“What’s this?” Laura questioned the next morning when she came upon Amelia in her hotel room reading diligently from a book.
“Oh, nothing.” Amelia barely looked up.
“Come on, tell aunty,” Laura teased. “Nobody else is up yet and I’ve simply got to talk to someone.”
“You mean there’s no one else about, so you’ll talk to me. Well, I like that!” Amelia returned to her book as though she were really indignant.
“You know I didn’t,” Laura sounded very conciliatory—for her. “It’s just this; I’ve got the whim-whams something terrible. Did you ever have the whim-whams, Amelia?”
“Can’t say I did,” Amelia answered. “At least I didn’t call them any such name as that.”
“Then you know what I mean?” Laura looked very serious.
“You mean,” Amelia turned the open book over on her lap and answered Laura’s question, “that you have awakened early in a hotel in a strange city, that you want like anything to go off exploring, that you know you can’t, and that the next best thing you can find to do is to annoy someone else who can’t go either.”
“My dear professor,” Laura assumed as serious a mien as possible, “you have hit the well-known nail squarely on the head. It must be that you have the whim-whams too. Now what is that you are reading?”
“Well, if you must know,” Amelia gave in, “It’s a guidebook to Mexico.”
“Ah, what could be better.” Laura herself reached for the book. “Let’s see what this country across the street from this hotel is like.”
“It does seem funny, doesn’t it,” Amelia said, “that when we look out our hotel windows we are looking into a foreign country. It doesn’t look any different. It doesn’t sound any different. And it doesn’t—”
“Smell any different,” Laura finished, “and that’s the most surprising thing of all, because according to Mr. MacKenzie, Mexico is just the smelliest place on God’s green earth.”
“Did he tell you that too?” Amelia asked. “Really, when he finished the tirade against the country that he delivered to me after dinner, I began to wonder why in the world he ever brought along five such nice girls as we.”
“Five? What’s the matter, ’Mealy, can’t you count before breakfast? There are six of us.”
“I said five nice girls,” Amelia insisted. “He might have had one of several reasons for bringing you along.”
“Such as—” Nan had come into the room just in time to hear this last.
“Oh, he might have wanted to make the world a better place for the rest of us to live in by losing Laura, making her a target for the revolutionists, feeding her to the bulls, or just leaving her here as food for the fleas,” Amelia responded airily, and then she put her arm around Laura’s shoulder as though to show her that she didn’t mean a word of what she was saying.
“They do say,” Grace added as she joined the group, “that the fleas here are man-sized. That reporter told me last night that the reason they give us mosquito netting to put over us at night is that the fleas and the mosquitos wage a nightly battle as to who is going to carry off the Americans.”
“And you believed him?” Laura laughed.
“Well, not exactly,” Grace answered, “but I did carefully tuck my netting all round me last night.”
“He told me lots of things about Mexico, too,” Nan added, “and I don’t know which of them to believe. This is a queer country we are going into, full of so many strange legends, so many different kinds of people that any wild tale at all might be true.”
“That’s what I was thinking,” Amelia agreed, “when Laura came into the room this morning. This guidebook here is full of all sorts of queer tales.”
“Such as—?” Nan queried.
“Oh, you people in there,” Bess called from another room, “wait until Rhoda and I come before you talk any more about Mexico. We want to hear too.”
“All right, slow-pokes,” Nan called back, “but you’ll have to hurry. We’re supposed to be downstairs for breakfast with Cousin Adair in exactly one-half hour.”
At this, Bess and Rhoda came into Amelia’s room and the girls, all dressed in sports clothes, settled themselves to learn something about the country they were going to visit.
“It says here,” Nan began, for she had long ago lifted the guidebook from Amelia’s lap, “that Mexico is a Latin-American country south of the United States of America. The Gulf of Mexico is to the east and the Pacific Ocean to the west.”
“Oh, we know that,” Bess interrupted impatiently, “tell us something that is different.”
