“All Mexico did,” Laura put in. “Really, at first we thought another revolution was taking place. Grace here was looking around for someplace to hide herself. Amelia was clutching her watch to her with a look of determination which said as plainly as anything ‘no foraging rebel is going to get this’ and Rhoda looked as though she wished she had brought her trusty six shooter along. And then when we had gotten ourselves all worked up to the point of accepting the inevitable, who should come round the corner but you and Mr. Jamieson, Alice and her father!”

“You sound as though we disappointed you,” Nan remarked.

“Oh, not at all.” Laura hastened to correct this impression. “I don’t believe Mr. MacKenzie has ever disappointed anyone in his life. He just couldn’t. Not with that cane, that roar, and that honesty which stops at nothing. He’s a dear. Now tell us, Nan, all you know about this place we are going to.”

“I’ve done that a thousand times since I met you in St. Louis,” Nan responded as she pulled off her dress and slipped her arms into the lounging robe that the Lakeview Hall girls had given her at a surprise party in her honor more than a year before.

“Oh, no, you haven’t,” Laura denied. “We made you spend most of the time telling us about this angel of a cousin that appeared out of a clear sky and offered to take us all to Mexico. Doesn’t sound real even now when we’re here.”

“There’s one thing about it,” Amelia added, “if one can’t have rich relations oneself, the next best thing in the world is to have charming friends who have them.”

“Here, here!” Laura raised a protesting hand. “You’re out of order. The first thing you know Nan will be thinking we’re fond of her.”

“Oh, you old ducks,” Nan looked at them all fondly. “Don’t you know that cousin Adair knew that if he didn’t invite all of you that I wouldn’t come at all? Now, let’s forget all of this gratitude stuff. It embarrasses me.”

“All right then,” Bess agreed, “but you really haven’t told Rhoda anything at all about the hacienda, Nan.”

“I don’t know anything myself,” Nan admitted after some hesitation. “I’ve tried and tried to get cousin Adair to tell me something about the place, but he just won’t say anything. I’m not sure whether he knows and won’t tell or whether he doesn’t know himself. At any rate, he’s being extremely mysterious about the whole thing. Says that we didn’t see anything when we saw Emberon, that this place that we are going has that beat all hollow. Now what do you people make of that?”

“Dungeons, secret passage, weird wailing of bagpipes, that’s what Emberon had,” Laura summarized. “If this Mexican hacienda has anything better to offer, I’d like to see it.”

“And so would I,” Nan agreed. She almost resented the idea that anything could possibly be any nicer than the old Blake estate in Scotland. “And listen, he says this further, that if we think we had adventures in Scotland and England, we just haven’t seen anything yet. What in the world do you suppose he means?”

“If Doctor Prescott said that, or Mrs. Cupp, or your father or mine,” Rhoda answered, “I might possibly hazard a guess as to what was meant, but there’s no telling about this cousin of yours, Nan.”

“No, he’s as unpredictable as the seasons, Alice says, and the only thing we can do is wait.” Nan sounded as though waiting was the hardest thing in the world to do.

CHAPTER VI
SOMETHING ABOUT MEXICO

“What’s this?” Laura questioned the next morning when she came upon Amelia in her hotel room reading diligently from a book.

“Oh, nothing.” Amelia barely looked up.

“Come on, tell aunty,” Laura teased. “Nobody else is up yet and I’ve simply got to talk to someone.”

“You mean there’s no one else about, so you’ll talk to me. Well, I like that!” Amelia returned to her book as though she were really indignant.

“You know I didn’t,” Laura sounded very conciliatory—for her. “It’s just this; I’ve got the whim-whams something terrible. Did you ever have the whim-whams, Amelia?”

“Can’t say I did,” Amelia answered. “At least I didn’t call them any such name as that.”

“Then you know what I mean?” Laura looked very serious.

“You mean,” Amelia turned the open book over on her lap and answered Laura’s question, “that you have awakened early in a hotel in a strange city, that you want like anything to go off exploring, that you know you can’t, and that the next best thing you can find to do is to annoy someone else who can’t go either.”

