The Ranch Girls' Pot of Gold

CHAPTER XII

CARLOS MAKES GOOD

"DON'T, please, Mr. Colter!" Olive faltered.

Frieda clutched at Jean's skirts, with big tears in her eyes, and Jean stared at the scene with a frightened face. Ralph Merrit had walked some distance away and Ruth had gone back to their tent, worn out by her second disappointment over Jack's failure to return. The three girls who remained had rarely seen anyone so angry as Jim Colter. He had not spoken when Carlos first returned; now he made the boy stand up before him and give an account of himself.

Ruth was crying when she heard a swish of a whip through the air and thought she caught the sound of a sob from Frieda. She listened again. Jim was speaking in a voice she did not know he could use, and for a minute she turned quite cold.

"You deserter," the voice said harshly. "I forgave you for running away from camp this morning, when I told you to stay behind, and then when I leave you for an instant you turn traitor the second time. There is no blood of an Indian Chief in your veins; they at least keep faith with their friends." Swish! Ruth knew the whip had struck again.

She slipped quietly on the scene. Olive and Frieda were both crying, and Jean was biting her trembling lips. Jim's face was crimson and his blue eyes blazed as only a man's can who is slow to anger. Only Carlos stood as still as stone. He had but one thin shirt over his slender body, but when he staggered it was from fatigue not pain. He bore his punishment with the silence and fortitude of an Indian warrior.

Jim had lifted his stick for the third time and this blow he meant to make the severest of all. A small, white hand closed over the raised whip. "Stop, Mr. Jim," Ruth said quietly. "Carlos is a child and whatever he has done he is too tired for you to punish him now. I think he did not mean to desert Jack any more than you did." Ruth did not intend her words as a reproach, but Jim's arm dropped quickly to his side and he turned so pale that she was frightened. "Take Carlos away and see that he has something to eat," he ordered Olive, "and, Jean, make Frieda stop crying." Without glancing at Ruth, Jim picked up a flask of beef tea, which he had had prepared for Jack's return, and without another word set out to search for Jack.

A little later Ralph Merrit proposed that he too should go out to reconnoiter. Having also met with misfortune at "Miner's Folly," he knew the country all about the neighborhood. The young man was saying good-by to Ruth and Frieda, when Jean's face, paler and more wistful than usual, appeared over her chaperon's shoulder.

"Ruth, dear, Olive and I want to go with Mr. Merrit to look for Jack," she begged. "Yes, I know it is awfully selfish of us to leave you, but we are perfectly worn out with waiting. Besides, Jack don't know Mr. Merrit and he will never be able to persuade her to return with him."

Ralph laughed. "Frieda, won't you give me the blue ribbon on your hair to prove to your sister I have been a guest of the caravan party?" he asked. "Though, of course, I don't believe she would be so obstinate."

Frieda solemnly unwound the band of ribbon which she used to keep her hair out of her eyes, and Ralph tied it in his buttonhole, where the ends floated out like blue pennants; but understanding their impatience, Ruth let Olive and Jean go to assist in the search for Jack.

It was now broad daylight; the birds were singing and the sun shining with the peculiar brilliancy that follows a rain-washed night. Ruth put Frieda to bed, as the little girl was exhausted; then she persuaded Carlos to lie down on her own cot. The boy had said nothing, only he never let go the gray ball of fur which he had brought home from the woods, but kept it pressed close to him. Ruth had no idea what animal Carlos had found, though it had a sharp, pointed nose, restless eyes, and every now and then tore at something with its baby teeth. Hidden near an old tree in the woods back of the gold mine, Carlos had run across a baby wolf cub, and having a curious fellowship with animals, had brought it back with him, hoping he might be allowed to raise it as a dog.

The ranch girls knew of Carlos' strange communion with birds and beasts. They would come at his call and eat out of his brown hand, but it did not seem remarkable to them, as the boy had lived always in the open and was only a half-tamed creature himself.

Ruth left the children alone in the tent. Fifteen minutes later she returned and Carlos had again disappeared. This time she made up her mind that the Indian boy must be sent back to his own people, since they could do nothing to stop his disobedience. But Olive had been trying to teach the little fellow to read and write, and in straightening up her bed Ruth found a piece of torn yellow paper. On it Carlos had written in quaint, scrawling letters: "I Go Girl Never Afrid. Find Not, Come Back Not."

Ruth put the letter away; her heart once more softened toward the lad, hoping for his sake that he might be the one to bring Jack to them.

