A DAY AT THE ALAMEDA

The next day they rode over again to the Alameda ranch to see the Chief’s horses of which he was so proud. By this time, as Ted said, they were so accustomed to riding horseback that it seemed queer to walk around.

“Ted, that sounds for all the world like some old sailor who didn’t like dry land,” said Sue. “Anybody’d think, to hear you, that you were born and bred on a ranch.”

“Wish I had been,” Ted flung back over her shoulder, as she rode past. “Peggie, will you change places with me? You go back to school, and let me stay here.”

“Have to ask mother that,” Peggie replied, shaking her head.

“Have you asked her, yet, really, Peggie?” said Polly, who was next to her in the file of horses. But Peggie shook her head.

“Not yet. I mustn’t. It isn’t my turn. Don comes next.”

But Polly made up her mind privately, to ask Jean. If the skeleton turned out to be worth anything, the Doctor would be the first to purchase it for the Institute at Washington, and Peggie was the finder, so the money would be hers and the Chief’s, as it was his property. The Admiral always said that Polly was the most rapid builder of air castles he had ever known, but that never disconcerted nor discouraged Polly.

It was the first time since their arrival at the ranch that Jean had let them ride without her, but with the extra harvesters that week, she felt she must help her mother. Sally Lost Moon was willing, but slow and a poor cook.

“Peggie knows the way over as well if not better than I do,” Jean had said, that morning. “Take the trip easily, girls. I think you’ll be all right.”

Peggie and Polly rode together, and the other girls behind them. It was a merry cavalcade of demoiselles, as Mrs. Sandy put it, that trotted up to the Alameda that morning. After they had turned the ponies into the corral, the whole day lay before them. They went far up the back road with Sandy himself, first of all, about a mile, until they came to the horse range. Carefully selected, it was, out of all the land he owned, chosen for shelter and good water and grass. Here he had built a great corral in the center, with feed-sheds for winter. Here grazed fifty beautiful mares, horses that had never felt a saddle touch their glossy arched backs.

“What do you think of them?” asked the Chief, proudly, as he rested one foot on a fence rail, and looked at the lot with loving eyes. “They are my special hobby, girls. I always liked a fine horse even when I was a youngster, but I never saw any to compare with my beauties over yonder. I keep weeding them out, and breaking in the ones that don’t seem fit for the royal family, as it were. They all know me, too. Watch.” He put his fingers to his lips and blew a shrill, far-reaching whistle. Every neck lifted at the call, heads were turned towards him, and some whinnied anxiously. Then one broke into a run, and the rest followed.

“Oh, oh, just look at them come,” cried Polly, enthusiastically. “See their manes float on the wind, and how light they are.”

“Many a time I’ve come across a drove of them feeding on a good plain, and have watched until my own horse would give the alarm to them, and off they’d all go like that. It was hard catching them, and hard breaking them afterwards, but those that did, got horses with the speed of the wind in their hoofs, and the strength of the hills in their muscles. The desert breed is the only one that matches it, I’m thinking.”

“Who takes care of them?” asked Ted.

“The boys. I’ve five of them. I used to try to do it all myself, but they fare better and so do I, if I keep away. Besides, there’s plenty to be doing down at the home ranch. Over yonder, a few miles more, are the cattle, and some more of the boys. There’s about five hundred head. I used to have a larger herd, in the old Texan trail days, but there are few real ranches left now. They’re all stockmen and farmers. I’ve got some of the last long-horned steers in the county, now, out yonder, and when I settled here, they were all Texans. I sold some youngsters to a farmer in Iowa, I remember, for yoke work, and he wrote back after he’d got them home, that he didn’t know what to do, because their horns were so wide he couldn’t get them into the barn. ‘Widen your barn door, you nester,’ I wrote him. ‘Don’t cut the horns. Cut the barn.’ And he did too.” The Chief laughed heartily over the recollection, and they all went back to where Mrs. Sandy was watching for them on the broad, cosy porch.

“Do just what you want to, girls,” she told them. “Go where you feel like going, and play that it is home for a day. Ted, I saw you looking longingly at the collection of hunting knives and guns in the long dining-room. Why don’t you take the girls in to see them? They are all trophies of Sandy’s Indian campaigns,” she added with pride.

