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
Frank looked again. Jack was going to face death squarely, or else to
drive her pony across the bull's course, before it reached her. Yet the
last method seemed hopeless, because the pony was master of the race,
not Jack. The girl had stooped low in her saddle. Her feet were out of
the stirrups and she lay almost flat across the pony's back. She seemed
to slip to one side. Frank watched for another horrified second. Jack
and her horse were not a hundred feet from the bull.
Then something slid along the ground on the right side of the pony, ran
a few feet, let go of the bridle and sat down limply in the brown grass.
Frank shouted as he had never thought it in him to shout. The trick of
dropping from her horse that Jack had just effected, he had seen
accomplished once in a Buffalo Bill show in London. The vision of a girl
doing it for her own safety was the most thrilling sight he had ever
seen in his life.
Tricks, deserted by her rider, and uncertain what she should do alone,
sprang to one side as the bull lunged at her, and the danger was all
over in an instant.
Frank found Jack shaking like one in a chill. But she smiled at him
bravely and put out her hand to let him pull her off the ground.
"Perhaps, Frank," she said, forgetting formalities in her thankfulness,
"if I live long enough, I may some day learn to do what I am told.
Please take me back to Olive."
Tricks, exhausted by her wild run, was led back to Jack, a weary and
repentant pony.
Jack was silent and shaken. She followed Frank back to the spot where
they had left Olive, without a word.
The cowboys were returning to the work of branding the cattle and it was
high time the ranch girls started for home. But neither Jack nor Frank
could find a trace of Olive. She had completely disappeared. They rode
over to the spot where they had lunched with Mr. and Mrs. Simpson, but
the automobile party had left for their ranch. Frank inquired of a dozen
cowboys. No one of them had seen Olive.
Jack tried not to cry, but the day's experiences had been too much for
her. She had never been so utterly wretched before.
"Don't worry, Miss Ralston," Frank urged. "I'll bet you anything that
Miss Olive has run across your overseer, Jim Colter, and has returned to
Rainbow Ranch with him."
Jack shook her head despairingly. "Olive would not go away without
telling me, for anything in the world," she insisted. "Besides, Jim
would not leave me here. He is somewhere around, won't you find him?"
Frank insisted that Jack wait in a place of safety a mile farther along
the trail toward their ranch. For an hour Jack walked up and down a few
yards of barren ground, her pony resting near her. The time seemed an
eternity.
By and by Frank arrived with Jim Colter. Jim looked sternly at Jack, but
she was past caring what he said or thought of her.
"Can't you find Olive, Jim?" Jack pleaded.
"I'll do my best," Jim returned. "Mr. Kent will take you home to the
ranch."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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