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Ranch Girls at Rainbow Lodge

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<h2>CHAPTER XXII.</h2> <div class='chaptertitle'>A VOICE IN THE NIGHT. </div> <div class='cap'>A   ROUGH voice aroused Olive. She sprang up in terror and stood pressed close against the piled up freight in the car. It was an odd-looking figure she made, as though she had stepped out of a world several hundred years younger than the present one. The coarse man who watched her dimly felt it.</div> The girl's shoes were ragged and hardly covered her slender feet, her skirt was torn and old. Over her shoulders hung a strange fur garment, shapeless, save that a hole had been cut in the center for her head. Her beautiful black hair was braided and one long plait hung over each shoulder; her head was uncovered and her delicate face, with its pointed chin, was deathly pale. She was trembling. Dark shadows encircled her great black eyes and there was a look not of defiance but of pleading in them. So picturesque a passenger had never before stolen a ride on a modern freight train.[267] She belonged to the days of the pioneer settlers in the new land of America. "How did you come here?" the man demanded gruffly. Olive's voice shook. She had thought it would be easy to tell her story, if she could only get away from the Indians, but this fierce man frightened her more than any one of them could have done. What must she say? Where could she begin with the tale of her misfortunes. "I stole in, when the train stopped a while ago, I don't just know when," Olive answered vaguely. She could not tell how long she had been asleep. "Then you'll git out the next time it stops, young Missie," the trainman announced harshly. "I'd put you off right now, but we are already behind time, because of a rascally Indian boy a piece up the road. Better stay hid and not let our engineer catch sight of you, or he'd make it good and hot for you. Maybe he would turn you over to the police." Olive could not realize it, but her appearance had already touched her discoverer. She crouched in her corner again and bowed[268] her head in her slim brown hands, as she had the day when the ranch girls brought her out of Frieda's cave. She did not try to defend herself. The trainman climbed up on a box and sat whittling a stick and watching Olive out of a pair of shrewd Irish blue eyes. He was not a fierce man. He had a wife and five tow-headed children, living in one of the little frame shacks along the line of the railroad. The man was clever enough to see that Olive was not an ordinary thief or impostor. "Are you sick, girl?" the man inquired, surprised by Olive's silence. The girl shook her head. "Oh, no, I am not sick, thank you," Olive answered gently, "but I am very tired. I ran away from an Indian encampment before dawn to-day. Would you mind telling <ins title="Transcriber's Note: original reads 'we'">me</ins> where this train is going?" Little by little Olive told the whole history of her strange life to the Irishman, who sat on the box in the freight car and never ceased his whittling for a moment. "By St. Peter!" he muttered, when Olive finished replying to his last question. "This girl tells a story that might have come out of a[269] poetry or a history book. The funny thing is, her story must be true! Oh, well," he announced to himself, not to Olive, "there is one thing certain. Nobody can ever make up in their heads such all-fired queer things as happen every day." But the man had not answered Olive's question as to where this train was going. She had not the courage to ask him again. By and by Olive saw little houses along the road and knew that their train was nearing a small, western town. She got up and touched the Irishman timidly on the arm. "May I get off at the station myself, please?" she begged. "You won't have to put me off." The man shook his head severely. "No, you are not going to get off yourself," he returned gruffly, "and I ain't going to put you off either. If you can keep on making yourself small, and you are a pretty thin kind of a girl, I am going to take you farther down the road with us. I have an idea this here freight train will run along somewhere near Wolfville in the course of the afternoon. You have had such bad luck in the past, Missie, that maybe your luck has changed. Anyhow, when you butted blindly into this freight car,[270] you found a coach going in just about the way you needed to travel. Don't worry your head any more about what you are to do. I'll put you off at Wolfville, and though it looks a bit cloudy, as though it might mean to blow up a bit of snow, I expect you'll manage to get back to the Ralston Ranch, somehow, before night." Olive, satisfied that this kind-hearted stranger would look out for her, dozed on, half waking and half sleeping. Neither she nor her new friend knew how exhausted