“Well, how’s this?” Nan queried, “Mexico is a land of great contrasts. About sixty percent of its population are Indians who live in a backward civilization that weaves its own clothes, grinds its own corn, does everything for itself by hand. The other forty percent is advanced and modern. The first can neither read nor write. The latter attends modern schools and universities.
“Nothing in Mexico, in its history, its climate, its people, or its landscape is dull or monotonous.”
“That’s better,” Bess approved. She was not one to care much for facts or figures.
“Oh, there are more interesting things than that in the book,” Amelia reached for it. “Here let me read you something that I found this morning.”
“Just a second,” Nan held on to it, “How in the world do you pronounce these words with all their z’s and x’s. No wonder there are so many people that can’t read or write. I wouldn’t be able to write myself if I lived here. Imagine living in a place called I x m i q u i l p a n or X o c h i m i l c o.” She spelled them all out because she couldn’t possibly pronounce them. “They must all be Indian words dating from the time of the Aztecs,” Nan went on. “Look, they all have beautiful meanings.
“Chalchihuites is translated into ‘Emeralds in the Rough’, Tehuacan, ‘Stone of the gods’, Chiapas, ‘River of the Lime-leaved Sage’, and Tzintzuntzan, ‘Humming Bird’. And here’s a place I want to go, Yecapixtla or ‘Place Where People Have Sharp Noses’.”
“What a funny place that must be,” Laura laughed with Nan, “I’ll bet they all spend their time minding one another’s business.”
“They probably have a factory there,” Nan went on, “for turning out people like Mrs. Cupp and they have catalogues showing the sharp, sharper, and sharpest noses.”
“And when a school principal wants to hire an assistant that will see everything and hear everything he pays top price and gets the sharpest,” Laura liked the idea. “We ought to go there,” she ended, “if it’s only to get a postcard so that we can send it back to Mrs. Cupp with the words ‘Wish you were here’.”
“Oh, Laura, you old meany,” Nan laughed. “You know she isn’t half as bad as you make her out to be.”
“No, she isn’t,” Laura agreed. “Lakeview Hall certainly wouldn’t be complete without her. Why, down here in Mexico—well, on the border of Mexico—when I’m going farther and farther away from her all the time, I can almost believe that I’m fond of her. But don’t let me talk about it,” she pretended to sniff as though she was going to cry, “or I’ll be getting homesick for her.”
“Small chance of your ever getting homesick for anyone,” Bess remarked, “but let’s hear what it is Amelia wants to tell us about and then go downstairs, I’m almost starved.”
“Oh, I’m sorry, Amelia,” Nan handed over the book, “I didn’t mean to monopolize it.” These Lakeview Hall girls, together for so many years under all sorts of circumstances, were still polite to one another and thoughtful about little things. They teased one another, laughed at one another’s faults, and quarreled sometimes among themselves, but they were always eager to forgive and more than anxious to please. This was why they had been friends for so long. They were never really jealous of one another and were always ready to praise anyone in the group who did anything outstanding.
“It’s all right, Nan,” Amelia answered as she reached for the book. “I merely thought that this story of the founding of Mexico City might be fun to read. It’s short, Bess, so we’ll be downstairs in just a few minutes. Here it is.
“‘When the Aztecs, a people that inhabited this part of Mexico long before the coming of the white man from across the water, were wandering from place to place in search of a spot on which to establish themselves, their head priest had a vision.
“‘In it, he saw their War God and heard him telling them to go on and on until they found an eagle on a cactus growing from the rock. The cactus, the War God said, was the heart of his treacherous nephew who had waged war against him and lost. As punishment, he had been put to death and his heart was torn from him and thrown into the lake. It fell upon a rock among the reeds, and from it grew a cactus so big and strong that an eagle, seeking a place to build his nest, had made his home upon it.
“‘The Aztecs heeded the words of their War God as told them by the priest. For years they wandered, until finally, one morning very early, their long search was rewarded. They came upon the eagle on the cactus! His wings were extended to the rays of the sun and in his claws he held a snake.
“‘So it was here that they built their city and even to this day, the cactus and the eagle, holding a snake in his beak, is Mexico’s emblem.’” With this, Amelia closed the book.
