JEAN MURRAY, RANCHER

For a minute or two there was silence in the quiet old room. Jean Murray drew the shell pins from her hair deliberately, and shook out its thick, curly waves. Then she went to the wardrobe, and took out her dinner dress before she answered. And Polly noticed that this was the simplest dinner gown she had ever seen. In fact, to Polly’s practiced eye, it was made of cream cotton voile, with a yoke of baby Irish crochet lace, and the same around the short sleeves. That was all. Yet when Jean slipped it on, and puffed up her hair, with a wide bank of black velvet tied about its reddish gold waves, and a narrow band of black about her girlish throat, Polly thought that she looked every inch a thoroughbred as the Admiral had declared.

“Miss Diantha lives on the next ranch to ours out home,” Jean said finally, and there was a curious note of rebellious contradiction in her voice, as if she were offering apologies against her will for Diantha Calvert. “She is my mother’s dearest friend, and we all love her more than I can say.”

“But why doesn’t she ever come back home to Queen’s Landing?” asked Polly wonderingly. “Grandfather has told us what a dear girl she was years ago, and how she was one of the belles here and up at Washington in those days. But that must be thirty years ago.”

“It surely was, and do you realize how old that makes her now? She is fifty her next birthday, I know, and she lives at the Alameda Ranch, about seven miles from us.”

“She does!” Polly’s brown eyes opened wide in amazement. “What’s her name, Miss Murray? What will the girls say?”

“Her name is Mrs. Alexander MacDowell, but we call her Mrs. Sandy,” and as Jean said it, even a casual observer could have told from the little tender smile on her lips, and the light in her eyes, what one member, at least, of the Murray outfit thought of Mrs. Sandy.

Polly pushed back her hair from her forehead quickly, as she always did when she was a little bit excited or surprised, and sat down on the window seat.

“Oh, dear, I came expressly to talk about Crullers, Miss Murray, and now I’ve found out about Miss Diantha. And it’s so interesting, I don’t know which to talk of first—and it’s getting late, and Aunty Welcome said I must hurry home.”

Jean laughed.

“Well, you are in a tangle, aren’t you?” she said. “I can tell you of Jane Daphne in a minute, but it would take days and days to make you understand our Mrs. Sandy. That is what we all call her out home.”

“Where is your home, please, Miss Murray? I don’t believe I ever heard you say.”

“I don’t believe that any of you girls ever asked, did you?” Jean’s blue eyes looked quizzically at Polly. Then she, too, sat down on the window seat, and looked out towards the West, where the sun was reddening the distant hills, and her face caught some of its radiance, as she went on, quietly. “My home is yonder, Polly, west of the hills. It is away, ’way out West in Wyoming, up in the northeastern corner, under the shoulder of Bear Lodge.”

“Is there a large family?” asked Polly, wistfully. “I love lots and lots of children in a family.”

“We think it is large. Let’s count up. There’s mother and father, first of all. Then I am the eldest, and I am twenty-eight. Neil is next to me. He is taking a post-graduate course at the State University. Then come Archie and Don. Arch is in his Soph year, and Don is only sixteen, so he helps father on the ranch, and goes to school winters. Then Margaret is the baby. She is twelve, and we call her Peggie. That is all of the real family, but besides there is old Sally Lost Moon, a half-breed Shoshone woman that mother took in one winter, and she has stayed ever since. Then father has about five men who work for him. They are mostly out on the range with the cattle. That is all the humans we have, as Sally would say. But there are horses, and dogs, and Prometheus, Don’s pet bear—”

“A real live one?”

“Yes, indeed, he is very much alive. I guess you would think so if you lived there. He is only a youngster now, but so full of mischief, you never can tell where it will crop out next. We have called him ‘Prometheus Unbound’ ever since the Sunday when the Missionary Bishop came to the ranch to dinner, and to hold service. That bear got loose somehow, Polly, and found his way into the cook house, and ate up everything in sight, and when Sally and mother went to set the table for dinner, you should have seen their faces!” Jean stopped and looked at her watch. “Child of mortality, as Miss Calvert would say,” she cried, “do you know the time of day? It’s after six now. Don’t ask me another question about home or Mrs. Sandy. I must hurry down to dinner, or I’ll be late for grace, and Miss Calvert never forgives that.”

“May I come and hear some more after school Monday?” asked Polly, as she followed the figure in white downstairs.

“Why, of course you may, and I shall be ever so glad to have you, Polly. Sometimes, this winter, I’ve wondered whether you girls really liked me or not.”

“We’ll like you better if you give us a chance to get acquainted,” said Polly, with her merry frankness. “I think the ranch is the most interesting place I’ve heard about in a long time. Oh, I forgot all about Crullers, Miss Murray.” She stopped short outside the dormitory door. “What did she do this time, please?”

“Broke her parole. She must stay in bed until to-morrow as a punishment. Just at noon to-day, she was found climbing out of the back hall window to the porch roof, and she dropped down to the other side of the garden wall, and made for the side street. Oh, she confessed. It was for pickled limes and doughnuts. Good-bye, Polly.” She went down the staircase, and turned to wave her hand at the bottom. And all at once an idea occurred to Polly.

“Couldn’t you come down to Glenwood to-morrow, and have dinner with grandfather and me, Miss Murray?” she asked eagerly. “We’d love to have you.”

