TAVIA IS DETERMINED
“After that scare I’m afraid the boys will have to go without a bird
dog,” Tavia said that night as she and Dorothy were brushing their hair
before the latter’s dressing-glass.
Tavia and Jennie and Ned and Nat were almost inseparable during the
daytime; but when the time came to retire the flyaway girl had to have
an old-time “confab,” as she expressed it, with her chum.
Dorothy was so bright and so busy all day long that nobody
discovered—not even the major—that she was rather “out of it.” The two
couples of young folk sometimes ran away and left Dorothy busy at some
domestic task in which she claimed to find much more interest than in
the fun her friends and cousins were having.
“It would have been a terrible thing if the poor dog had bitten one of
us,” Dorothy replied. “Dr. Agnew, the veterinary, says without doubt it
was afflicted with rabies.”
“And how scared your Aunt Winnie was!” Then Tavia began to giggle. “She
will be so afraid of anything that barks now, that she’ll want all the
trees cut down around the house.”
“That pun is unworthy of you, my dear,” Dorothy said placidly.
“Dear me, Doro Doodlekins!” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly and
affectionately, coming close to her chum and kissing her warmly. “You
are such a tabby-cat all of a sudden. Why! _you_ have grown up, while
the rest of us are only kids.”
“Yes; I am very settled,” observed Dorothy, smiling into the mirror at
her friend. “A cap for me and knitting very soon, Tavia. Then I shall
sit in the chimney corner and think——”
“Think about whom, my dear?” Tavia asked saucily. “That Garry Knapp, I
bet.”
“I wouldn’t _bet_,” sighed Dorothy. “It isn’t ladylike.”
“Oh—de-ah—me!” groaned Tavia. “You are thinking of him just the same.”
“I happened to be just now,” admitted Dorothy, and without blushing
this time.
“No! were you really?” demanded Tavia, eagerly. “Isn’t it funny he
doesn’t write?”
“No. Not at all.”
“But you’d think he would write and thank you for your letter if
nothing more,” urged the argumentative Tavia.
“No,” said Dorothy again.
“Why not?”
“Because Mr. Knapp never got my letter,” Dorothy said, opening her
bureau drawer and pulling the letter out from under some things laid
there. “See. It was returned to-day.”
“Oh, Dorothy!” gasped Tavia, both startled and troubled.
“Yes. It—it didn’t reach him somehow,” Dorothy said, and she could not
keep the trouble entirely out of her voice.
“Oh, my _dear_!” repeated Tavia.
“And I am sorry,” her friend went on to say; “for now he will not know
about the intentions of those men, Stiffbold and Lightly.”
“But, goodness! it serves him right,” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly. “He
didn’t give us his right address.”
“He gave us no address,” said Dorothy, sadly.
“Why, yes! he said Desert City——”
“He mentioned that place and said that his land was somewhere near
there. But he works on a ranch, which, perhaps, is a long way from
Desert City.”
“That’s so,” grumbled Tavia. “I forgot he’s only a cowboy.”
At this Dorothy flushed a little and Tavia, looking at her sideways and
eagerly, noted the flush. Her eyes danced for a moment, for the girl
was naturally chock-full of mischief.
But in a moment the expression of Tavia Travers’ face changed.
Dorothy was pensively gazing in the glass; she had halted in her hair
brushing, and Tavia knew that her chum neither saw her own reflection
nor anything else pictured in the mirror. The mirror of her mind held
Dorothy’s attention, and Tavia could easily guess the vision there.
A tall, broad-shouldered, broad-hatted young man with a frank and
handsome face and a ready smile that dimpled one bronzed cheek ever so
little and wrinkled the outer corners of his clear, far-seeing eyes.
Garry Knapp!
Tavia for the first time realized that Dorothy had found interest and
evidently a deep and abiding interest, in the young stranger from
Desert City. It rather shocked her. Dorothy, of all persons, to become
so very deeply interested in a man about whom they knew practically
nothing.
Tavia suddenly realized that she knew more about him than Dorothy did.
At least, she had been with Garry Knapp more than had her friend. It
was Tavia who had had the two hours’ tête-à-tête with the Westerner at
dinner on the evening before Garry Knapp departed so suddenly for the
West. All that happened and was said at that dinner suddenly unrolled
like a panorama before Tavia’s memory.
Why! she could picture it all plainly. She had been highly delighted
herself in the recovery of her bag and in listening to Garry’s story
of how it had been returned by the cash-girl’s sister. And, of course,
she had been pleased to be dining alone with a fine looking young man
in a hotel dining-room. She had rattled on when her turn came to talk,
just as irresponsibly as usual.
Now, in thinking over the occasion, she realized that the young man
from the West had been a shrewd questioner. He had got her started upon
Dorothy Dale, and before they came to the little cups of black coffee
Tavia had told just about all she knew regarding her chum.
The reader may be sure that all Tavia said was to Dorothy’s glory. She
had little need to explain to Garry Knapp what a beautiful character
Dorothy Dale possessed. Tavia had told about Dorothy’s family, her Aunt
Winnie’s wealth, the fortunes Major Dale now possessed both in the East
and West, and the fact that when Dorothy came of age, at twenty-one,
she would be wealthy in her own right. She had said all this to a young
man who was struggling along as a cowpuncher on a Western ranch, and
whose patrimony was a piece of rundown land that he could sell but for
a song, as he admitted himself. “And no chorus to it!” Tavia thought.
“I’m a bonehead!” she suddenly thought fiercely. “Nat would say my
noodle is solid ivory. I know now what was the matter with Garry Knapp
that evening. I know why he rushed up to me and asked for Dorothy, and
was what the novelists call ‘distrait’ during our dinner. Oh, what a
worm I am! A miserable, squirmy worm! Ugh!” and the conscience-stricken
girl fairly shuddered at her own reflection in the mirror and turned
away quickly so that Dorothy should not see her features.
“It’s—it’s the most _wonderful_ thing. And it began right under my
nose, my poor little ‘re-trousered’ nose, as Joe called it the other
day, and I didn’t really see it! I thought it was just a fancy on
Dorothy’s part! And I never thought of Garry Knapp’s side of it at all!
Oh, my heaven!” groaned Tavia, deep in her own soul. “Why wasn’t I born
with some good sense instead of good looks? I—I’ve spoiled my chum’s
life, perhaps. Goodness! it can’t be so bad as that.
“Of course, Garry Knapp is just the sort of fellow who would raise
a barrier of Dorothy’s riches between them. Goodness me!” added the
practical Tavia, “I’d like to see any barrier of wealth stop _me_ if I
wanted a man. I’d shin the wall in a hurry so as to be on the same side
of it as he was.”
She would have laughed at this fancy had she not taken a look at
Dorothy’s face again.
“Good-night!” she shouted into her chum’s ear, hugged her tight, kissed
her loudly, and ran away into her own room. Once there, she cried
all the time she was disrobing, getting into her lacy nightgown, and
pulling down the bedclothes.
Then she did not immediately go to bed. Instead, she tiptoed back to
the connecting door and closed it softly. She turned on the hanging
electric light over the desk.
“I’ll do it!” she said, with determined mien. “I’ll write to Lance
Petterby.” And she did so.