"Well, we've had a night of it, eh?" he said kindly. "Funny how
much one takes the little beggars for grawnted until it's one's
own that kicks up the row? You've not seen her--she's a nice
little beggar. You might get some sleep, I should think. I'm going
to hang around until some sort of a family jamboree is over, at
one o'clock--your mother insists that we have dinner--and then
I'll go out to the rawnch. But I'll be in in the morning!"
"Girl!" said Clara, apologetically, whimsically, deprecatingly,
her weak fingers clinging tightly to his.
"Ah, well, one carn't help that!" he answered philosophically.
"We'll have a row of jolly little chaps yet!"
But there was never another child. Clara, having cast her fortunes
in with her lord, was faithful to him through every breath she
drew. But before Rachael's first crying, feverish little summer
was over there had been some definite changes at the ranch. Thomas
was gone, and Clara, pale and exhausted with the heat, engaged
Ella, a young woman servant of her mother's selecting, to bake and
wash and carry in stove-wood. Clara managed them all, Gerald, the
baby, and the maid. Perhaps at first she was just a little
astonished to find her husband as easily managed as Ella and far
more easily managed than Rachael. Gerald Fairfax was surprised,
too, lazily conceding his altered little wife her new and
energetic way with a mental reservation that when she was strong
and well again and the child less a care, things would be as they
were. But Clara, once in power, never weakened for a moment again.
Rachael grew up, a solitary and unfriendly, yet a tactful and
diplomatic, little person on the ranch. She early developed a
great admiration for her father, and a consequent regard for
herself as superior to her associates. She ruled her mother
absolutely from her fourth year, and remained her grandmother's
great favorite among a constantly increasing flock of
grandchildren. Some innate pride and scorn and dignity in the
child won her her own way through school and school days; her
young cousins were bewildered themselves by the respect and fealty
they yielded her despite the contempt in which they held her
affectations.
Clara had never been a religious woman and, married to an utter
unbeliever, she had little enough to give a child of her own. But
Clara's mother was a church woman, and her father a deeply
religious man. It was his mother, "old lady Mumford"--Rachael's
great-grandmother--who taught the child her catechism whenever she
could get hold of that restless and lawless little girl.
Rachael had great fear and respect for her great-grandmother, and
everything that was fine and good in the child instinctively
responded to the atmosphere of her little home. It was an
unpretentious home, even for Los Lobos: only a whitewashed
California cabin with a dooryard full of wall flowers and
geraniums, and pungent marigolds, and marguerites that were
budding, blossoming, and gone to rusty decay on one and the same
bush. The narrow paths were outlined with white stone ale-bottles,
turned upside down and driven into the soft ground, and under the
rustling tent of a lilac bush there were three or four clay pots
filled with dry earth. There was a railed porch on the east side
of the house, with vines climbing on strings about it, and here
the old woman, clean with the wonderful, cool-fingered cleanness
of frail yet energetic seventy-five, would sit reading in the
afternoon shade that fell from the great shoulders of the blue
mountains.