“Would you, truly?” Jean paused, and smiled back at her. “Then I shall be glad to come. And I will have a chance to tell you more about the ranch, and Mrs. Sandy, bless her.” She turned, and made a low curtsy before the two girls in the oil painting, before she hurried down the wide old hall to the dining-room.

Polly went on out into the front garden where Stoney waited for her. He was half asleep on the grass by the gates, but roused up, and trudged after her down the broad, shady street towards Glenwood. Polly could hardly wait to reach home, and tell the Admiral that she thought his “thoroughbred” was Jean Murray.

The dinner hour was always a ceremonial period, partly because Aunty Welcome insisted on adhering to tradition in this regard, partly because both Polly and the Admiral enjoyed this time most of all the day.

There were long, delicate sprays of flowering almond in tall, slender vases at each end of the dining table, the only bright spot of color in the quiet, high ceiled old room.

“Am I late, grandfather dear?” Polly asked contritely, pausing a moment at the open doors. There was no reply, so she crossed the hall to the study, and tapped gently.

“Come in, child, come in,” called the Admiral’s deep, cheery voice, and she obeyed. There was some one in the room besides the Admiral. At first she could not tell who it was, but when the person put out his hand, and said, “Now, Miss Polly, have you forgotten your ‘smuggler’ so soon?” all at once, Polly remembered.

“Oh, it’s Doctor Smith.”

It was indeed, the genial, merry doctor who had been the girls’ neighbor at Lost Island on their vacation trip of the previous year. As Polly laid her hand in his, she remembered all the fun of that summer, how the doctor had lived alone at “Smugglers’ Cove,” and the girls had discovered him, and thought him a pirate or a smuggler. How they had gone to the Orienta Club’s reception, and had found that their smuggler was no less a personage than Doctor Penrhyn Smith, the great naturalist from Washington, D. C.

“Grown a trifle taller, Admiral, that is the only change. Where are you to spend the summer this year, Commodore Polly?”

“Not as a Commodore,” Polly replied, shaking her head, and sitting down on the broad arm of the Admiral’s chair. “We haven’t really decided yet, but we want to do something different from last year.”

“The Doctor is on the same trail,” said the Admiral. “Why can’t you be content, like I am, to let the summers drift along like the blossoms the wind is blowing off those fruit trees yonder?”

“Because we are children,” returned the Doctor promptly, quite as though his fifty-seven years were fifteen. “Last year I hunted a certain kind of polypus, remember, Polly? This year, I am seriously thinking of skipping away to Wyoming on a still hunt after a dinosaurus.”

“Oh, Doctor,” cried Polly, eagerly. “Are you? Those are the lizards that were running around before the Flood, aren’t they? And they’re terribly long, hundreds and hundreds—”

“Now, Polly,” warned the Admiral.

“Of inches,” finished Polly, mischievously. “Ruth was telling us about them. Ruth reads all that kind of stuff, you know. She’s walked right through a whale—I mean through the skeleton. She told us of some museum of natural history where there is a whale hanging in mid air, and a nice little gang plank is built through him so you trot across and feel like Jonah.”

“Preposterous, Polly!” laughed the Doctor.

“Truly,” Polly insisted earnestly. “I think it was at Charleston. Ruth’s been all around seeing interesting things, and she always remembers the most interesting of all to tell us girls.”

“I should say she did,” said the Doctor, gravely. “Polly, that whale story shall be preserved, and passed down to posterity. Now, I am really going up to Wyoming, and I sincerely believe that I shall tap the foothills and the buttes, and discover the long-buried remains of a dinosaurus, yet I feel that Ruth has gone me one better as a naturalist.”

“Wyoming,” repeated Polly, pushing her hair up from her forehead. “Grandfather dear, there’s another sign-post.”

“What do you mean, child?”

“Why, don’t you know, when you are undecided about something, if you watch, you will find sign-posts pointing the right way to go.” Polly’s brown eyes sparkled with eagerness, as she explained one of her pet ideas. “We want a good vacation this year, and a different kind of a one, and this is the second sign-post that has said Wyoming.”

“What was the first?”

“Jean Murray, ranch girl, thoroughbred, Wyoming.” Polly counted off the different heads on her finger-tips. “She is one of the Freshman teachers at Calvert Hall, grandfather dear, and she’s coming to dinner to-morrow, and we’ve got a wonderful surprise for you, I think.”

“Sign-posts?”

“Maybe.” Polly looked over at the doctor, and suddenly began to laugh. “Oh, I do believe—I’m almost sure—that even the Doctor is a sign-post pointing the way to Wyoming.”

“I am thankful it was not Kamchatka, for I verily think you would have had a try for it, Polly.” The Admiral rose, one hand on Polly’s young shoulder, and they went in to dinner, Aunty Welcome bowing and smiling in the wide hall outside the door as though she were trying to live up to her name.

And through the dinner, Polly listened with deepest interest to the conversation between her grandfather and the doctor, all about the recent researches throughout the Yellowstone valley, and following the glacial drift, and about dinosauri and other prehistoric animals until Wyoming seemed a veritable land of hidden enchantment. If it could be managed, then and there Polly made up her mind, the vacation club should have its summer outing in that far-off land of wonders.