Kitabı oku: «Frances of the Ranges: or, The Old Ranchman's Treasure», sayfa 11
“No, I will not!” retorted the girl, deliberately tempting Pete into one of his rages. If he became angry and yelled at her all the better!
“Do what I tell ye!” exclaimed the man. “Ain’t ye l’arned that I mean what I say yet?”
“I must move my limbs. They’re cramped and co-o-old!” wailed Frances, and she put a deal of energy into her cry.
Pete began to get stiffly to his feet. “Do like I tell ye, and lie down–or I’ll knock ye down!” he threatened.
At that the girl risked uttering a cry and shrank back with a semblance of fear. Aye, there was more than a semblance of fear in the attitude, for she believed he would strike her. She had shrieked, however, at the top of her voice.
“Shut your mouth, ye crazy thing!” exclaimed the man, and he leaped toward her.
Frances threw herself back upon the ground. She heard the clatter of hoofbeats approaching. They could be mistaken for no other sound.
“Daddy! Daddy! Help! Help!”
Her voice was piercing. The cry for her father was involuntary, for she believed him too ill to leave the ranch-house.
But the answering shout that came down the wind was unmistakable.
“Daddy! Daddy!” Frances cried again, eagerly, loudly.
Pete was about to strike her; but he darted back and stood erect. The horses were plunging madly down the hillside through the brush. The party of rescue was already upon the camp.
The scoundrelly Pete leaped away to reach his own horse. He must have found the creature quickly in the darkness; for before the men from the Bar-T pulled in their horses before the smouldering campfire, Frances heard the rush of Pete’s old pony as it dashed away down the stream.
“Daddy!” cried Frances for a third time. “We’re here–Pratt and I. Look out for Pratt; he’s hurt. I’m all right.”
“Somebody throw some brush on that fire!” commanded the old ranchman. “Let’s see what’s been doing here.”
“Sam, take a couple of the boys and go after that fellow. You can follow that horse by sound.”
He climbed stiffly out of his own saddle, and when the firelight flashed up revealing the little glade to better purpose, it was Captain Dan Rugley who lifted Frances to her feet and cut her bonds.
CHAPTER XXVI
FRANCES IN SOFTER MOOD
It was the next day but one and the hacienda and compound lay bathed in the hot sun of noon-day. Captain Dan Rugley was leaning back in his usual hard chair and in his usual attitude on the veranda, fairly soaking up the rays of the orb of day.
“Beats all the medicine for rheumatism in the doctor’s shop!” he was wont to declare.
Since his night ride to rescue his daughter he had become more like his old self than he had been for weeks. The excitement seemed to have chased away the last twinges of pain for the time being, and he was without fever.
Now he was watching a swift pony-rider coming his way along the trail and listening to the patter of light footsteps coming down the broad stairway behind him.
“Here comes Sam, Frances,” the ranchman said, in a low voice. “I reckon he’ll have some news.”
The girl came to the door. She had discarded her riding habit and was dressed in a soft, clinging house gown, cut low at the throat and giving her arms freedom to the elbow. She wore pretty stockings and pretty slippers on her feet. Instead of a quirt she carried a fan in her hand and there was a handkerchief tucked into her belt.
The chrysalis of the cowgirl had burst and this butterfly had emerged. Of late it was not often that Frances had “dolled up,” as the old Captain called it. Now he said, enthusiastically:
“My! you do look sweet! What’s all the dolling up for? Me? The Chinks? Or maybe that boy upstairs, eh?”
“For myself,” said Frances, quietly. “Pratt is too sick to notice much what I wear, I guess. But I find that I have been paying too little attention to dress.”
“Huh!” snorted the old ranchman.
“It is a woman’s duty to make herself as beautiful and attractive as possible,” said Frances, with a bright smile. “You know, I read that in a woman’s paper.”
“You surely did!” agreed the ranchman, and then turned to meet Silent Sam as that individual drew up to the step.
“What’s the good word, Sam?” inquired the Captain.
“Got that Ratty. He’s in the jail at Jackleg. Like you said, I never told nobody but the sheriff what ’twas for you wanted him.”
