Nothing Daunted by Wickenden Dorothy

Author:Wickenden, Dorothy [Wickenden, Dorothy]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster, Inc.
Published: 2011-06-20T22:00:00+00:00

PART FOUR

Reckonings

“Hero No. 1”

13

THE CREAM OF ROUTT COUNTY

Oak Hills, 1915

The teachers worked Monday through Friday, and except for their morning duties at Sunday school and their preparations for the following week’s classes, they were free on the weekends. Sometimes Bob managed to get to Elkhead on Saturday, to take the teachers on excursions without Ferry. They went with him on one “all day jaunt” to his future anthracite coal mine in Elkhead. “Mother dear,” Ros wrote on September 2, “I am sitting under a pine tree with the most beautiful blue sky above—and a veritable grove of pines and quaking aspens about me. . . . We are having the best kind of a time. We rode all morning—now [Mr. P.] is interviewing the man who is in charge of the land while we sit and laze, until we eat our picnic lunch. The horses are grazing away nearby—and I wish you could see the whole scene—the little tent down between two hillsides covered with ferns and trees. We appreciate trees, after our sage brush.”

As they were luxuriating, Bob’s horse got loose, and when they noticed it was gone, they leaped up and began a frantic search, futilely calling and whistling. Perry got onto Dorothy’s horse, Pep. She had traded in Rogan, offering a bonus, which the buyer refused. Pep was a small sorrel, and Bob galloped off, finally catching his horse halfway back to the Harrisons’.

The following weekend, he invited them to his house in Oak Hills, telling them he’d give them a tour of the Moffat mine. They would be joined by his sister Charlotte and Portia Mansfield, and by two young women from Lexington, Kentucky, who were coming for a visit. Dorothy and Ferry had discovered that each had a friend there: Anne Holloway, whom Dorothy knew from Smith; and Dot Embry, a Vassar graduate, whom Ferry had met when he was in law school. He had been sporadically wooing Dot for a few years, but without any apparent ardor.

On their way to pick up Dot and Anne at the Oak Creek depot, they drove to Bob’s other property—a homestead in Twenty Mile Park, between Hayden and Oak Creek. It was set in a meadow of oat and wheat fields. Dorothy commented, “It is wonderful to see them break up sagebrush & change virgin land—into a fertile farm land.” Bob’s tiny shack was surrounded by “very high mountains all around which looked dark & cavernous as if they were peopled by gnomes, and I expected to see giants & ogres.” After Bob spent some time talking to his overseer, they got back into the Dodge and “tore up, down, & around those mountains at a perilous pace and just reached Oak Creek as the train pulled in.” Faced with three pairs of women, two of which contained “Dorothys,” Bob simplified matters by calling Dot and Anne “The Kentuckys,” and the teachers “The Auburns.” Ros described the weekend as a lopsided house party, “the ratio being 6 ladies to 1 gentleman.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.