The Ranch Girls at Rainbow LodgeVandercook, Margaret
General
The Ranch Girls at Rainbow Lodge
Vandercook, Margaret
Ranch life -- Juvenile fiction; Western stories; Young women -- Juvenile fiction
Jim had not the remotest idea of Miss Ruth Drew's age. The name had an
elderly sound to it and Jack had described her as an old maid;
consequently Jim's mental picture showed a small, grey-haired woman with
corkscrew curls, somewhere in the neighborhood of fifty, with thin lips
and a penetrating eye. She would probably reduce him to powder with a
single glance, but he meant to be as polite to her as he humanly could
and to speak to her only when it was absolutely necessary.
"Jim," Jack suggested finally, "you have sighed like a human bellows
three times in the past five minutes. If you meet Cousin Ruth with that
expression, she'll think we are sorry she has come. Please go over into
the town and buy yourself some tobacco or something to cheer you. I'll
get on Tricks and ride up and down near the track for a while, and then
we will both be in a better humor when the train finally does get in."
Miss Ruth Drew sighed. She was sitting in the Pullman car with her eyes
closed and an expression of supreme fatigue on her sallow but not
unattractive face.
It seemed to her that she had been traveling ever since she could
remember. Were there people in the world idiotic enough to think there
was beauty in the western prairies? For days she had looked out on bare
stretches of endless brown plains rising and falling in one monotonous
chain. The sand was in her eyes, in her ears, in her mouth; worst of
all, it had piled up in a great mass of homesickness on her heart.
How could she have turned her back on dear New England villages, with
their sleepy, green and white homesteads and trim gardens, for this vast
desert? "Of course, she was doing her duty in coming to look after four
motherless girls," Ruth remembered, with a pang, but her duty at the
present moment did not appear cheerful.
When the conductor announced that the next station was hers, Ruth sat up
and arranged her hat and veil neatly. She adjusted her glasses on her
thin nose and put back the single lock of hair that had strayed from its
place. Her heart began to flutter a little faster. Was she actually
arriving in the neighborhood of Rainbow Ranch? It didn't seem possible!
If you can imagine a very prim, grey mouse kind of girl, who looked a
good deal older than she was, with ash brown hair and eyes and a neat
tailor-made suit to match, you will get a very good impression of Miss
Ruth Drew. Her figure was very good and her mouth might have been
pretty, except that it looked as though she disapproved of a great many
things, and that is never becoming. But she was tired and homesick and
it was not a fair time to judge her.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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