There seemed to be no kitchen to speak of, in sight. The long sunny room at the back of the house was a great living-room and dining-room too. There was a huge rock fireplace that reached clear up to the rafters, and the walls were decorated with all sorts of treasures of the Chief. On one side were specimens of Indian beadwork. There were hunting bags made of leather with beautifully-beaded fronts, the beads woven in solidly in threads instead of being fastened to the cloth or leather. There were hunting jackets, heavily fringed and beaded richly, with elk teeth and eagle feathers, and bear claws fastened to them ornamentally.

“Here is the headdress of old Red Buck, a Sioux Chief,” Sandy told them. He held it up so they could see that it was as tall as he was, a great cascade of eagle feathers. “The day I saw him in battle, he wore nothing but this, and another strip about his waist, but he was so heavily painted that he looked fully dressed. The others turned their war ponies about, and ran at the finish, when they saw the cavalry closing in on them, but he stood his ground, and stood yelling defiance at us, and shooting arrows until a bullet caught him, and he fell back from his pony.”

“What did the pony do?” asked Polly.

“Stood over his master, with lowered head, and whinnied to him. We found the two of them that way, and I stopped to take the headdress. He was a brave old lad, that redskin. I honor him for standing his ground alone with a whole troop of United States cavalry swooping down on him. That elk head up yonder is the biggest ever shot in our section. He used to come down and fairly taunt us early settlers with his royal kingship of these hills and valleys. I got him one moonlight night up at Ghost Lake, about seven miles above here, after nearly a week’s stalking.”

“Aren’t the moccasins pretty?” Isabel exclaimed, quick to notice anything fanciful. There must have been twenty or thirty pairs dangling from the wall on nails.

“Those there,” said the Chief smiling, “belong to my wife. They are her special reward of merit from the women folks in the tribes, twenty or thirty years ago, and more, I guess. Some of them were given to me before we were married. They’d come around and find me building this cabin, and I’d tell them just what it was for, and they’d go away and think about it. Then after a time, one would return, and bring me something for a peace offering to my bride. Mostly they brought moccasins, and they are certainly worked fine, those honeymoon slippers.”

“Isn’t this a papoose case?” asked Ruth.

“Yes. An Indian girl named Laughing Flower left that here one day. Her baby was pretty sick, I guess, and she didn’t like the way the old women and medicine men fussed over it, so she brought it over here to Diantha. It couldn’t walk, and they had told her at the camp it never would, that it was bewitched, and all that sort of nonsense. When I came home I found Di sitting in front of the fire there, with the little brown thing on her lap. She’d loosened its clothes, and bathed it, and rubbed its limbs with sweet-oil, and hung the papoose case up on the wall. After a week, Laughing Flower went back, and her boy could walk. Little two year old he was, with eyes like coffee beans. That’s why they loved Diantha, I guess, and let us stay here in the valley. We always treated them decent.”

“Now, tell us about all these guns, please,” begged Sue. “I didn’t know there were so many kinds.”

“Didn’t you? I’ve used everything from an old flint lock that belonged to Zed, down to this lightweight Winchester. These breech-loaders came in use along in the Indian wars, when I was a little lad about five, I guess. Here’s a carbine that went through the Civil War. It belonged to an old pard I had, back in my first days here; Tennessee Clayborne, he was called, but mostly Tennessee. He was with Custer to the finish.”

The Chief was silent after that, whistling softly to himself as he fingered the old gun lovingly.

“I wish I could shoot,” said Polly. “Not to kill anything but just to hit something.”

“Do you? Well, I shouldn’t wonder if that could be gratified.” Sandy lifted down a lightweight Winchester. “We’ll go out, and see which one has the steadiest hand, and surest eye.”

“Polly has, I’m sure,” said Isabel. “I don’t want to shoot, please. I don’t like even to touch anything that will go off.”

So out they went, and the Chief put up a piece of paper on a tree near the wagon-sheds, not a very big piece either.

“Now, you girl sharpshooters,” he laughed, stepping back, “let’s see what sort of scouts you’d make.”

Ted tried her luck first, and came within an inch of the paper, then Sue shot, and clipped the bark a couple of inches below the mark. Polly was laughing and eager, and managed to take a corner off the white square, but it was Ruth, quiet, steady-handed Grandma, as the girls called her, with spectacles and all, who lifted the rifle to her shoulder, aimed and sighted slowly, and put her bullet where it should go.

“There’s one place where you can’t trust to luck,” said Sandy. “That’s when you’re leveling a gun. You’ve got to think and figure too. Ruth’s got a calculating eye, I should say. We had one little shaver with us, in the Shoshone uprising, with only one eye, and he could pick off any brave’s topknot you’d prefer. We’ll throw some pieces of wood into the creek, and see if you can hit them on the go. That’s good practice.”

