THE LANDSLIDE
After their perilous adventure, the Outdoor Girls shunned the forest
unless they were accompanied by one or more of the cowboys at the ranch.
Andy Rawlinson escorted them whenever he could, but his duties as
foreman of the ranch kept him very busy and he sometimes appointed one
of the ranch hands to take his place.
However, these excursions became less and less frequent as the girls
became more interested in the booming mining town of Gold Run.
This they had visited with Mr. and Mrs. Nelson and Andy, and the whole
thing made them feel more than ever as if they were living some motion
picture drama.
There was the regulation general store and the inevitable dance hall
where the lucky miners came to spend their golden nuggets and the
unlucky tried to drown their misery in the companionship of others.
Their eyes wide with interest and pleasure and their tongues busy with
questions, the girls cantered down the narrow, crooked wagon road called
"Main Street." They read the names over the doors of the dingy little
shops, commenting gayly upon their queerness.
"Peter Levine, Attorney," read Betty aloud from a sign just a little
dingier than the rest. Then she drew rein and waited for her mother, who
was riding more slowly with Mr. Nelson. The other girls, who had ridden
on ahead, suddenly missed her, saw that she had stopped, and came back
curiously.
"Look, Mother," Betty was saying as they came up. "This is where dear
Peter Levine hails from. His checked suit and loud tie must look funny
in that dingy little shop," she added, with a chuckle.
"Well, let's ride along," suggested Mrs. Nelson nervously. "He might see
us and take it into his head to come out. And I don't want to have
anything more to do with him until Allen comes."
"Allen," thought Betty, as they turned and cantered on again. "I wish he
would hurry a little. He seems an awfully long time coming."
After they had seen all that there was to see of the town itself, Andy
led them to some of the important mines on the outskirts. They listened
with lively interest while the young fellow explained to them how the
ore was extracted from the mountain side where it had lain unmolested
for thousands of years.
"It almost seems a shame to disturb it," said Amy at this point, and the
girls laughed at her.
"Just give me a chance at it, that's all," said Mollie longingly.
At one of these mines they met the old man and his daughter, Meggy,
whose timely arrival a few days before had saved their lives. The two
were in the midst of their work, the girl lifting and hauling with all
the strength of a man, and they scarcely looked up as the party passed
them, although the old man responded with a wave of his hand when Andy
Rawlinson called to him.
"How's it goin', Dan?" asked the former.
"Oh, well enough, well enough," responded the man, with what seemed to
the girls enforced cheerfulness. "We'll strike gold afore to-morrow,
sure."
"Poor old Dan Higgins," said Andy, with a sobering of his good-natured
face. "He's always goin' to strike gold 'to-morrow.' Sure, there's no
one I'd rather see strike it rich than Dan an' that girl of his. But I'm
'fraid they're jest plumb unlucky. Funny thing, luck--and gold," he went
on to soliloquize. "Some young fellers they come out here, thinkin' they
can get back to the girl at home in a couple o' years with their
pockets plumb full o' nuggets, an' instead, they toil their lives away
till their hair grows white an' their skin gets crackly like parchment,
an' never even a glimpse o' yellow. An' mebbe the feller next to him
drills a hole three feet deep and he strikes a vein. Yes siree, if ever
there was a real thing in this world, that thing is luck."
The girls were impressed and their hearts ached for Dan Higgins, his
years of hope and work and his profitless mine. As for the girl, his
daughter, Meggy----
"Are you sure Dan Higgins hasn't any chance of striking gold?" asked
Betty, gravely.
"Not a bit of it," returned Andy Rawlinson quickly. "There's gold all
around here--everybody thought Dan was mighty lucky when he staked out
his claim. He may find gold yet. But," he added, and there was a
fatalistic quality in his tone that chilled the girls, "you always have
to reckon on luck."
In the days that followed it became quite the usual thing to see the
Outdoor Girls, mounted on their splendid horses, galloping along the
open road or cantering through the town of Gold Run. It was not long
before they became general favorites in this country where girls of
their type were scarce, and the girls knew most of the rough but
good-hearted miners by name. But perhaps of them all, their best and
staunchest friends were old Dan Higgins and his daughter, Meggy.
The girls often visited the mine and were always greeted with the utmost
heartiness by its owners. Once Betty had caught Meggy looking longingly
at Nigger as he was trying his best to get some nourishment from the
stubbly grass, and with the quick impulsiveness that was hers, she asked
the girl if she would like a ride.
