CHAPTER III

PROBLEMS

They were gone. Raquel and Mom stood at the end of the long veranda running the length of the house, and watched the car as it climbed towards the pass.

Mom looked like some hurt thing; she was too unconscious of anything but that they had gone to try to hide her feelings. She and Raquel walked side by side back into the house, Georgie following.

Raquel put her arm around Mom’s waist. She felt strong, and tender, and it comforted Mom. Words and caresses were few, but understanding was there.

“Georgie.” Mom reached out and drew him, the only baby she had left, into her lap, rocking him there tight in her arms. She rocked and rocked till gradually the strain eased and they began to talk about how much milk Ruth was giving, and all the jobs Georgie would have to take on.

Georgie at twelve was very round of face, very skinny of leg, snubby of nose, and liberally freckled. His two front teeth had reached their majority before the rest of him had, thus endowing him with the hated nickname of “Tooth,” but to Mom he had not yet lost his pearly baby teeth.

“Look after your mother and sister, Georgie,” was all that Dad had told him when he said good-by. “Remember you’re man breed.”

Dad had looked strange in a store suit, with a white collar that parted fearlessly each side of his Adam’s apple. In his red tie there gleamed like a cat’s eye a huge yellow diamond, purchased from a Mexican refugee.

It was the outfit Dad usually wore to Bank Directors’ meetings. Now that he was gone, his flannel shirt hung limply on a nail on the kitchen porch. His famous two-gallon hat, without which he never left the house, hung beside it. There it would hang till his return.

Raquel, looking at it, grinned ruefully.

“I wish what Dad kept under his hat was there now.”

Old Man Daniels had made plenty of enemies in his time, but there was no one, at the time of our story, who would rather have shot his hat and what was under it, full of holes than “A. B.” Meyers. It was not only the matter of losing out on fresh range, but that called loan at the bank had filled “A. B.” so full of poisoned hatred that he would stop at little to get back at the Boss of the Lazy L.

As the Pathfinder, carrying Dad to the railroad station, swooped down through Red Dog, and swirled past the saloon, “A. B.” looked out.

“Daniels off to take charge of cattle transportation overseas,” reported Red Bailey, the proprietor of the saloon, as the car disappeared in a cloud of dust. “Got his gal home from school in the East to run the rancho.”

“Takes more than fancy ropin’ and trick ridin’ to carry on the cattle biz,” remarked “A. B.” drily.

“You said it,” Red agreed. “A little money comes in handy.”

“A. B.” grew an angry red and made an impatient gesture. Then an evil smile came to his face. And at that moment he knew how he would get back at Bill Daniels. He would strike at him through his girl. A grand chance to get even, if Daniels wanted to be such a fool.

Raquel, meanwhile, all unconscious of the forces that were preparing to fight her, was thinking back over her parting conversation with Jimmy.

They had gone into the little school room together so that Jimmy could show her the school work laid out for Georgie that winter. Raquel was wearing a green jersey sports dress, a pretty thing, the most becoming she had--she had slipped into it at the last minute instead of pulling on her ranch clothes. How glad she was Anne had finally persuaded her to buy it!

Jimmy pompously took his seat at the teacher’s desk, while Raquel squeezed into one of the mutilated old desks which Dad had brought out from town when Grant and Custer were little, so that his children would have all the advantages of real school atmosphere.

“What’s it to be now, Raquel?” Jimmy had asked. “Oh, I know you’ve come back to handle a job that releases three able-bodied men to go to war”--an expression of momentary bitterness pulled at Jimmy’s mouth--“but how does it all seem, apart from the fact that there’s no life like the old ranch? I mean to say, what did you bring back with you from the East, from School, besides some mighty stunning clothes and three months’ good schooling? Got any new ideas?”

Raquel looked puzzled. What did Jimmy mean? She was not particularly analytical; she took things as she found them. She was going to run the ranch and that was all there was to it. If she could just hang on till Dad’s return, that was all she asked.

“Well, I couldn’t exactly get any new ideas about cattle ranching back East, could I? But I can think of one improvement. It seems to me I sort of hanker after a good shower bath and a couple of large porcelain tubs in place of that green tin tug boat we lug around to the warmest fire. Seems that if the Lazy L could afford a cattle dip and a couple of pianos it ought to be able to stand at least one genuine bath tub.”

Jimmy roared his delight.

“Well, I’ll tell you, Jimmy, it was really a wonderful experience, but somehow it seemed to me that the girls, none of them, had ever had a real responsibility outside of their monthly marks, and what they learned didn’t have much real meaning to them because of it. I mean--well, having lived out here you could just understand how the discoverers and pioneers felt when they found all the new countries of America. And that made me interested in history; the people seemed more real to me, and the growth of a country something about human beings, instead of just dry writing on a page.

“And I never realized till then how easy you had made it for me, Jimmy, tellin’ me such interestin’ things about the people in history as we went along. So I got fine marks in history and it was only because I knew their lives.”

Jimmy’s face broke into the smile that had won him the instantaneous liking of the Ranch of the Lazy L.

“It’s worth a lot to hear you say that, Raquel; I--oh, well, you know. There’s nothing I could do would repay what this ranch and this family have done for me.”

Raquel had a vague feeling of disappointment. Well, Jimmy was so nice of course he would feel like doing all he could. But she wished he hadn’t said that about repaying--or that he’d said he taught her because he wanted to anyway.

And Jimmy, strangely at a loss for him, was trying to find words to make his appreciation more personal; to say what she herself had meant to him, and that there wasn’t anything he wouldn’t do for her. And then--it was time to go, and he hadn’t said anything.

They were blowing the horn outside. He and Raquel hurried out to the Pathfinder where Dad was already stowing away his grip, the same one that Raquel had taken away to school and had hastily unpacked for Dad’s use last night.

In the sorrow at parting with Dad, Raquel forgot Jimmy’s going.

But Jimmy himself thought about his lost opportunity all the way into town, and was kicking himself for his stiffness, his tongue-tied stupidity.