“Horse wrangler. Horse trainer, that means.”
“But, my goodness!” chuckled Walter, “‘to
wrangle’ certainly means quarreling in speech.
I should think it was almost like a Quaker meeting
when this Mr. Kane trains a pony.”
“It is a fact,” laughed Rhoda, “that
the ponies make much more noise than Hesitation does.”
As they entered this deeper gulch, the girls cried
out in delight. The trail was narrow and grassy.
Growing right up to the path—so that they
could stretch out their hands and pick them—were
acres and acres of wild roses. They scented the
air and charmed the eye for miles and miles along
the trail.
They rode on and on. Finally the little cavalcade
wound out of the gap, down a slope, crossed a tumbling
river that was yards broad but not very deep, and
the ponies quickened their pace as they mounted again
to a higher plain.
“There it is!” shouted Rhoda, and, waving
her hat, she spurred her pony ahead and passed the
buckboard at full speed.
On a knoll the others saw a low-roofed, but wide-spreading,
bungalow sort of structure, with corrals and sheds
beyond. The latter were bare and ugly enough;
but the ranch house was almost covered to the eaves
with climbing roses in luxurious bloom.
OPEN SPACES
“On, Nan!” cried Bess, squeezing her chum’s
arm, “what do you think of it?”
“It is more beautiful than I had any idea of!
And Rhoda had to come away from all this just to go
to school,” answered the equally excited Nan.
Here Grace Mason’s usual timidity showed itself,
as she said:
“But there is so much of it! We must have
come twenty miles from the railroad station.”
“More than that,” put in her brother,
from his seat in the saddle.
“I don’t care!” cried Bess.
“It’s wonderful.”
“Oh, it is wonderful, I grant you,” said
Grace. “But—but everything is
so big—and open—and lonesome.”
“Cheer up, Sis,” said Walter. “We
are all here to keep you company, to say nothing of
the cows and the horses,” and he laughed.
Mrs. Janeway’s opinion was practical to say
the least, for her first words were, as the buckboard
reached the house: “I certainly shall be
glad to get a bath.”
Rhoda had thrown herself from her pony and rushed
up the steps of the veranda to greet two persons who,
later, the visitors found were Mr. and Mrs. Hammond.
The former was a rather heavily built, shaggy-bearded
man, his face burned to a brick-red and such part as
the beard did not hide covered with fine lines like
a veil. His wife was a tall and graceful woman
who showed nothing in her clear, wide-open eyes of
her blindness which for so many years had set her
apart from other people.
The blind woman stepped with assurance to the edge
of the veranda to greet the visitors, and it was Mrs.
Janeway she first met and embraced.