At the sudden radiance that flooded Meggy's face, Betty turned away
abashed. She felt as though she had been given a glimpse of the girl's
soul.
Meggy had her ride, and in the days that followed she had many others
and the girl's fondness for Betty became almost worship. She liked the
other girls, for they were always kind to her, but Betty was her idol.
"I have wanted all my life to own a horse," she confided to the Little
Captain one day, as she stroked Nigger's shining coat with almost
reverent fingers. "It would be the first thing I would buy for myself if
dad should strike it rich." Her tone was brave, but the eyes that sought
her father's toiling figure were sad. "Poor old dad," she said softly,
"I don't think he would keep on any longer, if it wasn't for me."
On one of their visits to the mine the girls were astonished to find
their mysterious musician there ahead of them. He seemed to be trying to
help, but from where the girls watched unobserved, it looked as though
he were more in the way than anything else.
Meggy was the first to discover them, and as she called out a greeting,
the Hermit of Gold Run rose quickly to his feet and disappeared into the
woods.
"Poor fellow," said Meggy, looking pityingly after him. "We let him try
to help us because it seems to amuse him, but he really doesn't know how
to work with his hands. His fingers were made for the fiddle."
"I certainly would like to find out more about that man," said Mollie,
her forehead puckered into a puzzled frown. "He sure does act pretty
funny."
"We'll have to visit him again some day," said Betty lightly, and then
turned to question Meggy on the progress of the mine.
On their way home they took up the subject of the strange musician whose
queer comings and goings had begun to be of more than usual interest to
them.
"He acts--in a--a stealthy way," said Grace, striving for the exact
words to express her meaning. "He positively sneaked away from us this
morning. It seems to me people don't act like that unless they are
afraid of something."
"He might just be afraid of people," Betty reminded her. "Or he may
dislike people and want to be left alone. That would account for the
name of 'hermit' that the natives around here have given him."
"But an ordinary hermit wouldn't be able to play like a virtuoso,"
objected Amy.
"Well, nobody said he was an ordinary hermit," retorted Mollie.
"To change the subject before you girls get to the hair-pulling stage,"
laughed Betty, as she turned Nigger's head toward the ranch, "I wish we
could do something for Dan Higgins and Meggy. It's a shame for that
splendid, loyal girl to have to spend all her youth, when she might be
having good times like other girls, in doing the kind of work that's
only fit for a man to do."
"And she's so brave about it, too," added Grace admiringly. "She keeps
her head up like a thoroughbred."
"I've asked her to come over to the ranch," Betty went on thoughtfully.
"She has a passion for horses, you know, and I told her we'd have Andy
Rawlinson pick her out a beauty from the corrals. I could see that she
was awfully tempted, but she said no, she couldn't leave her father."
"Probably the real reason she refused was because she hadn't decent
clothes to wear," said Mollie sagaciously. "The poor girl is almost in
rags."
"I wish we could help," sighed Betty. "But she and her father are proud,
like most of the other people around here. They just have to stand on
their own feet."
"I wonder if they have enough to eat," mused Amy. "It would be dreadful
to think of them actually hungry."
"Oh, I guess there's no danger of that," said Mollie. "As long as there
are wild animals in the woods and Dan Higgins and Meggy have guns they
won't starve to death."
"And maybe they really will find gold, anyway," said Grace hopefully.
They rode along silently for a while. In their abstraction they had
taken the long way home, instead of cutting directly across the ranch in
the direction of the house. They were on a rather narrow trail, so
narrow, that they could not ride two abreast but were strung out in
single file, Indian fashion. On one side of them rose the mountain, huge
and majestic, and on the other was a sheer drop of a hundred feet or so
into a rocky canyon.
The girls had always loved this ride because of the wonderful view it
afforded them of the surrounding country. But that very morning Dan
Higgins had warned them not to go that way.
"The mountain is pow'ful oncertain," the old man had told them. "Part of
it is apt to fall on you any time if you get too close to it."
Betty thought of this warning, but too late. An ominous rumbling jerked
her eyes upward and she saw a sight that almost froze the blood in her
veins. It seemed indeed to her terrified fancy as if the whole mountain
were falling upon them. A great mass of dirt and brush and rock was
hurtling down upon them with sickening velocity. A landslide--and they
were directly in its path!