“So that’s why I’ve been seeing that symbol on so many Mexican things all these years,” Nan commented. “I’ve wondered what it meant, but was always too lazy to look it up. How strange the history of this country is that we are going into! I wonder what will happen.”
“Probably everything,” Laura said, “so, now I think we’d better go downstairs and eat, fortify ourselves so to speak for any emergency.”
“Guess you’re right,” Nan laughed. And with this, Nan and her friends all hurried down to breakfast and to the beginning of another day in their Mexican adventure.
“Well, how are the charming señoritas this morning?” Walker Jamieson dropped his feet from the chair next to him and rose as Nan and her friends entered the lounge of the hotel.
“Let’s see, one, two, three, four, five, yes, there are six of you still. There was no victory for the mosquitoes last night I can see. I had an idea,” he nodded his head slowly as though he had been seriously considering the subject, “that all would go well after my joust with the man-sized monster that forced its way into my room. Boy, was it a big one! It had a million legs like tentacles that wound themselves around me so that if it hadn’t been for my trusty Excalibur, none of us would have been here this morning. It was a fight.” He shook his head as though the recollection was more than he could bear.
“Yes, we can see it was.” Alice, too, had been waiting for the girls to appear. “We can see the marks of the bloody battle all over your face.”
“Can you really?” Walker Jamieson grinned down at the girl who was just a foot shorter than himself. “Well, they are all for you ladies,” he pretended now to doff a big sombrero and sweep it across in front of him in the most approved style.
“What’s all this nonsense?” Adair MacKenzie joined the party. “Can’t stand silliness any time, and least of all before breakfast. Now, get out into that dining room and eat.”
At this, the whole party moved. “Don’t intend to spend the summer in Laredo,” Adair muttered as he followed them.
Breakfast was a silent meal—silent that is, save for Adair’s sputtering into his coffee. At its finish, he pushed his plate back, called the waiter and gave him an extraordinarily large tip, and turned to his young cousin.
“Well, Nancy,” he said agreeably, “How are things with you this fine morning? Ready to move on? And you, Bess, and all the rest of you, are you all right? Now, let me tell you all a secret,” he went on as he realized how quiet everyone had been throughout the meal, “I’m not really such a bad old soul. Oh, I lose my temper at times. I admit that,” he said generously, “but I’m not bad, not bad at all.” He shook his head as though he was entirely satisfied with himself and the world in general.
“And you there, Jamieson, you’re not bad either,” he went on.
Walker nodded his head as though he acquiesced entirely and Alice beamed on everyone. It was nice to have everyone in such a happy frame of mind, she thought, and then, for luck, crossed her fingers.
“And now, daddy,” she ventured while he was still in his expansive mood, “What’s on the program for today?”
“Oh, lots of things, lots of nice things,” he looked very pleased with himself. “First off, how soon can you all be ready to move on? We should be moving along to Mexico City, a grand place, one of the most interesting cities I’ve ever visited. What say you, Jamieson?”
“Eh, what?” Jamieson had been quite bowled over by the old man’s sudden change in mood and had been wondering whether it would be the right time now to ask whether he could kidnap Alice for part of the morning. He was trying to signal her to ask her opinion, when the question was addressed to him. Now, he was at a complete loss, for he had heard nothing of the conversation that preceded the query.
“I say,” Adair repeated his question patiently, “isn’t Mexico City a grand place?”
“Yes, yes, a grand place,” Walker answered absently. Had Alice understood what he was signaling? He couldn’t be sure. What was she telling him with her lips. Was it “Better wait” or “Better not.” “What?” The question came out audibly without his realizing it.
It was Nan, the darling, who saved the day. She had been watching the frantic efforts of Walker Jamieson to communicate with Alice and noted his lack of success. She, too, had been trying to read Alice’s answer and was as startled as Walker when his “what?” was voiced. Now, like a “veteran” (Walker used the word later when he promised to buy her something, anything from a gorgeously colored serape to an jade bracelet for coming to his rescue) she filled the breach.