“That’s right,” said the Captain, gravely. “If the boys understood he was mixed up with this kidnapping business, I don’t know what they would do.”
“Right, Captain,” said the foreman. “So the sheriff took him for being all lit up. Ratty won’t sleep it off before to-morrow.”
“And if they could catch that Pete What’s-his-name by then – ”
“Ain’t found hide nor hair of him,” answered Silent Sam.
“Where do you reckon he went to, Sam?”
“He didn’t go with his horse, Captain. He fooled us.”
“What?”
“That’s so. Horse was found yisterday evenin’ down beyand Peckham’s–scurcely breathed. He’d run fur, but he didn’t have nobody on his back.”
“I see!” ejaculated the ranchman, smiting one doubled fist upon the other palm. “That Pete has fooled us from the start.”
“Sure did,” admitted Sam.
“He never mounted his horse at all?” cried Frances, deeply interested.
“That’s it,” said her father. “We ought to have known that at the time. No horse could have gone smashing through the brush the way that one did without knocking his rider’s head off.”
“Sure,” agreed Sam again.
“And he was right there near the place he held Pratt and me captive all the time we were making a stretcher for poor Pratt,” said Frances.
“Or hiking up stream,” said the foreman, preparing to ride down to the corral.
“Lucky the boy broke the fellow’s gun as he did,” said Captain Rugley, thoughtfully, turning to his daughter. “Otherwise some of us might have been popped off from the bushes.”
“Oh, Daddy!”
“When a man’s as mean as that scalawag,” said her father, philosophically, “there’s no knowing to what lengths he will go. I shan’t feel that you are safe on the ranges until he’s found and jailed.”
“And I shan’t feel that we’re out of trouble until your friend Mr. Lonergan comes here and you divide and get rid of that silly old treasure,” declared Frances, and she pouted a little.
“What’s that, Frances?” gasped the old Captain. “All those jewels and stuff? Why, don’t you care anything for them?”
“I care more for my peace of mind,” she said, decidedly. “And see what it’s brought poor Pratt to.”
“Well,” said her father, subsiding. “The boy did git the dirty end of the stick, for a fact. I’m sorry he was hurt – ”
“And you are sorry you thought so ill of him, too, Daddy–you know you are,” whispered Frances, one arm stealing over the Captain’s shoulder.
“Well – ”
“Now, ‘’fessup!’” she laughed, softly. “He’s a good boy to risk himself for me.”
“I wouldn’t have thought much of him if he hadn’t,” said the old ranchman, stubbornly.
“What could you really expect when you consider that he has lived all his life in a city – ”
“And works in a bank,” finished the Captain, with a sly grin. “But I reckon I have got to take off my hat to him. He’s a hero.”
“He is a good boy,” Frances said, cheerfully. “And I hope that he will recover all right, as the doctor says he will.”
“I don’t know how fast he’ll mend,” chuckled the Captain. “If I were he, and getting the attention he is – ”
“From whom?” demanded Frances, turning on him sharply.
“From Ming, of course,” responded her father, soberly, but with his eyes a-twinkle.
And then Frances fled upstairs again, her cheeks burning as she heard the old ranchman’s mellow laughter.
Pratt lay on his bed with his head swathed in bandages and his shoulder in a brace. He had suffered a dislocation as well as the bruises and the cut in his head. From the time he had been struck from behind by the man, Pete, the young fellow had known nothing at all until he awoke to find himself stretched upon this bed in the Bar-T ranch-house.
The old Captain, with Ming’s help, had disrobed Pratt and put him to bed; but when the doctor came early in the morning, he put the patient in Frances’ hands.
“What he needs is good nursing. Don’t leave him to the men,” said the doctor. “Your father says he’s cured himself by getting out on horseback. If it didn’t kill him, I admit it’s aiding in his cure for him to be more active again.
“But I depend upon you, my dear, to keep this patient as quiet as possible. I hate having my patients get away from me,” added the physician with twinkling eye. “And this lad is mine for some time. He has sure been badly shaken up.”
