Now, as Nan completed the job of helping Rhoda dress and Bess finished packing her bags, there was a gentle knock on the door and a gentle voice inquired, "May I come in?" It was Alice.

"Walker's gone for father," she said, "And Laura's asked me to tell you that there's a train out in a half hour. Is everything ready?"

Rhoda nodded her head, but said nothing. She was trying hard now not to cry.

"So you know where cousin Adair is?" Nan looked across the room at Alice.

"No, but Walker will find him and have him here in no time at all,"

Alice replied quietly and confidently.

She had hardly finished the sentence, when those in the room heard the firm tread of Adair MacKenzie in the hall and heard his voice boom out, "Porter, porter, come here, and take these bags."

It was good to hear him, good to hear his decisiveness. Everyone in the room felt better as soon as he opened the door.

"Here, here, what's all this?" He looked at Rhoda's red eyes. "Come, girl, buck up," he patted her roughly on the shoulder. "Ready, are you?"

"You're going by plane. It leaves in fifteen minutes and there's a taxi waiting downstairs. That red-headed girl, what's her name, got you a compartment in a train, but we've cancelled that.

"Now, that good-for-nothing newspaper friend of my daughter's is downstairs putting through a long distance call so that you can talk to your father before you leave here.

"You can tell him that this is a private plane and that it will practically drop you in your own back yard. Do they have back yards where you come from?"

Rhoda nodded. How good everyone was being to her.

"Now, now, don't thank me," Adair MacKenzie forestalled her thanks.

"Help a nice girl like you out any time I can. Ready? You better go downstairs. You've just got time to talk to your father before you make the plane. You'll find everything comfortable there.

"Come, you, Nan," he motioned to his cousin, "You're the only one that can come along with us. Don't want a lot of fuss. See the rest of you later." With this, he hurried Nan and Rhoda out of the room and down the elevator so quickly that Rhoda, in doing things, got control of herself, just as Adair MacKenzie had known she would.

The talk with her father was comforting, but not encouraging, and it was with a heavy, heavy heart that Rhoda Hammond waved good-by to her friends at the airport a few minutes later.

Nan stifled a sob as the plane taxied across the field and rose into the air. Adair MacKenzie looked down on her. "There, there, child," he said gently, "Things will turn out all right and we'll make this up to the girl sometime later."

Nan caught her upper lip between her teeth and tried to smile up at him. "Please, please, make everything right." It was a prayer that she breathed.

CHAPTER IX

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 bl.u.s.tering, 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.