But no one need have been troubled about Jack on this wonderful summer morning. Quite comfortably she awoke in her nest of branches to a bewildering chorus of song, a little stiff, of course; hungry and thirsty. But climbing out on the ground, she ran for half a mile until the soreness was out of her muscles and the surging blood warmed her heart and cheeks. Jack took off her sweater, carrying it under her arm, the wind blew back her hair, which had the colors of the sun in it, her lips were open and full and a deep crimson. If ever any of the old-time pagan goddesses that one reads of in mythology sheds her influence over the modern girl, Jack had drawn some of her spirit from Diana. She looked as you might imagine Diana to have looked after she had spent the night hunting with her maidens in some lonely forest – fresh, brilliant and gay.

When Jack stopped to rest from her run she saw, near the rocky gorges and in many of the waste places, red cacti blooming against the gray buttes, like splashes of flame. Gathering a little she stuck it in her belt, but Jack hoped to discover a cactus plant of a different kind. Her father and Jim had taught her all they knew of the plants and flowers that grow in the American desert, for they wished her to be prepared for just such an emergency as had now befallen her. At first Jack kept close to the path at the side of the gorge, retracing the steps she had wrongly taken the night before. When she came beyond the thicket through which the cougar had followed her, a stretch of arid country spread away to her right on this side the gorge. Standing in the desert with nothing about it but sand and sage brush, Jack spied the cactus she sought. It rose like a tree, with thick, bunchy leaves at its base, and dozens of clusters of small mustard-colored flowers on separate branches sticking out from its summit like the ribs of an umbrella.

The American aloe has been the salvation of many a traveler in the desert country of the West. Hurrying to it, Jack cut away some of the thick leaves and then settling herself comfortably in the sand she sucked the sap from the leaves until her throat was no longer parched and her hunger and thirst were both appeased.

She was resting, trying to make up her mind to go back to the ravine, where Jim would surely find her, when she heard a well-known whistle. It was not like the note of a bird, and yet it did not seem to come from a human throat, yet Jack recognized it at once. It was the odd sound Carlos made when calling to the birds in the woods or fields. The call had traveled a great distance in the clear morning air.

Jack clapped her hands loudly. "I am coming, Carlos, I am coming," she cried; "wait for me." Then she ran back toward the edge of the cliff. She would have liked to cry out with pleasure when she first saw Carlos, but instead kept quite still.

The lad had made himself a whistle from a stalk of wild grass that grew like a reed. He was wandering along searching everywhere for Jack, yet beguiling his way with wonderful woodland noises which he made through his whistle. A robin sat perched on his black hair, several other birds fluttered over his head, afraid to alight and yet unwilling to leave him. If Jack had suggested the huntress Diana, Carlos looked like a follower of Pan. Surely in mythological days just such red-brown boys had accompanied the old wood god, making the weird and eerie music that caused a smile to hover ever on his wild face.

The caravan party, except Jim and the truants, were eating luncheon when Jack and Carlos burst in upon them. Jack flew to Ruth, flinging her arms about her and giving her a breathless hug. "It was all my fault, as usual," she explained, "but there is nothing the matter with me except a bruise on my forehead and an empty feeling in another place." Jack stopped, suddenly discovering the presence of the stranger, Ralph Merrit.

Hugging Jack with one arm, Ruth respectfully shook hands with Carlos with the other. The small lad tried not to show emotion, but a light of triumph shone in his eyes. He and not the "Big White Chief" had found "The Girl Who Was Never Afraid." Now surely he would be forgiven the sin of his failure to keep faith.

Worn and haggard, Jim returned a few hours later to find his fellow-travelers engaged in cheerful conversation and seemingly forgetful of the strain.

"I hope nothing will happen to me again while we are on this trip," Jack remarked carelessly. "I thought last night in the storm that the gypsy who came to our ranch had surely put her curse on me. You know she announced that something would happen to me that would force me to depend on other people, and as I had to depend on Carlos to show me the way home to the caravan, perhaps the spell is past."

Olive, sitting next Jack, gave a shudder. She had never confessed how much she had thought of the woman's evil words to her, but Frieda, who was playing with the stones Jack had brought back from the gold mine, made a quick turn in the conversation.

"Jean," she announced indignantly, "you told me you'd give me the gold Jim and Jack brought from the mine with them, and now they haven't brought any, because Ralph Merrit says these rocks are no better than other pebbles. I really did think they might find some gold, though I said I knew they wouldn't," she ended mournfully.

Jean laughed. "Same here, baby. I confess I thought maybe they would come home with a grand discovery and we would all be as rich as cream forever afterwards. Did you have any such idea in your head, Jack?"

Jack blushed. "Not really," she conceded; "but of course as soon as one hears anything about a gold mine, one goes quite crazy. Remember how we used to plan, when we were little girls, to run away and find the 'Pot of Gold at the End of the Rainbow' as soon as we grew up?"