He was afraid at first that there was concussion of the brain; but after a few hours the young bank clerk became lucid in his speech and the fever began to decrease.
The doctor had not left the ranch until the evening before this day when Frances stole up the stair again to peer into the room to see how her patient was.
“Oh, I’m awake!” cried Pratt, cheerfully. “You don’t expect me to sleep all the time, do you, Frances?”
“Sleep is good for you,” declared the girl of the ranges, with a sober smile. “The doctor says you are to keep very quiet.”
“Goodness! I might as well be buried and so save my board,” grumbled Pratt. “When is he going to let me get up out of this?”
“Not for a long, long time yet,” said Frances, seriously.
“What? Why, I could get up now – ”
“With those shingles plastered to your shoulder?” asked the girl, smiling again, but somewhat roguishly.
“Oh–well–have those boards actually got to stay on?”
“Yes, indeed.”
“How long?”
“Till the doctor removes them, Pratt. Now, be a good boy.”
“I’ll never be able to get out of bed,” grumbled the patient, “if he keeps me here much longer, I’ll be bedridden.”
“Nonsense,” said Frances, with a very superior air. “You haven’t been here two days yet.”
“And when is the doctor coming again?” went on Pratt.
“He said he’d come within the week,” replied the girl, demurely.
“Good-night, nurse!” groaned Pratt. “A whole week? Why, I’ll die in that time–positively.”
“You only think so,” said Frances, coolly.
“You don’t know how hard it is to lie here with nothing to do.”
“You don’t appreciate your good fortune, I am afraid,” returned the girl, more gravely. “You might have been much more seriously hurt – ”
“You don’t suppose I care about being hurt, do you?” he cried, with some excitement. “I’d go through it a dozen times to the same end, Frances – ”
“Now, stop!” she said, commandingly, and raising an admonitory finger. “If you show any excitement I will go out of the room and leave Ming – ”
“Don’t!” groaned Pratt.
“I shall certainly leave him in charge of you. You won’t talk to him.”
“No. If he doesn’t sit silent like a yellow graven image, he scatters ‘l’s’ all about the room until I want to get out of bed and sweep ’em up,” declared Pratt.
The ranchman’s daughter smiled at him, but shook her head. “Now! no more talking. I’ll sit here and promise not to scatter any of the alphabet broadcast; but you must keep still.”
“That’s mighty hard,” muttered the patient. “Sit over by the window. There! right in the sun. I like to see your hair when the sun burnishes it.”
Frances promptly removed her seat to the shady side of the room.
“Oh, please!” begged Pratt. “I’m sick, you know. You really ought to humor me.”
“And you really ought not to jolly me!” laughed the range girl. “I think you are a tease, Pratt.”
“Honest! I mean it.”
She looked at him with a roguish smile. “What did you say to Miss Latrop about her hair? Isn’t it a lovely blond?”
“Oh! I never looked at it twice. Molasses color,” declared Pratt. “I don’t like such light hair.”
“Now, be still. Mrs. Edwards sent over word they are coming to see you to-morrow. If you are feverish I shan’t let them in.”
“My goodness!” gasped Pratt. “Not all of them coming, I hope?”
“Mrs. Edwards and Miss Latrop, anyway,” said Frances, seriously. “Now keep still.”
Pratt digested this for a while; then he held up one arm and waved it.
“Well? What is it?” asked the stern nurse.
“Please, teacher!”
“Well?”
“May I say one thing?”
“Just one. Then silence for an hour.”
“If that girl from Boston comes I’m going to have a fever–understand? I don’t want her up here. Now, that’s all there is about it.”
“Hush, small boy! You don’t know what is good for you. You must leave it to the doctor and me,” said Frances, but she kept her head turned from the bed so that Pratt would not see her eyes.
By and by Pratt waved his hand again like a pupil in school and even snapped his fingers to attract her attention.
“Please, teacher!” he begged when she looked up from the pad on her knee over which her pencil had been traveling so rapidly.
“I’m nurse, not teacher,” Frances said, firmly.
“Nurse, then. Is that the plan for the pageant you are writing?”