“My dear professor,” Laura assumed as serious a mien as possible, “you have hit the well-known nail squarely on the head. It must be that you have the whim-whams too. Now what is that you are reading?”

“Well, if you must know,” Amelia gave in, “It’s a guidebook to Mexico.”

“Ah, what could be better.” Laura herself reached for the book. “Let’s see what this country across the street from this hotel is like.”

“It does seem funny, doesn’t it,” Amelia said, “that when we look out our hotel windows we are looking into a foreign country. It doesn’t look any different. It doesn’t sound any different. And it doesn’t—”

“Smell any different,” Laura finished, “and that’s the most surprising thing of all, because according to Mr. MacKenzie, Mexico is just the smelliest place on God’s green earth.”

“Did he tell you that too?” Amelia asked. “Really, when he finished the tirade against the country that he delivered to me after dinner, I began to wonder why in the world he ever brought along five such nice girls as we.”

“Five? What’s the matter, ’Mealy, can’t you count before breakfast? There are six of us.”

“I said five nice girls,” Amelia insisted. “He might have had one of several reasons for bringing you along.”

“Such as—” Nan had come into the room just in time to hear this last.

“Oh, he might have wanted to make the world a better place for the rest of us to live in by losing Laura, making her a target for the revolutionists, feeding her to the bulls, or just leaving her here as food for the fleas,” Amelia responded airily, and then she put her arm around Laura’s shoulder as though to show her that she didn’t mean a word of what she was saying.

“They do say,” Grace added as she joined the group, “that the fleas here are man-sized. That reporter told me last night that the reason they give us mosquito netting to put over us at night is that the fleas and the mosquitos wage a nightly battle as to who is going to carry off the Americans.”

“And you believed him?” Laura laughed.

“Well, not exactly,” Grace answered, “but I did carefully tuck my netting all round me last night.”

“He told me lots of things about Mexico, too,” Nan added, “and I don’t know which of them to believe. This is a queer country we are going into, full of so many strange legends, so many different kinds of people that any wild tale at all might be true.”

“That’s what I was thinking,” Amelia agreed, “when Laura came into the room this morning. This guidebook here is full of all sorts of queer tales.”

“Such as—?” Nan queried.

“Oh, you people in there,” Bess called from another room, “wait until Rhoda and I come before you talk any more about Mexico. We want to hear too.”

“All right, slow-pokes,” Nan called back, “but you’ll have to hurry. We’re supposed to be downstairs for breakfast with Cousin Adair in exactly one-half hour.”

At this, Bess and Rhoda came into Amelia’s room and the girls, all dressed in sports clothes, settled themselves to learn something about the country they were going to visit.

“It says here,” Nan began, for she had long ago lifted the guidebook from Amelia’s lap, “that Mexico is a Latin-American country south of the United States of America. The Gulf of Mexico is to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.”

“Oh, we know that,” Bess interrupted impatiently, “tell us something that is different.”

“Well, how’s this?” Nan queried, “Mexico is a land of great contrasts. About sixty percent of its population are Indians who live in a backward civilization that weaves its own clothes, grinds its own corn, does everything for itself by hand. The other forty percent is advanced and modern. The first can neither read nor write. The latter attends modern schools and universities.

“Nothing in Mexico, in its history, its climate, its people, or its landscape is dull or monotonous.”

“That’s better,” Bess approved. She was not one to care much for facts or figures.

“Oh, there are more interesting things than that in the book,” Amelia reached for it. “Here let me read you something that I found this morning.”

“Just a second,” Nan held on to it, “How in the world do you pronounce these words with all their z’s and x’s. No wonder there are so many people that can’t read or write. I wouldn’t be able to write myself if I lived here. Imagine living in a place called I x m i q u i l p a n or X o c h i m i l c o.” She spelled them all out because she couldn’t possibly pronounce them. “They must all be Indian words dating from the time of the Aztecs,” Nan went on. “Look, they all have beautiful meanings.

