CHAPTER XIVTAVIA IS DETERMINED
“After that scare I’m afraid the boys will have to go without a bird dog,” Tavia said that night as she and Dorothy were brushing their hair before the latter’s dressing-glass.
Tavia and Jennie and Ned and Nat were almost inseparable during the daytime; but when the time came to retire the flyaway girl had to have an old-time “confab,” as she expressed it, with her chum.
Dorothy was so bright and so busy all day long that nobody discovered—not even the major—that she was rather “out of it.” The two couples of young folk sometimes ran away and left Dorothy busy at some domestic task in which she claimed to find much more interest than in the fun her friends and cousins were having.
“It would have been a terrible thing if the poor dog had bitten one of us,” Dorothy replied. “Dr. Agnew, the veterinary, says without doubt it was afflicted with rabies.”
“And how scared your Aunt Winnie was!” Then Tavia began to giggle. “She will be soafraid of anything that barks now, that she’ll want all the trees cut down around the house.”
“That pun is unworthy of you, my dear,” Dorothy said placidly.
“Dear me, Doro Doodlekins!” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly and affectionately, coming close to her chum and kissing her warmly. “You are such a tabby-cat all of a sudden. Why!youhave grown up, while the rest of us are only kids.”
“Yes; I am very settled,” observed Dorothy, smiling into the mirror at her friend. “A cap for me and knitting very soon, Tavia. Then I shall sit in the chimney corner and think——”
“Think about whom, my dear?” Tavia asked saucily. “That Garry Knapp, I bet.”
“I wouldn’tbet,” sighed Dorothy. “It isn’t ladylike.”
“Oh—de-ah—me!” groaned Tavia. “You are thinking of him just the same.”
“I happened to be just now,” admitted Dorothy, and without blushing this time.
“No! were you really?” demanded Tavia, eagerly. “Isn’t it funny he doesn’t write?”
“No. Not at all.”
“But you’d think he would write and thank you for your letter if nothing more,” urged the argumentative Tavia.
“No,” said Dorothy again.
“Why not?”
“Because Mr. Knapp never got my letter,” Dorothy said, opening her bureau drawer and pulling the letter out from under some things laid there. “See. It was returned to-day.”
“Oh, Dorothy!” gasped Tavia, both startled and troubled.
“Yes. It—it didn’t reach him somehow,” Dorothy said, and she could not keep the trouble entirely out of her voice.
“Oh, mydear!” repeated Tavia.
“And I am sorry,” her friend went on to say; “for now he will not know about the intentions of those men, Stiffbold and Lightly.”
“But, goodness! it serves him right,” exclaimed Tavia, suddenly. “He didn’t give us his right address.”
“He gave us no address,” said Dorothy, sadly.
“Why, yes! he said Desert City——”
“He mentioned that place and said that his land was somewhere near there. But he works on a ranch, which, perhaps, is a long way from Desert City.”
“That’s so,” grumbled Tavia. “I forgot he’s only a cowboy.”
At this Dorothy flushed a little and Tavia, looking at her sideways and eagerly, noted the flush. Her eyes danced for a moment, for the girl was naturally chock-full of mischief.
But in a moment the expression of Tavia Travers’face changed. Dorothy was pensively gazing in the glass; she had halted in her hair brushing, and Tavia knew that her chum neither saw her own reflection nor anything else pictured in the mirror. The mirror of her mind held Dorothy’s attention, and Tavia could easily guess the vision there. A tall, broad-shouldered, broad-hatted young man with a frank and handsome face and a ready smile that dimpled one bronzed cheek ever so little and wrinkled the outer corners of his clear, far-seeing eyes.
Garry Knapp!
Tavia for the first time realized that Dorothy had found interest and evidently a deep and abiding interest, in the young stranger from Desert City. It rather shocked her. Dorothy, of all persons, to become so very deeply interested in a man about whom they knew practically nothing.
Tavia suddenly realized that she knew more about him than Dorothy did. At least, she had been with Garry Knapp more than had her friend. It was Tavia who had had the two hours’ tête-à-tête with the Westerner at dinner on the evening before Garry Knapp departed so suddenly for the West. All that happened and was said at that dinner suddenly unrolled like a panorama before Tavia’s memory.
Why! she could picture it all plainly. She had been highly delighted herself in the recovery ofher bag and in listening to Garry’s story of how it had been returned by the cash-girl’s sister. And, of course, she had been pleased to be dining alone with a fine looking young man in a hotel dining-room. She had rattled on when her turn came to talk, just as irresponsibly as usual.
Now, in thinking over the occasion, she realized that the young man from the West had been a shrewd questioner. He had got her started upon Dorothy Dale, and before they came to the little cups of black coffee Tavia had told just about all she knew regarding her chum.
The reader may be sure that all Tavia said was to Dorothy’s glory. She had little need to explain to Garry Knapp what a beautiful character Dorothy Dale possessed. Tavia had told about Dorothy’s family, her Aunt Winnie’s wealth, the fortunes Major Dale now possessed both in the East and West, and the fact that when Dorothy came of age, at twenty-one, she would be wealthy in her own right. She had said all this to a young man who was struggling along as a cowpuncher on a Western ranch, and whose patrimony was a piece of rundown land that he could sell but for a song, as he admitted himself. “And no chorus to it!” Tavia thought.
“I’m a bonehead!” she suddenly thought fiercely. “Nat would say my noodle is solid ivory. I know now what was the matter with GarryKnapp that evening. I know why he rushed up to me and asked for Dorothy, and was what the novelists call ‘distrait’ during our dinner. Oh, what a worm I am! A miserable, squirmy worm! Ugh!” and the conscience-stricken girl fairly shuddered at her own reflection in the mirror and turned away quickly so that Dorothy should not see her features.
“It’s—it’s the mostwonderfulthing. And it began right under my nose, my poor little ‘re-trousered’ nose, as Joe called it the other day, and I didn’t really see it! I thought it was just a fancy on Dorothy’s part! And I never thought of Garry Knapp’s side of it at all! Oh, my heaven!” groaned Tavia, deep in her own soul. “Why wasn’t I born with some good sense instead of good looks? I—I’ve spoiled my chum’s life, perhaps. Goodness! it can’t be so bad as that.
“Of course, Garry Knapp is just the sort of fellow who would raise a barrier of Dorothy’s riches between them. Goodness me!” added the practical Tavia, “I’d like to see any barrier of wealth stopmeif I wanted a man. I’d shin the wall in a hurry so as to be on the same side of it as he was.”
She would have laughed at this fancy had she not taken a look at Dorothy’s face again.
“Good-night!” she shouted into her chum’s ear, hugged her tight, kissed her loudly, and ran awayinto her own room. Once there, she cried all the time she was disrobing, getting into her lacy nightgown, and pulling down the bedclothes.
Then she did not immediately go to bed. Instead, she tiptoed back to the connecting door and closed it softly. She turned on the hanging electric light over the desk.
“I’ll do it!” she said, with determined mien. “I’ll write to Lance Petterby.” And she did so.