“A part of it,” she admitted. “Some ideas that came to me the time I went to Amarillo.”
“With the make-believe treasure chest?”
“Yes.”
“Read it to me, will you, Miss Nurse?” he asked.
“If you will keep still. I never did see such a chatterbox!” exclaimed Frances, in vexation.
“I’ll be just as still as still!” he promised. “Maybe it will put me to sleep.”
“Mercy! I hope it isn’t as dull as all that,” she said, and began to read the pages she had written.
CHAPTER XXVII
A DINNER DANCE IN PROSPECT
The girl from Boston did not come over to see Pratt that very next day; but soon she, as well as the remainder of the young people who had been the guests of Mr. Bill Edwards and his hospitable wife, were stopping at the Bar-T daily and inquiring for Pratt; and as soon as he could be helped downstairs and out upon the veranda, he held a general reception all day long.
In the afternoon when the Edwards crowd was over, the old hacienda took on a liveliness of aspect that it had never known before. The veranda was gay with bright frocks and the air resounded with laughter.
The boys gathered around Pratt and plans for future hunts and other junkets were made–for the young bank clerk was rapidly recovering. The girls meanwhile made much of the old Captain–all but Sue Latrop. But she did not count for as much as she had at the beginning of her visit at the Edwards ranch. The other young folk had begun to find her out.
The punchers who were off duty were attracted to this gay party on the porch, as naturally as flies gravitate to molasses. The Amarillo girls–and, of course, Mrs. Bill Edwards–saw nothing out of the way in Captain Rugley’s hands lounging up to the hacienda to talk. Most of them were young fellows of neighboring families, and quite as well known as were the visitors themselves. Sue Latrop’s amazement at this familiarity only made the other girls laugh.
Unless she would be left alone on the veranda with Pratt (which she considered very bad form) she was obliged one afternoon to go down to the corral with the crowd to see a bunch of ponies fresh from the range.
Some of the half-wild ponies rolled their eyes, snorted, and galloped to the far side of the corral the instant the visitors appeared.
“Get your reserved seats, gals!” cried Fred Purchase, preparing to open the gate. “Roost all along the rail up there and watch the fun. I bet Fatty Obendorf falls off and breaks a suspender-button–fust throw out of the box!”
“Oh my! you don’t mean for us to climb up there?” gasped Sue, as one or two of her friends tucked up their skirts and started to mount the fence.
“Sure. Reserved seats at the top,” laughed Mrs. Edwards, likewise mounting the barrier.
“Why! I am afraid I could never do it,” murmured the Boston girl.
“You’ll miss a lot of fun, then,” declared one of the Amarillo girls, callously. They were all getting a little tired of Sue Latrop and her pose.
Finding herself the only one on the ground, Sue scrambled up very clumsily and just in time to see Fatty rope the first pony out of the bunch that was now racing around and around the corral.
This was a black and white rascal with a high head and rolling eye, that looked as though he had never been bridled in his life. But it was only that he had been some months on the range, and freedom had gone to his head.
Fatty lay back on the lariat and dug his high heels into the sod. When the pony felt the noose he leaped into it, it tightened around his neck, and the creature came to the ground, kicking and squealing.
“By hicketty!” yelled Purchase. “Ain’t lil’ old Fatty good for suthin’? Yuh could suah use him tuh tie a steamboat tuh–what!”
For all the fun the other punchers made of Fatty Obendorf, he had his selection out of the herd blindfolded, bridled, and saddled, before any other pony was noosed.
“Good for you, Fatty!” cried Frances, who was perched on the corral fence with the other girls. “And that’s a good horse, too; only you want to ’ware heels. I remember that he’s a kicker.”
“Oh! Fatty don’t keer if his fust name’s Kickapoo,” jeered Fred.
The black and white pony gave Obendorf all the work he wanted for some minutes, however, and afforded the spectators much excitement. He wasn’t a bucking bronco, but he showed plainly his dislike for human management. Spur and bit and quirt, however, was a combination that the pony was quickly forced to give in to.
