RESOLUTIONS
It was a sad little party that drew out of Laredo that afternoon. The
thoughts of Nan and her friends were all with Rhoda. At every turn they
wondered where she was and what she was doing.
Only Adair MacKenzie's insistence had made them depart from the city on
the border at all.
"Got to be on our way now," he had said brusquely when he and Nan had
driven up to the hotel after seeing Rhoda off. "Now, get busy, you," he
ordered the girls after they had heard the details of Rhoda's departure
from Nan. "Can't stay around here any longer. Sick and tired of this
place. Nothing but a hole in the wall. Don't like it. Don't like the
people. We're leaving. Get busy, I say." He tapped his cane impatiently
on the floor of the hotel veranda. "I mean you and you and you." He
pointed with it to each separate member of the party.
The girls jumped. Alice jumped. And Walker Jamieson jumped. Everyone got
busy and in an hour's time they were all sitting on the veranda, dressed
for traveling, waiting for the car to come.
"What are you doing here?" Adair MacKenzie appeared in the doorway.
Short and somewhat stocky with a face that was perpetually tanned and
dressed as he was in a white suit and large white panama hat, he looked
like a permanent part of the scene about him. Nan, as she looked at him
felt proud. Despite all his blustering, his ordering of people around,
and his abrupt manner, he was kind and gentle at heart. This, she knew,
was the reason for his success. This was why everyone who had ever known
him liked him and loved him.
Now, characteristically, he followed his abrupt question with a piece of
information that laid bare his softness and unfailing thoughtfulness.
"Get inside, all of you," he ordered, "there are long distance calls
coming through for each of you from your parents. Can't have you mooning
around," he muttered, "waiting for mail in order to find out whether or
not your mothers and fathers are well. You, Nancy, your call is waiting
now. Just talked to Jessie myself in Memphis. She's fine, just fine.
Never felt better in her life she says. Might have known it in the first
place. The Blakes are strong people."
With this, he walked away. "No nonsense, now," he grumbled as he
disappeared and each of the girls went in to talk from a telephone booth
on the southern border of the United States to her parents in the north.
How exciting it was to talk over that great distance! How good it seemed
to the girls to hear their mother's voices! Nan talked to both her
father and mother in Tennessee, and as she did, she imagined just how
they looked, the expressions on their faces when they said certain dear,
familiar things and the look in their eyes when they laughed. It was
almost like having them in the same room with her.
As she hung up, a wistful expression crossed her face, one that Adair
MacKenzie, standing off to one side of the room noted. "What's the
matter, Nancy?" he asked in a softer tone than Nan had ever heard him
use.
"Lonesome?" Adair questioned further.
"Oh, a little bit," Nan smiled. "Sometimes, I miss Momsey a great, great
deal." As she spoke her thoughts slipped back to those first days at
Pine Camp recounted in the first volume of the Nan Sherwood series when
it was so hard to fight off the wave of homesickness that came over her.
"Not going to back down on me and go home, are you?" Adair MacKenzie
asked the question half in fun and half in seriousness.
"Oh, no," Nan laughed. "I couldn't do that."
"That's the spirit!" Nan's cousin applauded. "Never back down on
anything you set out to do. When you start a thing, finish it. That's
the way people get places. Made me what I am. Never started a thing yet
I didn't finish."
Nan looking at him, believed it. He had the air about him of one that
accomplishes things. You could see it in the way he walked, the way he
talked. "Doesn't make any difference," he continued, "what it is, a
school lesson, a vacation, a housekeeping task for your mother. If you
begin it, finish it." He said this last so emphatically that Nan looked
about her half expecting to find something that she should finish right
away.
"Doesn't make any difference," he went on, "how hard the thing is or how
much you want to do something else. Do the thing you first started and
do it as well as you possibly can. Understand what I mean?" Nan's cousin
looked at her very intently for a moment and then he ruffled her pretty
brown hair with his rough hand. "Of course you do, child," he smiled at
her. "You're as bright as they make them."