Jean and Frieda nodded, but the entire party was soon busy with their plans for resuming their trip in the early morning. Jim asked Ralph Merrit to go along to the Yellowstone Park with them. The young man had been through the western reserve once before, and since his experience with Jack, Jim thought it might be just as well to have another man to divide responsibilities for the remainder of the trip.

By nine o'clock the next day the caravaners had moved away from the quiet oasis in the desert, their tent had been folded up and the horses reluctantly driven from the fresh grass. The little place had become but a memory to its dwellers by the wayside.

CHAPTER XIII

ENTERING WONDERLAND

"THE Forest of Arcady, Jim," Jean called gayly from her seat on the back of her pony. She and Olive, with Ralph Merrit walking beside them, had just climbed a steep road that led across the Continental Divide into the great park of the Yellowstone, called Yellowstone by the Indians many years ago, because its river ran like melted gold between massive stone walls, shading from palest lemon to a deep orange glow.

Behind its outriders the ranch girls' caravan moved slowly upward. They had been passing through tall pine forests that shut them in to a cathedral gloom, but beyond and farther down the hill Jean had just caught sight of a grove of quaking aspen trees with the sky above them shining as bright as sunny Italy. The grove looked like a great umbrella shop with its parasols open on parade, for the trees had circular green tops growing high above the ground, and their straight, slender trunks were like white umbrella handles.

Jim cracked his whip in answer to Jean's speech and Jack waved her hat from the place next him; just behind them Ruth clutched at Frieda and Carlos to keep them from falling into the road in their efforts to see everything at once. Away to the right they could catch a faint glimpse of one of the long arms of Yellowstone Lake, and they meant to reach a hotel on its northern banks by twilight.

For the past ten days the caravan party had been moving almost steadily onward. Twice only had they stopped at small towns for mail, to buy fresh provisions and to get rid of some of the stains of travel. However, the entire party looked like a troupe of Spanish gypsies, some of them fair-haired and blue-eyed as the old Castilians, others dark as the Moors, but all with their complexions tanned to varying shades of brown from their weeks in the open air.

"Nature's Wonderland!" Jack spouted rapturously in the language of a guidebook. "Really, Ruth, the Park is even more beautiful than we dreamed, isn't it?"

But Jack ceased talking abruptly and Jim reined in his horses on a stretch of level road, while Olive and Jean slid gently down from their ponies' backs. The noise of their approach had frightened a band of almost a hundred antelopes, who were browsing in a near-by forest, and now they started off in a long, galloping run single file through the trees to a fertile green valley below.

When the deer were out of sight, Frieda flung a dimpled brown arm about Jim's neck. She wore a yellow straw bonnet with a blue ribbon on it, tied under her chin. Ruth had purchased the bonnet in one of the towns where they spent the night, for each member of the expedition was weary of crawling down from the wagon to pick up Frieda's lost hat. "Do let's rest here a few minutes, Jim," Frieda urged. "The horses have stopped, anyhow, and my legs are so tired dangling from the seat."

Ruth had let go her hold on the children for a few minutes, and without waiting for Jim's consent, by some sort of silent signal they both slipped over the wagon wheels and danced away. For hours they had been passing by every variety of beautiful wild flower, but this minute Frieda and Carlos discovered an isolated hill crowned with jagged rocks and covered with bitter-root, whose delicate blossoms made the ground look like a carpet studded with small pink stars, leading to a giant's castle in the air.

It was not yet time for luncheon, but the caravaners were always hungry, and Ruth, Jean and Olive dragged a basket of sandwiches out of the wagon, while Jim Colter and Ralph Merrit led the horses away to search for water.

"Better look after the children, Jack," Ruth suggested carelessly.

Jack moved slowly toward the pink hill. She could see that Carlos had run lightly up it and was now crowing proudly from the peak of one of the highest rocks, while poor Frieda was crawling laboriously after him, fired with ambition and envy. Jack stopped a minute to laugh. Her small sister was so round and chubby, that even though she clung to the shrubs as she struggled upward, every now and then she would slip back almost as far as she had gone on.

"Don't try to go any farther, Frieda; come back to me," Jack cried warningly. But Carlos had leaped to another higher crag and was beckoning his companion to follow him, so Frieda either didn't hear or wouldn't heed her elder sister; neither did she look upward toward the goal "to which she would ascend." Carlos vanished around another rock and was out of sight; he did not think to mention that there was a flat platform back of the first big rock and that it was already occupied. Suddenly from her position near the bottom of the hill, Jack saw an old goat thrust his head out over this rock and survey Frieda, with the long gray beard and the glittering eye of "The Ancient Mariner." He was evidently an old time resident of the Park and had no intention of sharing his retreat with an outside intruder.