Now, Bessie there," he pointed to Bess who had stayed for dinner, "she's not so modest, but she's kind and loyal. She's a little spoiled, but she'll get by."

Bess blushed all shades of the rainbow at Adair's frankness. Used to being babied and somewhat pampered at home, his outspokenness troubled her. She felt strangely like crying. Nan caught her eye and smiled encouragingly. Mrs. Sherwood patted her hand beneath the tablecloth. And Alice, well, Alice was a dear, for she turned the conversation toward school, and both Nan and Bess utterly forgot themselves in telling of the horse show in which they had both taken part during the last week at school.

"So you think you can ride, eh?" Adair MacKenzie was secretly pleased at both of the young girls. "Well, we'll see. I'll put you each on a Mexican mule and let you try to climb a mountain and see what happens."

He chuckled at the thought.

Alice laughed merrily at this. "Well, you'll never get me on one," she vowed. "Once was enough. Instead of the mule pulling me up the narrow path, I pulled the mule up. I never worked harder in my life."

"Oh, my sweet, you never worked at all." Adair shook his finger at his daughter. "But you'll work this summer--if that old housekeeper of ours keeps her resolution not to go down to that dirty hole which we call a hacienda. The words are hers," he explained to Nan and Bess.

"She once, when she was a very young girl, spent a summer on a sugar beet farm here in the north. A lot of Mexicans worked on it. They were miserably treated and poorly paid. As a result their huts were like hovels. She saw some of them and now she says that wild horses couldn't drag her into that country down there. She'd rather see me starve first.

But I'll get her yet." Adair MacKenzie smiled as though he liked opposition. "I'll show her who is boss," he ended.

"Of course you will, daddy," Alice agreed. "But now tell us, when are we going? How long are we going to stay? And whom have you invited?"

This last question put Adair MacKenzie in a corner and he knew it.

Really, a very kind and extremely impulsive soul, when he went on these summer jaunts for pleasure he was apt to go about for weeks, inviting all his friends. As a result, no matter how large the house was he rented, it was always too small, and no matter what preparation Alice made for guests, they were always inadequate.

Now, as he sat thinking, a mischievous light came into his eye. "There is only one that I've invited," he teased, "besides these girls that will interest you."

"And that is--?"

"Walker Jamieson, that smart-alecky reporter that we met in San Francisco a couple of years ago. Remember?"

"Remember? Of course I remember and he wasn't smart alecky. He was kind and sweet and--" But Alice didn't finish her sentence, for she became conscious of the fact that all the eyes around the dinner table were on her. She blushed prettily.

"Anyway," she justified herself, "he'll be a help in handling you, for he's smart, almost as smart as you are, daddy."

"A reporter! You mean to say a real newspaper reporter will be down there with us?" Nan couldn't contain herself any longer.

"Yep, a no good reporter." Adair MacKenzie tried hard to look disdainful as he said this, but he didn't succeed very well and both Nan and Bess guessed that he had a genuine regard for the "young scamp" as he called him. "Got to have someone around," he muttered as he drank his coffee, "to help handle you women, even if it's a young scalawag who spends all his time tracking down stories for your worthless newspaper."

"Stories!" Bess and Nan were wide-eyed.

"Now, see here," Adair shook his finger in the direction of the two young girls, "reporters are no good. They're a lazy lot that hang around with their feet on desks pretending to think. Think! Why, I never knew one yet that had a thought worth telling, let alone writing.

"This one that you are going to meet is no better than the rest. M-m-m, and no worse either," he conceded as he noted the expression on Alice's face. "I asked him to come along because he has a knack of making things lively wherever he is.

"Soon's he gets those two big feet of his down off his desk, he makes things hum. That's the way he is, lazy one minute, full of action the next. If there's absolutely nothing happening, he knows how to stir things up. I rather like a man like that--not that I like him," he added hastily, "but if we're going to go across the border this summer, got to have someone like him around. Might just as well be Jamieson as anyone else."

"And will he write stories while we're there and will they be in the paper?" Nan was reluctant to let the conversation about the young reporter drop.

"Never can tell anything about people like him," Adair MacKenzie shook his head as though he would be the last person in the world to predict anything about reporters. Could he have looked into the future he would have shaken it even more violently, for in the next few weeks Walker Jamieson, with the help of Nan and the Lakeview Hall crowd, was to uncover in Mexico one of the biggest stories of the year.

CHAPTER III

ADAIR MACKENZIE SPEAKS UP

It all started in Laredo, Texas, just after Nan and her guests had been met by Adair MacKenzie, Alice, and that amazing young newspaper man, Walker Jamieson.

