CHAPTER XV

MOLLY

The day after Oriole had arrived at the Three-bar Ranch she was introduced to Molly. Molly was what Harvey Langdon called a "blue" pony--almost the color of a Maltese cat--and she was a "dear" as Oriole immediately declared. The girl from the East had seen plenty of bucking, snapping, ugly-looking half-broken ponies; but Molly was as kind looking and affectionate of disposition as a cocker spaniel.

"Oh!" gasped Oriole, "I am just going to _love_ that pony."

"You'd best learn to ride her first," was the comment of the practical Sadie Brown.

That was not hard work, for Oriole took to the saddle famously. And Molly was as gentle as a horse could be. Yet she was spirited, too, and could cover a deal of trail in an hour. In a fortnight Oriole was riding about the ranch as though born to the saddle.

And how much there was to see! The girl from the East began to realize that she had come to a very, very busy country. No room for drones on this ranch. Shedder Crabbe, for instance, would have been given short shrift here. But Oriole thought that a boy like Teddy Ford must have been quite in his element at the Three-bar Ranch.

She spent, of course, much of her time with the twins. Sadie Brown was actually Mr. Langdon's housekeeper as well as the twins' nurse. Oriole relieved the woman of many small duties, and Myron and Marian were perfectly contented when the visitor was with them, giving Nurse Brown time for other duties.

Aside from Ching Foo, the cook, there were several houseboys--all Mexicans. Not many ranches in this country were as well governed and the houses as luxuriously furnished as Mr. Langdon's. There was a fine player-piano and a talking machine in the great living room; and it was plain that the owner possessed good taste as well as much wealth, or the house would not have been so comfortable and beautiful.

The twins were well supplied with playthings; but they lived out of doors most of the time, early as was the season. The middle of the day was warm, although from the veranda great patches of snow could still be seen upon the sides of the mountains, and the nights were still cold.

But the spring had no set-back. The grass flourished and the distant forest line was as green as green could be. Oriole often rode Molly out to where one of the herds grazed, and she met most of the punchers employed on the Three-bar in this way. So she was bound, before long, to see the three men in whom she had become so deeply interested--Ridley, Shaffer and Mudd.

Both Harvey Langdon and Nurse Brown believed that there was little to hurt Oriole when she scampered over the plain on Molly. That is, by daylight. Even the coyotes slunk into hiding at sight of a mounted person during the daytime. And unless one penetrated the cañons or gulches of the foothills, a bear or mountain lion was not to be found.

The girl herself soon gained the impression that no man was to be feared on the Three-bar Ranch. Sometimes a bunch of Indians passed the house and corrals; but they were as simple and kindly people as Oriole had ever seen. And she _did_ love the copper-colored babies!

She wrote Flossy and Minnie Payne--as well as Nat Jardin and Ma, and Mrs. Joy and her housekeeper, Lyddy Ann--all about her new life and the strange sights she saw. First of all in interest, she thought, were the "papoose babies" belonging to the nomadic Indians--some of them strapped to a board in the old style, for all the Indians were not modern in their ways.

She scampered away from the house one afternoon on the blue pony and finally fell upon a trail that she had never traced before. She had been warned not to venture into the hills at any distance from the grazing herds; and usually when she rode she could go to the top of any little ridge and see some of the punchers riding herd. This trail she chanced to find was only a narrow path, but cut deep in the sod. It was an ancient water-trail; but of course Oriole could not read signs.

Molly cantered along the path easily, twisting and turning as the path did, and finally plunged down into a deep coulee and through a patch of high sage. Instead of coming up directly out of the shallow hollow, the path followed a gully that at one time must have been a water-course, and in a few moments the girl was riding through a scrub oak patch and in as wild a ravine as she had ever seen.

"Oh, my!" murmured Oriole, and drew Molly to a sudden stop. "I must go back. This is a wild country and I may get lost."

Just then Molly raised her head, stretched forth her nose and gave every indication of being about to whinny. Oriole had seen the blue pony do this before, and she knew how to stop her. The girl leaned forward in the saddle and seized the pony's nose, shutting her nostrils firmly.

"Be still, you naughty girl!" commanded Oriole. "I don't want you to call like that. Suppose--suppose somebody we don't like hears you?"

For she was suddenly smitten with the thought that in this unknown and wild ravine there might lurk some danger--some enemy, although she could not imagine what kind of enemy there could be here on the Three-bar Ranch.

But as she whispered to Molly to keep still Oriole suddenly heard a gruff voice say:

"Do as you like, you two. I'm going to get my time from Harvey Langdon and beat it out of here. And, be-lieve me! when I split the breeze away from the Three-bar I aim to visit that old prospect hole first, no matter what you fellers say."

"You'd better keep away from there, Tom Mudd, unless you're aiming to peeve me and Shaffer a pile. You know what the agreement was," said a still gruffer voice.