she was. She had passed through several weeks of dreadful hardship, exposure and unhappiness, and now she felt too happy to think or care because her head ached dully, and her legs shook so she could hardly stand on them. She would be home soon with Frieda and Jean and Jack! Several hours went by. The trainman left the car and attended to his duties. But Olive had entire faith that he would not forget her. At a little past five o'clock in the afternoon the freight train came to a stop near the little town of Wolfville, which was only a matter of ten miles from Rainbow Ranch. The wind[271] was blowing with a queer, ominous rattling sound and a few flakes of snow were falling. Olive's new friend gazed at her a little queerly, as he lifted her out on the platform. There were no people in sight except the station master, for it was almost dark and the stopping of a freight train was of little interest. "Sure you know how to get to your friends from here?" the Irishman asked Olive. She took time to nod and wave her hand, then ran swiftly away from the station in the direction of Rainbow Ranch. If Olive had gone into the town, someone would have driven her to the Lodge, or else sent word to Jim Colter or the Ralston girls that she was in safe-keeping for the night. A prairie snowstorm was approaching and few people would have cared to trust themselves to a ten-mile drive at this hour of the winter evening. But Olive did not think of further danger. Ten miles seemed to her to be so near home that she could not bear a second's delay in trying to reach there. For the first few miles she ran swiftly along, as she knew the trail and it was not too dark to follow it. The stinging[272] wind cut her face and at times the snow blinded her. But the distance was only a short walk for a girl who had spent all her life out of doors in the great West. Yet Olive should have known what a snowstorm in Wyoming, with a heavy pall of gray clouds and a scudding blast, meant. After a while, her feet in her worn shoes felt like wooden pegs stumping on the frozen earth. Her hands had lost all feeling, although she managed to draw the rabbit-skin furs that Carlos had given her, over her head and to keep her hands under them. The snow no longer fell in flakes but in white sheets, lashed and driven by the force of the storm. The trail across the plains to the Ralston Ranch was quickly hidden. Mountains of snow piled up in front of Olive, deep gullies appeared at her feet, where the land was usually as level as a table, and she had no idea in which direction she should try to travel. But she fought her way on, thinking perhaps that another wanderer might overtake her, or that she might catch a glimpse of the lights of some ranch house. If she could find an objective point ahead of her, she felt that she[273] might get to it. But to move blindly in a circle of snow, brought no hope of any relief. Yet Olive knew she must keep moving if she wished to live. She did not suffer the same agony from the cold, that she had at first. The wind blew her about, as though she had been a bit of paper. She staggered and fell in the snowdrifts, got up and pressed on wishing that even a wild animal would scurry past her on the way to its retreat. But animals are always wiser than human beings before the approach of a storm. Every head of cattle, every horse on the plains, every beast in the forest had found a rude shelter. Olive felt herself entirely alone in a savage, white world. But in quiet natures like Olive's, there is a wonderful power of resistance. She had endured so much, she had learned the fortitude that comes with misfortune. She prayed silently through the hours she struggled. There were moments when she believed she spied the light of Rainbow Lodge gleaming on the cruel surface of the snow. She would fight her way to this place, only to discover that her own blind desire had led her astray.[274] Night came on, but there was little change from the twilight. The few stars that broke through the clouds only made the way more blinding. Olive's patience, Carlos' planning seemed to have been in vain. Again Olive dreamed she saw some lights ahead of her. Her mind was no longer clear. She could not remember why she was out alone in the snow. She cried for Jack, when she had the strength, but the tears froze on her face. Olive reached out her arms toward her vision of the lights of Rainbow Lodge. She was either too blind or too utterly spent to see the snowbank in front of her, as suddenly it shut out her mirage of home. The girl gave a cry of despair with all the feeble strength that was left in her and tumbled headlong into the cold embrace of the snow. But the snow was no longer cold. It was strangely warm and she was shut away from the cruel winds. <hr style="width: 65%;" />[275] <div style="break-after:column;"></div>

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