I ain’t; I’m gittin’ wise,” retorted the ranchman, with a wide grin.
“How’s that?”
“I’m l’arnin’ how to git along with Jane Ann,” declared Mr. Hicks, with a delighted chortle, and pinching the freckled girl beside him.
“Ouch!” exclaimed his niece. “What’s the matter, Uncle Bill?”
“He says he’s bought this contraption to please you, Jane Ann,” said the storekeeper. “But what’ll Old Trouble-Maker do when he sees it – heh?”
“Gee!” ejaculated the ranchman. “I never thought o’ that steer.”
“I reckon Old Trouble-Maker will have to stand for it,” scoffed the ranchman’s niece, tossing her head. “Now, Sally, you ride out and see us. These girls from down East are all right. And we’re going to have heaps of fun at Silver Ranch after this.”
Helen Cameron touched a lever and the big car shot ahead again.
“She’s a mighty white girl, that Sally Dickson,” declared Jane Ann Hicks (who hated her name and preferred to be called “Nita”). “She’s taught school here at the Crossing for one term, too. And she’s sweet in spite of her peppery temper – ”
“What could you expect?” demanded the stout girl, smiling all over her face as she looked back at the red-haired girl at the store. “She has a more crimson topknot than the Fox here – ”
There came a sudden scream from the front seat of the automobile. The car, under Helen Cameron’s skillful manipulation, had turned the bend in the trail and the chapparel instantly hid the store and the houses at the Crossing. Right ahead of them was a rolling prairie, several miles in extent. And up the rise toward the trail was coming, in much dust, a bunch of cattle, with two or three punchers riding behind and urging the herd to better pasture.
“Oh! see all those steers,” cried Ruth Fielding. “Do you own all of them, Mr. Hicks?”
“I reckon they got my brand on ’em, Miss,” replied the ranchman. “But that’s only a leetle bunch – can’t be more’n five hundred – coming up yere. I reckon, Miss Helen, that we’d better pull up some yere. If them cows sees us – ”
“See there! see there!” cried the stout girl in the back seat.
As she spoke in such excitement, Helen switched off the power and braked the car. Out of the chapparel burst, with a frantic bellow, a huge black and white steer – wide horned, ferocious of aspect – quite evidently “on the rampage.” The noise of the passing car had brought him out of concealment. He plunged into the trail not ten yards behind the slowing car.
“Goodness me!” shouted the big boy who sat beside Bill Hicks and his niece. “What kind of a beast is that? It’s almost as big as an elephant!”
“Oh!” cried the girl called “The Fox.” “That surely isn’t the kind of cattle you have here, is it? He looks more like a buffalo. See! he’s coming after us!”
The black and white steer did look as savage as any old buffalo bull and, emitting a bellow, shook his head at the automobile and began to cast the dust up along his flanks with his sharp hoofs. He was indeed of a terrifying appearance.
“It’s Old Trouble-Maker!” cried Jane Ann Hicks.
“He looks just as though his name fitted him,” said Tom Cameron, who had sprung up to look back at the steer.
At that moment the steer lowered his head and charged for the auto. The girls shrieked, and Tom cried:
“Go ahead, Nell! let’s leave that beast behind.”
Before his sister could put on speed again, however, the big boy, who was Bob Steele, sang out:
“If you go on you’ll stampede that herd of cattle – won’t she, Mr. Hicks? Why, we’re between two fires, that’s what we are!”
“And they’re both going to be hot,” groaned Tom. “Why, that Old Trouble-Maker will climb right into this car in half a minute!”
CHAPTER II – BASHFUL IKE
The situation in the big automobile was quite as serious as Tom and Bob believed, and there was very good reason for the girls to express their fright in a chorus of screams. But Ruth Fielding, and her chum, Helen, on the front seat, controlled themselves better than the other Eastern girls; Jane Ann Hicks never said a word, but her uncle looked quite as startled as his guests.
“I am sartainly graveled!” muttered the ranchman, staring all around for some means of saving the party from disaster. “Hi gollies! if I only had a leetle old rope now – ”
But he had no lariat, and roping a mad steer from an automobile would certainly have been a new experience for Bill Hicks. He had brought the party of young folk out to Montana just to give his niece pleasure, and having got Ruth Fielding and her friends here, he did not want to spoil their visit by any bad accident. These young folk had been what Bill Hicks called “mighty clever” to his Jane Ann when she had been castaway in the East, and he had promised their friends to look out for them all and send them home in time for school in the Fall with the proper complement of legs and arms, and otherwise whole as to their physical being.
Ruth Fielding, after the death of her parents when she was quite a young girl, had left Darrowtown and all her old friends and home associations, to live with her mother’s uncle, at the Red Mill, on the Lumano River, near Cheslow in York State. Her coming to Uncle Jabez Potter’s, and her early adventures about the mill, were related in the first volume of this series, entitled “Ruth Fielding of the Red Mill; Or, Jasper Parloe’s Secret.”
Ruth had found Uncle Jabez very hard to get along with, for he was a miser and his kinder nature had been crusted over by years of hoarding and selfishness; but through a happy turn of circumstances Ruth was enabled to get at the heart of her crotchety old uncle, and when Ruth’s dearest friend, Helen Cameron, planned to go to boarding school, Uncle Jabez was won over to the scheme of sending the girl with her. The fun and work of that first term at school is related in the second volume of the series, entitled “Ruth Fielding at Briarwood Hall; Or, Solving the Campus Mystery.”
For the mid-winter vacation Ruth accompanied Helen and other school friends to Mr. Cameron’s hunting camp, up toward the Canadian line. In “Ruth Fielding at Snow Camp; Or, Lost in the Backwoods,” the girls and some of their boy friends experience many adventures and endure some hardship and peril while lost in the snow-shrouded forest.
One of Ruth’s chums, Jennie Stone, otherwise known as “Heavy,” invited her to Lighthouse Point, with a party of young people, for part of the summer vacation; and although Uncle Jabez was in much trouble over his investment in the Tintacker Mine, which appeared to be a swindle, the old miller had allowed Ruth to accompany her friends to the seashore because he had already promised her the outing. In “Ruth Fielding at Lighthouse Point; Or, Nita, the Girl Castaway,” is narrated all the fun and delightful experiences the girl of the Red Mill and her friends had at the seaside; including the saving of a girl from the wreck of a lumber schooner, a miss who afterward proved to be Jane Ann Hicks, the niece of a very wealthy Montana ranch owner. The girl had run away from the ranch and from her guardian and calls herself Nita, “because the girl in the paper-covered novel was called Nita.”
That was just the sort of a romantic, foolish girl Jane Ann Hicks was; but she