Oriole listened with more than curiosity. The names she heard spoken were of two of those very "bad men" of whom Teddy Ford had first told her. She removed her hand from Molly's nose, but the pony only sneezed softly. It evidently was not heard by the men in conference beyond the clump of scrubby trees.

"Be-lieve me!" said the man called Mudd, "I never ought to have agreed to any such fool idea. And I break the bargain right now! We ought to have gone to that old pit and made our getaway while Harvey Langdon was East. Now he is home again and the worry about the kids is off his mind, he is a-goin' to keep his eyes open. If he sees us pirootin' up that-a-way toward the Three Sisters, he'll mebbe smell a rat."

"He'll smell a heap more than one rat if you try to double-cross us, Tom, and go up there to the old pit alone," said a third voice, which the sharp-eared girl believed must be that of Shaffer.

"Don't you fellers think I'm afraid none of you!" exclaimed Mudd. "You and Hank can't put nothing over on me----"

"Aw! who is trying to hurt you, Tom?" broke in the second speaker. "It is you that seems to be wantin' to bust up this here triumvirate, as the feller said. Hold your horses."

"Well!" grumbled Mudd.

"Well, yourself! If we had left when Harvey Langdon was away, he'd have been leary of us, sure! Now we better stay till the spring rodeo. After that we can light out 'most any time. It will be the dark of the moon, too."

"Golly!" exclaimed the third man, "I couldn't find that pit in the dark. The trail is as blind as a maze."

"I'll _smell_ it out," said Mudd confidently. "If Hank and you can't----"

"Don't you go to smellin' too sudden, Tom," advised the voice that Oriole knew must belong to Hank Ridley. "We agreed to share and share alike--and that stuff can't be shared in the shape it is."

"Laws, no!" agreed Shaffer. "And we'll have a nice time carting it----"

"Leave that to me," broke in Hank Ridley.

Oriole had finally got Molly turned about and her nose headed for the direction of the ranch house. She stopped to listen to no more. For some reason she felt that these men would not be at all friendly to her if they knew she had overheard this conversation.

Yet she did not understand it at all! There was nothing about an old "prospect hole" and "the Three Sisters" in the story she had been told of the robbery of the Langdon Ranch.

Once out upon the open prairie again Oriole drew Molly in. She hesitated. She had never as yet observed Hank Ridley and his two mates, and she wanted very much to do so.

She believed the trio--"the triumvirate" as Ridley called them--would soon appear out of the brush-grown ravine. They might be hunting stray cattle; but Oriole felt that they must soon return to the open plain.

Nor was she mistaken. From the very path which she had followed appeared three riders. Molly was bearing the girl by this time well away from the coulee which was the entrance to the scrub-oak patch. Oriole circled around and came up to the three men from the rear.

"Hullo!" shouted one of them--a dark-faced, mustached man whom she knew to be Tom Mudd from his voice. "Here's the gal Harvey Langdon brought from the East with him and Sade Brown. Hullo, Sissy! How do you like it out here?"

"Oh, I think it is very pleasant, sir," Oriole replied demurely.

"That's that there blue horse we brought up from the bottoms last horse round-up," said another of the three. "Likely critter."

"And right gentled, she is," observed the third.

They paid no further attention to Oriole, who rode slowly by. But the girl scrutinized them all keenly, photographing the three upon her mind indelibly. So these three rough looking fellows were Ridley, Shaffer and Mudd! She was quite ready to believe that they were untrustworthy and that perhaps, as Teddy Ford had intimated, they knew more than they were willing to tell about the disappearance of the chest of silver plate from the ranch house.

To George Belden Oriole went again with her questions the next time he came to make one of his calls upon Sadie Brown. Why he continued to call upon the twins' nurse Oriole could not imagine, for Miss Brown showed plainly that she scorned the foreman's attentions.

However, as Sadie Brown treated the man so unkindly, Oriole found all the more time to talk with him. And she wanted to know now about certain matters that had assumed importance in her mind since she had overheard the snatches of conversation between the three "bad men."

"What is a 'prospect hole?'" repeated George Belden. "Why, it's a prospect hole--that's all," and he chuckled. "The pocket hunters and prospectors that searched those hills yonder for gold and silver ore sunk many shafts and the like, hunting for color, or following a vein of ore that usually petered out before they got very deep. There's dozens of 'em over there," and he pointed with a flourish toward the dim, blue hills to the north and west of the ranch house.

Oriole pointed, too. She had suddenly made out three nice, rounded hilltops quite close together--just as though the trio must encircle a half-hidden glen.

"What are those?" asked the girl.

"What are what?" drawled Belden, squinting up his eyes in his funny way.

"Those three--hills, are they? They seem taller than the other bumps I see over there."

"Why, sure, they are," said the foreman, carelessly. "Those are the Three Sisters."