“Peggie, you didn’t try,” called Polly, as Peggie came around the corner of the house.

“I went over to the cook-shack to see Fun.”

“Fun?”

“Ah Fun, the cook. He came from California with Sandy a long time ago. His name is Ah Fun, and he never smiles. Isn’t that queer? I always go over and speak to him.”

“Oh, I want to see him too,” Polly said, so after the target practice, a formal call was paid to the cook-cabin, and there they found Ah Fun, a thin old Chinaman, with a face so yellow it looked like a dry maple leaf.

“Better not let the Doctor see him,” said Ruth, in her comical way, without a smile, when they came away. “He’ll gather him up for a fossil specimen sure as shooting.”

The girls strolled down towards the corral, for it was getting late, and the ride lay before them. Polly had lingered before a picture that hung over the old chest of drawers in Mrs. Sandy’s bedroom. It was a portrait of Miss Honoria, taken in the seventies, a wreath of flowers on her head, and a low-necked dress with a fichu of white Spanish lace about her shoulders. Very girlish and lovely it looked. Mrs. Sandy lingered too.

“Does she look at all like that now?” she asked, softly. “That was my favorite picture.”

Polly felt a sudden impulse, and spoke on the spur of it.

“No, she doesn’t look at all that way. She’s quite old looking, and very gray, and she hardly ever smiles. Mrs. Sandy, please forgive me, but what is the trouble?”

“Trouble, dear child?” A little flush stole to Diantha’s cheek, and she bent over to smooth the linen pillow shams, already without a wrinkle. “What can you mean?”

“I don’t know how to explain it,” Polly went on, “but I have always wished I had a sister all my very own, and here you have one, and—and—”

“And what, Polly?”

“And you never see each other, or write, or anything. Was it—was the trouble so bad as all that? I don’t see how anything could ever be that way with sisters.”

“Don’t you, dear? Perhaps you will some day.” Diantha paused, and thought for a minute. They could hear the laughter of the girls mingling with the Chief’s deep bass down at the corral as they got the ponies ready for the home trip. “It is so far back now that only in the hearts of a few old families lie the pain and the rancor of the old war days. My father, Colonel Calvert, never forgave the North. He believed the government should have purchased the slaves and then freed them under special act of Congress, and forbidden slave-holding thereafter. But he held it as unnatural and unlawful for brother to lift hand against brother, or to take away property rights without restitution. This is all so far back that you cannot get even the shadow of its intensity, and I am glad you cannot, but my childhood days were filled with it. Honoria has all the Calvert pride, but I am afraid I had not, for, dearie, I married a Northerner, and love him better than all of Virginia, and so—” she made a hopeless little gesture with her slim, pretty hands, “so Honoria has never forgiven me, nor will she accept Sandy, no, not after thirty-five years. Honoria is very consistent.” She finished with a sigh.

“Polly, are you ready to go?” called Peggie outside.

“Coming,” said Polly. She reached over, and put her arms around Mrs. Sandy’s throat, and pressed her cheek to hers. “I’m sorry for both of you, dear Mrs. Sandy,” she whispered. “Have you tried writing to her?”

“She never replies to my letters. I am afraid there’s nothing that can be done, Polly child.”

“I know what I’d do,” said Polly, resolutely, as she reached for her hat. “I’d just get on a train, and go down home, and go straight up to the Hall, and when I saw her, I’d hug her before she knew what was happening, and I’d shake her too, a little bit, and kiss her, and say, ‘Hello, Honoria.’ That’s what I’d do.”

Mrs. Sandy laughed heartily at the mental picture of her accosting the stately Honoria in such a fashion after thirty-five years, but Polly was serious in her intent.

“It would settle the whole thing, Mrs. Sandy, dear, I am sure it would, and grandfather and I’d be delighted to have you and the Chief at Glenwood with us too.”

“Oh, Polly, do you realize what the trip would cost? Sandy would have to sell off some of his thoroughbreds, wouldn’t he?”

“Why not take the money that will come from the bones in Zed’s gulch, and make it a second honeymoon trip?” asked Polly. “Don’t laugh at me, please. I know it’s only another air-castle, but let’s keep hoping.”

“All right, child,” promised Mrs. Sandy, as she kissed her good-bye. “I’ll keep hoping.”