The Ranch Girls' Pot of Gold. Vandercook Margaret

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СКАЧАТЬ but the young man had gone home to England, when the affairs of the ranch girls were safely settled with his cousin Daniel Norton, who had tried to steal their home from them, and Jim had not expected nor desired to see the English fellow again. He didn't care much for foreigners, even Anglo-Saxon ones.

      "I am only here for a little while, Mr. Colter," Frank Kent explained, answering the question in Jim's words and in Jack's eyes. "I came back to America on a short business trip. My father heard of some mines in Colorado, and as I was so enthusiastic about the West he sent me out to investigate them for him. As Colorado is a sister state to Wyoming, I had to slip across the border, you know," he ended shyly.

      Olive had let every one else in the room finish their welcome to Frank Kent before she attempted to speak to him. Now she put out her slender hand and held his only for a moment while her face flushed and her dark eyes shone with a soft radiance. "I am truly glad to see you again," she declared with more real feeling than any one of the other girls had yet revealed. Jack, who adored Olive, and was a little jealous of any affection she might show for other people, stared at her curiously.

      "O Frank, do let's all go out of doors," Jack suggested. "We have the most wonderful scheme we want to tell you about and we want to know everything about your people in England, your father and mother and two sisters and your wonderful estate in Surrey."

      The entire party was just leaving the living room when Aunt Ellen's tall form blocked the door. Her face showed anger and she held the small Indian boy by his uninjured arm. Carlos' eyes were larger and more mournful than ever and his lips set in an obstinate curve.

      "This boy says he won't eat with Zack and me," Aunt Ellen announced angrily. "He says he is the son of a chief and the grandson of one and that he should be fed first; and I won't put up with such nonsense."

      "O Carlos!" Olive came across the room and dropped on the floor in front of the lad. "How can you be so silly and ungrateful?" she asked pleadingly. "Aunt Ellen, his people are all dead; they were killed in a fight on the plains, and I don't know whether Carlos is a chief's son or not. But of course we can't keep him at the ranch if he is troublesome."

      Olive was such a lovely picture as she knelt on the floor gazing up into the Indian boy's face that Frank Kent looked at her closely for the first time since he entered Rainbow Lodge. She was more changed than any one of the ranch girls in the six months of his absence, and seemed older and somehow more graceful and elusive than ever.

      Jim Colter took several great strides across the room toward small Carlos, without apparently heeding Ruth's little cry of remonstrance nor Olive's plea for patience; he seemed so big and fierce and strong and the Indian boy so little and weak and defiant, that it was like a great eagle pouncing down on an impudent sparrow. Jim swooped Carlos up in his arms, but instead of devouring him, put the lad down in a chair by the breakfast table, poured out a glass of milk for him and made him drink it, for he saw what no one else had, that the boy was almost dying of hunger.

      "Leave us to ourselves, please," Jim demanded, smiling at Aunt Ellen apologetically. "I want to see after this boy myself for a few minutes. Who knows but we may need just such a little scout in our trip across the prairies."

      Ruth smiled at Jim without a trace of the old-maid disapproval of him which she once felt, and Olive gave a sigh of relief, for she had been worrying all through breakfast about what they could do with Carlos when they went on their wonderful caravan trip. It had seemed so unkind to desert him after his long and faithful quest of her.

      A quarter of an hour later Jim came out in the yard, and the Indian lad went to the kitchen to do as he was bid. Whatever Jim had told him served to keep him proudly obedient so long as he remained at the ranch house.

      In front of the Lodge, Jean, Olive, Frieda and Ruth were still talking of their journey, while Frank and Jack had wandered off somewhere together. Jean was flitting about in the sunlight like a brown sparrow, twittering and singing and hopping from very joy at being alive. She suddenly seized Jim's hand and forced Ruth to take hold of his other one, then when Olive and Frieda joined the circle, she made them whirl around until they were completely out of breath. "I declare, I never was so happy in my life," Jean panted, when she finally released her victims. "I believe every good thing in the world comes true if you only want it hard enough. But don't you wish we were traveling across the plains right now? It is such a wonderful, wonderful day!"

      Truly it might have been a spring morning in the Garden of Eden. The pale green leaves of the tall cottonwood trees were shimmering and quivering with each faintest breeze; the birds were rustling softly in their branches, and, beyond the trees, the alfalfa fields were now a delicate lavender and rose.

      Jean pointed through an opening in the trees, where the landscape stretched almost unbroken to the line of hills on the western horizon and made a little curtsy to Ruth.

      "'Oh, what's the way to Arcady

      Where all the leaves are merry?'"

      "Tell me, Ruth, dear," she quoted mischievously from a volume of poems she and her chaperon had just finished reading.

      Ruth shook her head, but Jim stared at Jean thoughtfully. "Say that little verse again, Jean," he said slowly. "I don't know where Arcady is, but it is a pretty sounding place."

      Jean laughed roguishly and blew him a kiss. "What has come over you, Jim, to make you willing to listen to poetry?" she inquired. "Arcady is just an ideal country that poets like to write about, but here's the way to find it if you like:

      "'What, know you not, old man (quoth he), —

      Your hair is white, your face is wise, —

      That love must kiss that Mortal's eyes

      Who hopes to see fair Arcady?

      No gold can buy you entrance there, —

      But beggared love may go all bare —

      No wisdom won with weariness,

      But love goes in with Folly's dress —

      No fame that wit could ever win,

      But only love may lead love in

      To Arcady, to Arcady.'"

      At the end of her recitation Jean quickly put her hands in Olive's and Frieda's and ran off to see if any flowers had bloomed in their violet bed, leaving Ruth and Jim alone. Ruth was blushing, for she had a far-off idea of what Jean meant to suggest by her quotation, but Jim appeared so sublimely unconscious that she felt relieved. He was evidently thinking of something very different from love or Arcady, for Ruth had to touch him before he seemed to hear what she was saying. "When may Jack write the people to say they can have the Lodge?" she inquired, determined not to be entirely forgotten by her companion, no matter how glad she was that he had paid no attention to Jean.

      "The Lodge? Oh, any time," he answered vaguely, looking at Ruth in a way that made her catch her breath. Jim was not thinking at the moment of anything connected with Rainbow Lodge. He was wondering if a man, who had something in his past he wished to forget, could ever travel over into Arcady by the route Jean's poem suggested – Arcady, that country he knew nothing about except that the name had a pleasant sound.

       CHAPTER V

      MEETING WITH NEW PEOPLE

      "JEAN BRUCE, if you add one more item to that everlasting old list of yours, we will have to give up our trip," Jack Ralston remarked crossly. "Even if Jim has given us a few precious dollars to invest in our going-away outfits, we can't buy the entire town of Laramie and cart it across the state to the Yellowstone Park." Jack was standing in front of her mirror trying to fasten down her shirtwaist in the back, and as a pin had just pricked her finger, she was irritable.

      "What СКАЧАТЬ