Fred himself straddled a speckled, ugly-looking animal, and put it through its paces in short order. It was a spectacular exhibition; but some of the other punchers laughed uproariously.
“What’s the matter with you fellers, anyway?” demanded Fred, complainingly. “Ain’t you a-gwine to accord me no praise? Don’t I look as purty on hawseback as that fat chunk does?” he added, referring to Obendorf.
“You know very well,” called Frances, from the seat of judgment, “that I drove that speckled pony to my little jumpcart two years ago. That’s Chippy–and he’s almost as big a bluff, Fred, as you are! He looks savage enough to eat you up, and is really as tame as tame can be.”
“Hi, Teddie! she’s got yuh throwed, tied, an’ branded, all right!” shouted one of the other punchers.
The girls on the fence welcomed each feat of horsemanship with great applause. Some of the ponies “acted up,” as Tom Gallup called it, “to the queen’s taste.”
“Whatever that may mean, Tom,” Mrs. Edwards said, dryly. “Why don’t you try your ’prentice hand on that buckskin? He’s dodged the lariat a dozen times.”
“Why, that Bucky is a regular rocking-horse, I bet,” declared Tom, who, for a city boy, was a pretty good rider.
“Get down and ride him, Tommy,” urged Sue. “Can’t you ride as well as these country boys?”
“I never said I could,” retorted Tom, doubtfully. “You girls are guying the punchers, too. Why don’t one o’ you get down and show ’em what you can do?”
“Frances can beat all you boys riding, Tommy,” Mrs. Edwards cried.
“Bet she couldn’t even get aboard of that Bucky,” young Gallup instantly responded.
“You’re not going to take a dare like that, are you, Frances?” demanded Mrs. Edwards.
Sue became disdainful the moment Frances came into the argument. She had nothing further to say.
“I believe the boys are all holding back on that little buckskin,” said Frances, laughing.
“Step right this way, Ma’am, step right this way,” urged Fred Purchase, bowing low and offering his lariat. “Here’s my rope and I’ll lend ye anything else ye may need if ye wanter try that Bucky. He’s some bronco, believe me!”
Frances got down off the fence.
“Oh! don’t you try it, Frances!” cried one nervous girl. “That pony looks wicked!”
“Let her break her neck, if she wants to make a fool of herself!” snapped Sue, sotto voce.
Nobody heard her. All were watching too closely the range girl approach the buckskin pony. She had accepted Fred’s lariat and the coil of it began to whirl about her head.
“There it goes!” cried Tom Gallup.
The buckskin started on a long, swinging lope; but it could not get out from under the coil of the lariat. The noose fell and the plunging pony went head and forefeet into it. Frances leaped with both feet upon the rope, just as it snapped taut. Bucky went on his head, kicking all four feet in the air.
“Got him! got him!” shrieked the excited Tom, and the girls cheered likewise.
And then the lariat snapped in two!
Muddied and scratched, the buckskin scrambled to his feet, his eyes blazing, nostrils distended, and as wild a horse as ever came off the range.
“Look out, Miss Frances!” yelled Mack Hinkman, who had just come upon the scene. “That thar buckskin hawse is a bad actor.”
“Oh! the dear girl! Whatever did possess me to urge her on?” cried Mrs. Edwards. “Boys! Save her!”
But it was all over before any of the punchers, or the visitors on the fence, could go to Frances’ rescue.
The buckskin rose on his hind legs and struck at the girl desperately. She had gathered in the slack of the broken lariat and she swung it sharply across the pony’s face, leaping sideways to avoid him.
The pony whirled and struck again, whistling shrilly, the foam flying from his jaws. Once more Frances avoided him.
Tom Gallup was yelling like a wild boy on the fence. Sue could scarcely catch her breath for fear. She would not have admitted it for the world; but the courage of the range girl amazed her. Her own rescue from the charge of the little black bullock by Frances had not impressed Sue Latrop as did this battle with the pony in the arena of the horse corral.
Fred Purchase ran with another lariat. Frances seized it, flung the noose over the upraised head of the pony, took a swift turn around a shed post, and brought the “bad actor” up short.