"Got everything?" Adair MacKenzie asked gruffly when the bevy of pretty young girls, all in their early teens, had stepped, one after the other, from the streamlined train that had brought them from St. Louis. They had met in that city, all except Rhoda whose home, as those who have read "Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch" will remember, was in the South. She, therefore, had joined the party at beautiful San Antonio. From there on, the girls had all been together.

"I-I-I guess so," Nan answered her eccentric old cousin slowly as she looked about first at her friends and then at the suitcases and bags that the porters were setting on the station platform beside them.

"Looks it." Adair MacKenzie agreed laconically. "Got almost as many bags as Alice here and I thought that she carried more junk than any other woman alive. So these are the girls. H-m-m." He looked at the Lakeview Hall group in much the same manner that he had appraised Bess just three weeks before.

"Let's see," he began, and Nan's eyes twinkled as she realized that he was not going to keep his conclusions to himself any more than he had before. "You're Laura," he said positively, picking the red-headed girl out of the crowd as though he had studied a photograph of her until he couldn't possibly mistake her features.

"And that red hair's going to get you in trouble sometime," he continued his characterization. "Got a temper now. I can see that. A ready tongue too, I'll wager. But you'll get by if you can go on laughing at yourself. You've got a sense of humor. Keep it."

"Yes, sir," Laura answered as meekly as she could. She had already been warned, on the train, by Bess as to what to expect, so this frank a.n.a.lysis of her character did not take her altogether by surprise.

"And you, Miss," the old Scotsman went on around the circle of girls enjoying himself hugely as he characterized his young cousin's friends, "you," he was looking at Amelia as he spoke, "are the one that has all of those clocks. You're too serious. You'll learn down here in this lazy country that time just doesn't matter. Ask anybody to do anything for you and he'll nod his head slowly and mutter, if he's got enough pep, 'Si, si, senor, manana!' He'll do anything in the world you want him to do, manana, and manana never comes.

"However, you and I will get along. I like you. You are punctual. It's a virtue. Never been late for anything in your life, have you?"

Amelia hardly knew what to answer, for Adair had made time seem both important and unimportant.

"Speak up," the old man looked at her kindly now. "Don't be modest like my young cousin here. Well, never mind," he pa.s.sed Amelia by as he saw that he had embarra.s.sed her beyond her ability to speak. "I'll take care of you later," he ended before he turned to Rhoda.

"From the West, aren't you?" he questioned the proud brown-eyed young girl. "Can tell in a minute. That carriage, the way you hold your head, your clear eyes. Even if I hadn't heard that Western accent, I would have known." Adair MacKenzie was proud of his ability to read character, and as he went from one of the young la.s.sies to the other, he was pleased with himself and pleased with them, for their quiet acceptance of his outspokenness.

"A city girl. Just a little too shy." Grace's turn came last, and she had been dreading it. "You've got to learn to stick up for your own rights," he had struck home here, he knew, and though he realized that Grace could take it with less equilibrium than any of the rest, he wasn't going to spare her.

"Say, 'boo,' to you," he went on, "And you'll run. Isn't it so?"

Grace said nothing, but nodded her head.

"Try saying 'boo!' back sometime," he advised in a quieter tone than he had used to any of the other girls, "and see what happens. If the person you say it to doesn't run, stand your ground and say it again, louder.

But be careful," he patted Grace on the shoulder, "and don't scare yourself with your own voice."

At this everyone laughed, including Grace, and Alice MacKenzie took her father by the arm and started toward the station. "If you don't look out, father," she warned, "I'll say 'boo!' to you and then you'll jump."

"Oh, go along with you," Adair MacKenzie pounded his cane on the wooden platform, and then shook it at his daughter, "If you don't behave yourself, I'll give you one last spanking that will hold you until you are as old and gray as I am."

For answer, Alice laughed provocatively up into his face.

"Now, come on, you girls," Adair frowned as best he could under the circ.u.mstances, "we've got to get along. And you too, you get a move on,"

he pointed his cane, with this, at a tall, lanky blond young man.

At this, Nan and Bess, Rhoda and Grace, Laura and Amelia with one accord turned their eyes on Walker Jamieson.

"It's real, girls." Walker grinned down into their faces. "It moves and speaks, eats and sleeps just like the rest of the world. It does everything but work." So saying, he winked quite openly at Alice and lengthened his steps so that he walked beside her father.

"First truth I've ever heard you utter," Adair MacKenzie tried to sound brusk, but didn't succeed very well. The truth was, of course, that he was intensely pleased with the prospect of spending his summer with this crowd of young people. And, though he would be the last person in the world to admit it, he was intensely flattered that this brilliant young newspaper man was in the party. "Not that he came," he thought to himself as he noted, with some satisfaction, the regard with which Walker seemed to hold Alice, "to keep me company." He sighed deeply as he finished the thought. Alice was his only child.