"Dad, oh, dad!" Alice MacKenzie joined the two. "You're wanted. The
car's ready and the driver wants to know when we're going to start."
"Start!" Adair MacKenzie, the soft mood having slipped away from him
now, roared. "Haven't I been waiting around here for an hour now for
that old sluggard. And then he has the effrontery to send word to me
that he's waiting! The dolt! I'll fix him. I'll fix him, if it's the
last thing in the world I do! Thinks I'm a softy, does he? I'll show
him!" With this, Adair MacKenzie went fuming from the room.
Fifteen minutes later Nan Sherwood and her friends, Walker Jamieson, and
Alice and her father were riding along the road toward Mexico City.
"Got this telegram just before we left," Adair MacKenzie felt in his
pockets for the yellow paper, "It's from that Hammond girl." He turned
it over to Nan who read aloud to the others.
"Arrived safely at San Antonio. Plane there ready to take me on. Called
home again. Mother holding her own. Love. Rhoda."
Nan's voice was husky as she finished. She folded the telegram slowly
and thoughtfully, thinking of the struggle that was going on at Rose
Ranch and remembering her own concern years back over her own mother's
health.
"There, Nan," Bess laid a gentle hand on her friend's. "Don't look so
worried. I'm sure things will turn out for the best."
"Oh, Bess, if they don't," Nan half whispered in return, "It will leave
Rhoda and her father all alone. It will make things so hard, for
everyone just worships Mrs. Hammond."
"I know," Bess's voice was heavy too, "but don't think of those things."
The role of consoler was new to Bess, but instinctively she was saying
just the right thing. "Mrs. Hammond just has to get well, and so she
will. I feel sure that what I'm saying is true. Oh, Nan, don't cry,"
Bess's own voice was full of tears.
"Here, here, what's happening back there?" Adair MacKenzie turned from
his place next to the driver and frowned at the girls. "Can't have this.
No blubbering on this trip."
Nan smiled a wan smile at the word.
"Thought you were a brave girl," Adair went on. "Now, dry away those
tears," he ended, and turning, resumed his work of instructing the
driver as to how to drive.
It was Laura who unthinkingly started them all off again.
"Makes you think, doesn't it," she remarked, "of the number of things
you overlook doing for your mother when you're around her? Will I ever
be good," she continued, "when I get home. I'll wash the dishes, set the
table, run to the store, do anything and everything without question."
Laura sounded so serious and so unlike herself in her seriousness that
even Nan had to smile, as she agreed. "That's just the way it makes me
feel," she said.
"Oh, Nan," Bess protested, "and you're always so good to your mother.
I'm the one that's mean. Why, I never do a thing around the house if I
can help it." And Bess spoke the truth. The daughter of a family that
had plenty of money, Bess was a pampered child. As a general rule, she
had little regard for either of her parents. Whatever she wanted, she
asked for without regard for cost. What she couldn't get from her
mother, she frequently managed to get from her father, and the two were
well on the way toward spoiling her utterly when she went off to
Lakeview with Nan.
There, away from home among strangers in a place where she had to live
up to certain well-defined rules, Bess had improved considerably. Those
that have watched her since her first appearance in "Nan Sherwood at
Pine Camp" have seen a change come over her gradually. She is a little
more thoughtful, a little more considerate of other people, but she
still has a selfish streak which at times like the present confronts her
so that her conscience pricks her sharply.
"When I get home," Bess spoke more quietly than was her wont, "I'm
going to do a little reforming myself. I'm going to pay more attention
to what mother has to say. I'm going to be a better daughter."
"And I am too," Laura agreed.
"And I," Grace and Amelia said this together.
So even while Rhoda Hammond in a plane that was winging its way toward
her western home, was remembering little, dear things about the mother
she was so fond of, her friends were thinking of her and making
resolution after resolution about their own conduct toward their
parents.