Read Ebook: The Girls of Silver Spur Ranch by Cooke Grace MacGowan McQueen Anne

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Ebook has 766 lines and 39953 words, and 16 pages

"Why in the world don't you let Ruth sleep with Cousin Hannah?" argued Mary, "you know how you hate to--and she doesn't mind."

"Because it isn't fair that I shouldn't have my turn as well as the others--it's disagreeable to all of us. Now you just let me have my way, and say nothing else about it!" declared Elizabeth with authority, and as usual, she was allowed to have her way.

While Cousin Hannah undressed, moving ponderously about the little room, Elizabeth sat on the side of the bed, brushing her long blond hair, watching with critical admiration of the beautiful, the gleams of red and gold the lamplight cast upon its glittering strands, and formulating in her mind a plan to find out the secret of her birth--if secret there was.

She finally decided that plain speech was better than beating about the bush, and spoke in a carefully suppressed tone.

"Cousin Hannah," she said, with whispering decisiveness, "I want to know what you, and Mother and Mary were talking about in her room."

"Why, Libby!" exclaimed Cousin Hannah, plumping down upon the bed in her astonishment, "did you go and listen to what we was sayin'?"

"Indeed I didn't! But I couldn't help hearing you--and I think it's my right to know, if you were talking about me."

Certainty made Elizabeth calmly triumphant.

"I have felt, for a long time--ever since I can remember, that I was different from the rest of my family, though you didn't give me credit for having sense enough to see it. Of course, I love them all dearly but I can't help feeling that it's my right to know the truth, whatever it is. Cousin Hannah, is or is not my name Spooner?"

"Well," Cousin Hannah evaded the question, "what would you get out of it if your name wasn't Spooner?"

Elizabeth leaped up softly, she held her hairbrush as though it were a scepter; her long hair flowed and billowed about her as she walked with majestic tread, up and down the tiny room--she was seeing visions!

If her name was not Spooner! That would mean that her birth was, she felt sure, indefinitely illustrious some way. Of course she would never desert the people who loved her, and whom she would always love, but--might not something come of it that would be grand for them all?

"Libby," Cousin Hannah's eyes followed the moving figure with a distressed look in them, "your ma--Jennie Spooner--your true ma, if love and tenderness count for anything, never wanted you told. Mary knows, and she don't want you should know. When I watch your uppity ways I tell 'em it's high time they explained the situation to you."

"The situation--" Elizabeth hung breathlessly on her words with shining eyes, and an eager tremble of her lips.

"Yes, the situation," repeated Cousin Hannah heavily. "Jennie Spooner had a tough time raisin' you--a troublesome young'un as ever I see. You teethed so hard that it looked like she never knew what a night's rest was till you got 'em through the gums. I used to come over here many a time and help her; what with Ruth bein' so nigh the same age, she had her hands full. It was kept from you for fear of hurtin' your feelin's, if you must know."

"How could it hurt my feelings?" questioned Elizabeth, a little puzzled. "I love them all--but they should have told me. They ought to have known they couldn't change--" a swan to a duckling had been on the tip of her tongue, but she stopped in time, "me to a Spooner, even by their love and kindness."

"Change you to a Spooner?" slow wrath mounted to Cousin Hannah's face. She caught Elizabeth's arm as the girl passed by. "I reckon they couldn't make a Spooner out o' you, that's a fact. The Spooners, bein', so far's known to me, respectable householders--"

Cousin Hannah groaned. "Looks like I've let the cat out of the bag--don't it? Well, what I've got to tell ain't nigh what you think I've got to tell," she asserted doggedly. "You'll be sorry for askin'."

Through Elizabeth's mind flashed visions of a wonderful ancestry; to do her justice these dream parents did not in any way displace the father and mother she really loved with all her young heart--they were only that vision which comes to us all in some shape when we feel we are misunderstood--different.

Mary's step was heard approaching in the little corridor. She had undoubtedly been disturbed by the sound of their voices, and was uneasy for fear Cousin Hannah would be teased into making in judicious revelations.

"Tell me--tell me quick--" whispered Elizabeth, shaking her room-mate's arm. "Tell me before Mary gets here."

"Well, I will," gasped Cousin Hannah. "You ought to know it--but I warn you it's not what you're expectin'!"

When Mary stepped into the little bedroom Cousin Hannah Pratt had already spoken.

"Your pa and ma was movers that come here sixteen years ago--movers, like the folks you seen to-day and made such fun of. The name was Mudd."

These whispered words sounded in Elizabeth's ears, and the girl crumpled up on the bed sobbing just as Mary opened the door. Mrs. Pratt pulled the elder sister into the room.

"I've told Libby--she ought to have been told long ago--with you marryin' and goin' away and Ruth not havin' a bit of faculty and her bein' the one to take your place I think she was obliged to know it."

Mary came across the room with a rush, and took slim Elizabeth in loving arms.

"Go away, Cousin Hannah, please," she said. "You can sleep with Ruth and I'll stay with Elizabeth."

Mrs. Pratt, glad enough to be relieved from sight of the misery she had caused, hurried away and the two sisters were alone together. Mary knew very little of what Cousin Hannah had seen fit to reveal, a child herself at the time, she had but vague remembrances of it, and indeed Elizabeth asked no questions--she only needed to be comforted, and this Mary did as best she could.

The next day but one was the wedding day, Mr. Bellamy was expected in the morning and they would probably have no other chance for private talk, but Mary urged Elizabeth to go to their mother for comfort when the wedding was over, and some time late in the night they both fell asleep.