She insisted, too, on cinching on the saddle and putting the bit in the pony’s mouth. Then she mounted him and as he tore around the corral, the girl sitting as though she were a part of the creature, the boys and girls joined the punchers in cheering her.
It was not in this way, however, that the girl visitors to the ranges learned the true worth of Frances Rugley. They were, after all, only “porch acquaintances.” Once only had the party been invited into the inner court for luncheon, and their brief calls to the ranch-house offered little opportunity for the girls to really see Frances’ home.
They had met her so much in riding costume that, like Pratt Sanderson, they were amazed when she appeared in a pretty house dress. And they were really a bit awed by her, for although the range girl was of a naturally cheerful disposition, she possessed, too, more than her share of dignity.
“You don’t flit about like these other girls, Frances,” said the old ranchman, who was very observant. “You grow to look and seem more like your mother every day. But the goodness knows I don’t want you to grow into a woman ahead of your time.”
“I reckon I won’t do that, Dad,” she said, laughing at him fondly.
“I don’t know. I reckon you’ve had too much responsibility on those shoulders of yours. You left school too young, too. That’s what these other girls say. Why, that Boston girl is going to school now!
“But, shucks! she wouldn’t know enough to hurt her if she attended school from now till the end of time!”
Frances laughed again. “That is pretty harsh, father. Now, I think I have had quite schooling enough to get along. I don’t need the higher branches of education to help you run this ranch. Do I?”
“By mighty!” exploded the Captain. “I don’t know whether I have been doing right by you or not. I’ve been talking to Mrs. Bill Edwards about it. I loved you so, Frances, that I hated to have you out of my sight. But – ”
“Now, now!” cried the girl. “Let’s have no more of that. You and I have only each other, and I couldn’t bear to be away from you long enough to go to a boarding school.”
“Yes–I know,” went on Captain Rugley. “But there are ways of getting around that. We’ll see.”
One thing he was determined on was Captain Dan Rugley. He proposed to have “some doings” at the ranch-house before Pratt was well enough to be discharged from “St. Frances’ Hospital,” as he called the hacienda.
The old ranchman worked up the idea with Mrs. Edwards before Frances knew anything about it.
“They call it a ‘dinner dance,’” he confided to Frances at length, when the main plan was already made. “At least that’s what Mrs. Edwards says.”
“A ‘dinner dance’?” repeated his daughter, not sure for the moment that she wished to have so much confusion in the house when there was so much to do.
“Yes! Now, it isn’t one of those dances you read about out East, where folks drink a cup of tea, and then get up and dance around, and then take a sandwich and the orchestra strikes up another tune,” chuckled Captain Rugley.
“No, it isn’t like that. I couldn’t stand any such doings. I’d never know when I’d had enough to eat; every dance would shake down the courses so that my stomach would be packed as hard as a cement sidewalk.”
“Oh, Daddy!” said Frances, half laughing at him.
“No. This dinner dance idea is all right,” declared the ranchman. “We give a dinner to the whole crowd–all the girls and boys that have been coming over here for the past two or three weeks.”
“It will make fifteen at table,” said the practical Frances, thinking hard of the resources of the household.
“That’s all right. I’ll get in the Reposa boys to help San Soo and Ming.”
“Victorino, too?” asked his daughter, curiously.
“Yes,” declared the Captain, stoutly. “He’s sorry he mixed up with Ratty M’Gill. Vic isn’t a bad boy. Well, that’s help enough, and San Soo can outdo himself on his dinner.”
“That part of it will be all right–and the service, too, for José and Victorino are handy boys,” admitted Frances.
“We’ll have out the best tableware we own. That silver stuff that came from Don Morales will knock their eyes out – ”
“Oh, Daddy!” cried Frances, going off into a gale of laughter. “You picked up that expression from Tom Gallup.”
“That’s the slangy boy–yes,” admitted the old ranchman, with a broad smile. “But some of his slang just hits things off right. Some of those girls think you’re ‘country,’ I know. We’ll show them!”