“Chalchihuites is translated into ‘Emeralds in the Rough’, Tehuacan, ‘Stone of the gods’, Chiapas, ‘River of the Lime-leaved Sage’, and Tzintzuntzan, ‘Humming Bird’. And here’s a place I want to go, Yecapixtla or ‘Place Where People Have Sharp Noses’.”

“What a funny place that must be,” Laura laughed with Nan, “I’ll bet they all spend their time minding one another’s business.”

“They probably have a factory there,” Nan went on, “for turning out people like Mrs. Cupp and they have catalogues showing the sharp, sharper, and sharpest noses.”

“And when a school principal wants to hire an assistant that will see everything and hear everything he pays top price and gets the sharpest,” Laura liked the idea. “We ought to go there,” she ended, “if it’s only to get a postcard so that we can send it back to Mrs. Cupp with the words ‘Wish you were here’.”

“Oh, Laura, you old meany,” Nan laughed. “You know she isn’t half as bad as you make her out to be.”

“No, she isn’t,” Laura agreed. “Lakeview Hall certainly wouldn’t be complete without her. Why, down here in Mexico—well, on the border of Mexico—when I’m going farther and farther away from her all the time, I can almost believe that I’m fond of her. But don’t let me talk about it,” she pretended to sniff as though she was going to cry, “or I’ll be getting homesick for her.”

“Small chance of your ever getting homesick for anyone,” Bess remarked, “but let’s hear what it is Amelia wants to tell us about and then go downstairs, I’m almost starved.”

“Oh, I’m sorry, Amelia,” Nan handed over the book, “I didn’t mean to monopolize it.” These Lakeview Hall girls, together for so many years under all sorts of circumstances, were still polite to one another and thoughtful about little things. They teased one another, laughed at one another’s faults, and quarreled sometimes among themselves, but they were always eager to forgive and more than anxious to please. This was why they had been friends for so long. They were never really jealous of one another and were always ready to praise anyone in the group who did anything outstanding.

“It’s all right, Nan,” Amelia answered as she reached for the book. “I merely thought that this story of the founding of Mexico City might be fun to read. It’s short, Bess, so we’ll be downstairs in just a few minutes. Here it is.

“‘When the Aztecs, a people that inhabited this part of Mexico long before the coming of the white man from across the water, were wandering from place to place in search of a spot on which to establish themselves, their head priest had a vision.

“‘In it, he saw their War God and heard him telling them to go on and on until they found an eagle on a cactus growing from the rock. The cactus, the War God said, was the heart of his treacherous nephew who had waged war against him and lost. As punishment, he had been put to death and his heart was torn from him and thrown into the lake. It fell upon a rock among the reeds, and from it grew a cactus so big and strong that an eagle, seeking a place to build his nest, had made his home upon it.

“‘The Aztecs heeded the words of their War God as told them by the priest. For years they wandered, until finally, one morning very early, their long search was rewarded. They came upon the eagle on the cactus! His wings were extended to the rays of the sun and in his claws he held a snake.

“‘So it was here that they built their city and even to this day, the cactus and the eagle, holding a snake in his beak, is Mexico’s emblem.’” With this, Amelia closed the book.

“So that’s why I’ve been seeing that symbol on so many Mexican things all these years,” Nan commented. “I’ve wondered what it meant, but was always too lazy to look it up. How strange the history of this country is that we are going into! I wonder what will happen.”

“Probably everything,” Laura said, “so, now I think we’d better go downstairs and eat, fortify ourselves so to speak for any emergency.”

“Guess you’re right,” Nan laughed. And with this, Nan and her friends all hurried down to breakfast and to the beginning of another day in their Mexican adventure.

CHAPTER VII
BESS SMELLS A ROMANCE

“Well, how are the charming señoritas this morning?” Walker Jamieson dropped his feet from the chair next to him and rose as Nan and her friends entered the lounge of the hotel.