In the days that followed the wedding, when everything was strange, and they were settling slowly back into the usual routine Elizabeth found no opportunity to speak with her mother of that trouble which had come now to haunt every waking hour, and even pursued her into dreams.

Mary and her euphoniously named Mr. Bellamy had gone on their way to Oklahoma, where the bridegroom owned a ranch. Cousin Hannah Pratt, having helped with the wedding sewing and the packing, had gone back to Emerald and her own overflowing boarding-house. Mrs. Spooner, the three girls, and old Jonah were left alone, face to face with the problem of getting along.

Everything had settled into the usual routine at the Silver Spur; Mrs. Spooner, rather weak from her neuralgia and the strain of the wedding, sat on the front porch in a big chair which Elizabeth had endeavored to make comfortable with rugs and pillows.

"Are you perfectly sure I can't do anything else for you, Mother?" she asked anxiously. "Mary always waited on you so beautifully, while--it seems to me I've never done one little thing for you, when you've done so much for me!"

A big tear slipped from the long lashes and splashed on Mrs. Spooner's little hand, fluttering among the cushions. In a minute the mother-arms had pulled the girl's head down to the mother-breast, the thin fingers patting the blond braids and the mother-voice crooning comfort into the crumpled little ear buried upon the maternal shoulder.

"It--it doesn't matter, Mother," gasped Elizabeth, as she mopped her reddened eyes, "if I can just take Mary's place to you. I am going to try, my very level best."

"Then you'll be sure to succeed," said her mother, confidently. "You always succeed in everything you undertake--hadn't you noticed that, dear? Now, really, I'm just as comfortable as hands can make me, so you run on down to the corral and help Ruth and the Babe with the ponies. You ride with them to Emerald, and get the mail--it'll do you good. And be sure you bring me a letter from father."

Cheered by her mother's words, Elizabeth gave one more pat and pull to the pillows, kissed her, and ran down to the corral, where the girls were roping the ponies. She and Ruth could each rope a little, missing about three out of five throws, but the Babe usually flourished so reckless a loop that she entangled herself, and had to be helped out; in spite of which old Jonah Bean insisted that she was the only one who showed any signs of learning the art.

Poor Elizabeth! Her castle of dreams had fallen, leaving her wide awake to the fact that she was no princess of romance but the humble offspring of miserable movers, such as had always been the objects of her shuddering contempt. Even Cousin Hannah's heart was touched with pity, and she tried with clumsy but hearty kindness to make amends for the grief she had caused by her disclosure. Nothing had been said to Ruth and the Babe, of course--they still believed her to be their born sister. However, deep down in her heart, Elizabeth was walking in the Valley of Humiliation amid the dust and ashes of dead hopes; and, as most people know, when one enters the Valley it is very, very hard to find the way out again!

Mrs. Spooner, watching the girls ride down the road, sighed softly. "Poor child," she murmured pityingly, "I can hardly forgive Cousin Hannah. But in the end it may prove the best thing. I'm afraid we were spoiling her. This may bring out the fine nature that I know she possesses."

Texas is a land of far horizons; Mrs. Spooner could see all the vast, brown-green circling plain until it lost itself in the hazy distance.

Away up the trail that led to her brother's distant ranch, twenty miles further from Emerald, she noticed a moving cloud of dust which resolved itself into an oscillating speck--two--a man on a pony, with a led horse.

For some reason which she could not have explained, Mrs. Spooner felt that the approaching rider was going to turn in at the Silver Spur. There was no pleasant feeling between herself and Harvey Grannis. John Spooner had bought the Silver Spur ranch from his brother-in-law when he came to this part of Texas, and there had been trouble over the transaction, due, Mrs. Spooner felt, to Harvey's disposition to take too much authority. He was a bachelor, and the rich man of the community--excepting the English rancher, McGregor, who did not live so far away. He would have liked to do a good deal for the family of his only sister, but he wanted to do it in his own way, asserting that John Spooner couldn't take care of them, and treating them, Elizabeth fireily said like paupers. A hard man, with his good qualities, yet full of the "rule or ruin" spirit, and liable to go to great lengths to make his point.

The approaching rider was now seen to be a young fellow, scarcely more than a big boy. He came up the long bare drive, stopped at the porch edge and took off his hat before he spoke to the woman in the rocking-chair. She noted that the pony he rode stumbled with weariness, while the led horse trotted briskly, unencumbered with saddle or rider. She saw, too, that while the tired pony bore a brand unfamiliar to her, the led one was marked with a G in a horse-shoe--Harvey Grannis's brand.

"Good morning, ma'am," the newcomer greeted her. He was a handsome lad of perhaps sixteen, but just now in a woeful plight, dusty, shaking, haggard with weariness. "I stopped to ask if you'd like to buy a pony at a big bargain."

Mrs. Spooner leaned forward in her chair with a little gasp. She was afraid of what was coming.

"I don't know," she replied evasively. "Which one of them do you want to sell?"

"O, mine's played out," the boy returned never noticing the admission his words contained. "I've ridden pretty hard, and besides I've got to have her to carry me to Emerald, so I can take the train there. It's the other one. He's a mighty fine pony, and I'll let him go for enough to buy me a ticket back home."

"Won't you come in and rest a minute?--you look tired," said Mrs. Spooner, sympathetically. Somehow she could not bring herself to ask if he was from her brother's ranch, though she felt quite sure something was wrong about the pony that would go so cheap.

"I am tired, but I've got to go on so as to catch the six o'clock train," the boy smiled wanly. "I guess I can stop in for a drink, anyhow."

He dropped the lines, and the two ponies stood, cattle country fashion, as though they had been tied.

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