Frances sighed. She knew it meant that she must dress the part of a barbarian princess to please her father. But she made no objection. If she tried to show him that the jewels and ornaments were not fit for her to wear, he would be hurt.
“Yes!” exclaimed Captain Rugley, evidently much pleased with the idea of a social time that he had evolved with Mrs. Edwards’ help, “we’ll have as nice a dinner as San Soo can make. After dinner we’ll have dancing, I’ll get the string band from Jackleg. Jackleg’s getting to be quite a social centre, Mrs. Edwards says.”
Frances laughed again. “I expect,” she said, “that Mrs. Edwards is eager to have a dance, and the Jackleg string band is a whole lot better than Bob Jones’ accordion and Perry’s old fiddle.”
“Oh, well! Of course, an accordion and fiddle are all right for a cowboy dance, but this is going to be the real thing!” declared her father.
“Aren’t you going to invite the boys as usual?” asked Frances, quickly.
“Not to the dinner!” gasped her father. “But that’s all right. To the dance, afterward. Some of them are mighty good dancers, and there aren’t boys enough in Mrs. Edwards’ crowd to go round. It’s quite the thing at a dinner dance, she says, to invite extra people to come in after the dinner is over.”
“All right,” said Frances, suppressing another sigh.
“And I’m going to send off for half a carload of potted palms, and other plants. We’ll decorate like the Town Hall. You’ll see!” exclaimed the old ranchman, as eager as a boy about it all.
Frances hadn’t the heart to make any objection, but she was afraid that the affair would be a disappointment to him. She did not think the boys from the ranges, and Sue Latrop and her girl friends, would mix well.
But the Captain went ahead with his preparations with his usual energy. He had Mrs. Edwards as chief adviser. But Frances overlooked the plans in the household in her usually capable way.
The big drawing-room was thoroughly cleaned and the floor waxed. The scratches made by Ratty M’Gill’s spurs were eliminated. When the potted plants came–a four-mule wagon-load–Frances arranged them about the dancing floor and dining-room.
She found her father practising his steps in the hall one morning before breakfast. “Goodness, Daddy,” she cried. “Do be careful of your weak leg.”
“Don’t you worry about me,” he chuckled. “I’m going to give old Mr. Rheumatism a black eye this time. I’m going to ‘shake a leg’ at this dance if it’s the last act of my life.”
“Don’t be too reckless,” she told him, with a worried little frown on her brow. “I want you to be able to ride to Jackleg to see the pageant. And that comes the very day but one after our dance.”
“I’ll be all right,” he assured her. “I have a dance promised from Mrs. Edwards and each of the girls but that Boston one, right now. And I wouldn’t miss your show in Jackleg, Frances, for a penny!
“I only wish Lon were here to enjoy it. I got a letter from that minister saying that Lon and he will reach here next week. If they’d come early in the week they’d get here in time for the pageant, anyway.”
With so much bustle and preparation about the Bar-T ranch-house, there was not much likelihood of anybody being reckless enough to attempt stealing the old Spanish chest, or its contents.
These days the Captain kept the room in which the chest of treasure lay double-locked, and at night slept in the room himself. From sunset to sunrise a relay of cowboys rode around the huge house and compound, and although Pete Marin, as Ratty M’Gill’s friend from Mississippi was called, was still at large, there was no fear that he, or anybody else, would get into the hacienda at night.
Frances, with all her duties, had less time to devote to Pratt’s entertainment now. In truth, as soon as he was able to get downstairs by himself he complained that he lost his nurse.
When the crowd came over from the Edwards ranch, and sat around on the porch, Frances was not always with them. One afternoon–the very day before the dinner and dance, in fact–she came through one of the long, open windows upon the veranda, right behind a group of three of the girls. It was by chance she heard one of them say:
“Well, I don’t care, Sue, I think she is real nice. You are awfully critical.”
“I can’t bear dowdy people,” drawled Sue Latrop. “I know she’ll be a sight at that dinner to-morrow night. My goodness! if for nothing else I’d come to see how she looks in her ‘best bib and tucker’ and how that queer old man acts when he is what he calls ‘all dolled up.’”
