LITMIR.BIZ

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      The Ranch Girls and Their Heart's Desire

      CHAPTER I

      THE BRANCH OF THE TREE

      Across a wide prairie a man and woman were riding side by side at an hour approaching twilight on a September afternoon. Moving slowly they appeared to be studying the landscape.

      Toward the west the sky was banked with gold and rose and purple clouds, while the earth revealed the same colors in the yellow sand of the desert spaces, the wide fields of purple clover, and the second blooming of the prairie roses.

      "Strange to have you living at the old Rainbow ranch again, Jack, and yet under the circumstances perhaps the most natural thing in the world! Long ago when I was a young fellow I learned that when human beings are hurt they follow the instincts of the homing birds who seek the nest. You have always loved the old ranch better than any place in the world, more than the other girls ever loved it, so with the news of your husband's death I knew you would return from England and bring your son with you, Lady Kent, once Jacqueline Ralston of the Rainbow ranch. Somehow I never have learned to think of you, Jack, by your title of Lady Kent."

      "No, Jim, and why should you?" the girl answered. "I never learned to think of myself in that fashion. I am going to confide something to you, Jim Colter. I always have confided my secrets to you since I was a little girl. I never learned during the years of my married life in England to feel that I was anything but a stranger there. Yet for my husband's sake I did my best to like England and try to make English people like me. I was never specially successful. I presume I am hopelessly an American and, what may be worse, hopelessly western. At present I feel that I wish to spend all the rest of my life in Wyoming. But one is not often allowed to do what one wishes. This morning I received letters from England, all of them asking when I intended to return and settle down as Dowager Lady Kent at Kent House, to bring up little Jimmie in a manner becoming a future British Lord. The worst of it is I don't want to go back and I don't want to bring up my son as an aristocrat. My husband was an Englishman, but I am an American and have never believed in titles. Frank had no title when I married him. I want little Jimmie to be half an American anyhow and wholly a democrat. What must I do, Jim Colter, stay here on the ranch with my own people and lead the life I love, or go to England and spend half my time amid the conventional society existence I loathe, and the other half playing Lady Bountiful to the poor people of a small village?"

      Jacqueline Ralston, who was Lady Kent, regardless of her own protest, now reined in her horse, and rising in her saddle let her glance sweep the wide horizon.

      In the wide, gray eyes, in the low, level brow, in the full, generous lips and abundant vitality one might have recognized the pioneer spirit, infrequent in human beings, but more infrequent in women than in men. Yet this Jacqueline Ralston Kent, one of the original four "Ranch Girls of the Rainbow Lodge," possessed. All her life she had loved personal freedom, wide spaces, a simple, every-day, outdoor existence without formality. She felt a natural intimacy with the people who attracted her without consideration for their social position. Yet in so contrary a fashion does fate deal with us that Jack had spent the greater part of her married life under exactly opposite conditions.

      "For my part I don't dare advise you, Jack, I so want you to stay on at the Rainbow lodge, more than I wish anything else in the world at present. With Ruth gone, I don't see how I shall ever get on with my four new little Rainbow ranch girls without you to help mother them. Yet I had pretty much the same experience once before! Odd how circumstances repeat themselves! You must first do what you think best for Jimmie. What does the boy himself wish to do, stay here at the ranch and learn to be a ranchman under my training, or go back to Kent House?"

      Laughing Jack shook her head, crowned with gold brown hair; she was without a hat, after her old custom.

      "You know the answer to that question as well as I do, Jim. Jimmie adores the ranch. He is named for you, and you have done everything in your power to make him love it. Then I must have implanted my own affection for the freedom of our western life in my little son. Jimmie insists that he wants nothing better in the future than to stay on here and run the ranch and the mine when you and I have grown too old to be troubled with such responsibilities. He is only eight years old at present and so we need not feel laid on the shelf at once."

      "No, but I am not young as I was, Jack, hair is turning pretty gray these days," Jim Colter answered. "I have never mentioned this to the boy, but I have wanted the same thing he does. I would like Jimmie to live here and perhaps marry one of my four girls and keep the old ranch in the family through another generation or so. Sentiment of course, yet so far Jimmie is the only son on the horizon! Here I am with four daughters, Jean and Ralph Merritt with two, Olive and Captain MacDonnell with no children, and Frieda's and Professor Russell's little girl so frail that it is hard to count on any future for her."

      At this Jack's expression clouded. A moment later she again arose in her saddle, this time pointing toward the eastern portion of the Rainbow ranch. To the west and north lay the gold mine discovered years before, though no longer yielding a supply of gold as in its early days.

      The mine had never interested either Jacqueline Ralston or Jim Colter as it had the other members of the family. They had been horse and cattle raisers before a mine was ever dreamed of, and it was the rearing of the livestock for which Jim and Jack cared intensely to this day.

      Riding through the ranch, every half hour or so they had passed a herd of cattle browsing amid the purple alfalfa grass, seen the sleek brown cows standing with their young calves close beside them. Less often they had run across a small drove of horses and young colts, as horses were no longer so good an investment as in the old days. Yet the present Rainbow ranch owners would prefer to have lost money than be without them, the horses having always received Jack's especial affection and attention as a girl and upon her occasional visits home to the ranch after her English marriage.

      "Can that be a herd of horses or cattle stampeding there toward the east, Jim? We are too far off to see distinctly; suppose we ride in that direction," Jack said unexpectedly.

      Wasting no time in words Jim Colter nodded. The following moment both horses, their noses pointing eastward, were galloping across the open prairie fields and away from the road.

      Experienced ranchmen, he and his companion appreciated that the cloud of dust and the grouping of dark bodies advancing toward them with unusual rapidity represented trouble of some kind. At this time of the year it seemed scarcely possible that a wolf had stolen from the pack and frightened one of the herds. Yet there was no accounting for the tricks of nature. Moreover, frequently a number of horses or cattle suffered from group fear, the one transmitting the fright to the other without apparent reason.

      Half a mile away the drove of young horses, which Jim Colter had finally located with his field glasses, turned and swerved south.

      Almost as swiftly the two riders moved off in the same direction, hoping they might be able to divide the frightened animals and drive them apart.

      A quarter of a mile farther along, riding at no great distance from each other, Jim Colter heard an exclamation from his companion, so sudden, so terrified and so unexpected that he reined his own horse sharply until for an instant it stood trembling on its hind legs, its slender nose snuffing the soft air.

      "Tell me, Jim, is that Jimmie's pony ahead of us? The saddle is on the pony, but no one is riding. Jimmie can't have ridden over here alone? He can't be anywhere near-by?"

      Yet even as the question was being asked, the man and woman saw and, seeing, understood.

      The pony which Jack had spied with the bridle dangling over its head was moving from place to place nibbling at the most luxurious patches of clover. Beyond, and closer to the trampling herd of panic-stricken animals, lay a small figure, outstretched on the ground and probably until this moment asleep.

      Whether he now heard the oncoming horses or the cries of his mother and guardian, in any case, awakening, he jumped to his feet and the same instant turned, beheld, and understood his own danger. In a few moments, seconds perhaps, the frightened animals would be upon him, trampling, snorting, unconscious of his presence in their frenzy.

      As the boy ran across the field toward

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