“I said,” she affirmed, looking at Walker as though she was answering his question, “that we can all be ready to leave about noon, if it pleases cousin Adair.” She turned to her cousin somewhat diffidently as she added this last. The truth was, of course, that she and her friends could have left in an hour, in a half hour, but it was fun trying to help Walker and Alice out.
“Let’s see,” Adair took out his big gold watch and considered. “Noon. That gives us a few hours to make a good start on our way before dark. Could you make it by eleven?”
Nan looked at Walker. “Eleven-thirty.” She read his lips.
“Eleven-thirty,” she smiled up at her cousin.
“You little beggar, you,” he tweaked the pink ear that showed just beneath her brown bobbed hair, “you’ll be able to barter with those Mexicans like a veteran. It’s your Scotch blood.” He looked proud of her as he turned to the others, “Well, Nan here says ‘eleven-thirty’, so eleven-thirty it is. Now get out, all of you, I’ve got some business to attend to, and I don’t want to see any more of any of you until it’s time to leave. No, not even you,” he added as he looked at Alice.
They all strolled out of the dining room together and Walker executed a few fancy little steps for Nan’s benefit, as, when they reached the elevators, he and Alice went on past them to the doors and out.
“Why, Nan Sherwood, it’s a romance. Walker Jamieson is in love with Alice MacKenzie. I’ll bet you anything.” Bess’s face was all alight as she closed the door of Nan’s room. “It’s just thrilling. Did you see the way the two of them walked away together. Why, they were so glad you said you couldn’t be ready until eleven-thirty! I just know they were!” Bess was fairly bubbling over with excitement. “Didn’t you see it at all?”
“See what?” Nan pretended innocence.
“Why, how glad they were, of course,” Bess seemed impatient with Nan’s inability to see a romance when it was right under her nose.
“Oh, Bess, you imagine things,” Nan answered. She didn’t want Bess to be aware at all that she had tried to help Alice and Walker out.
“Imagine things! You’re just blind, that’s all,” Bess was very proud of her discovery. “They are in love with one another and they’ll get married in Mexico. You’ll be the maid of honor and we’ll be the bridesmaids and everything will be just grand, won’t it?”
“Bess, Bess,” Nan laughed, “how you do jump to conclusions! Have you ever considered that the bride has to have someone to give her away and have you tried to imagine cousin Adair giving Alice away?”
Bess was all soberness immediately. “No, I didn’t think of that,” she admitted. “Oh, what can we do about him?” she puckered her brows as if Adair was an immediate and very difficult problem. “If we could get him right after he has had a good breakfast,” she laughed, “maybe he would be as nice as he was this morning and then I’m sure everything would be all right.”
“Or,” she continued, as a new and better idea came to her, “they could elope. Wouldn’t that be exciting, Nan? And just think how mad your cousin would be. No, that’s not so good either. Mr. MacKenzie would probably disown Alice and then they wouldn’t have all his money.”
“Bess!” Nan exclaimed, “how you do run on.”
“Yes, I know,” Bess agreed, “but it’s such a perfectly entrancing subject. She’s a darling and so is he. Why, he’s almost as nice as Walter Mason,” she added slyly.
Nan ignored this last. “Walker is nice, isn’t he?” she said. “And he and Alice do look dear together.”
“He’s swell,” Bess said slangily. “He’s tall and handsome and full of fun. Do you know, I think sometimes that Mr. MacKenzie does like him, for all the way he calls him ‘lazy’ and a ‘no-good reporter.’”
“Of course he does,” Nan agreed, “and Walker likes him too. I just know it.”
Bess looked at Nan questioningly at this latter bit of information. Did Nan know something she didn’t know?
“Anyway, we’ll just have to wait and see what happens,” Nan tried to dismiss the subject.
“I suppose so,” Bess sighed, “but it would be such fun to be an attendant at a wedding.”
“Oh, Bessie,” Nan ruffled her friend’s hair, “you’re such a romantic soul. I’ll bet that you think that if worse came to worse and cousin Adair insisted that Alice marry someone else, Walker would ride up on a charger and carry Alice off the way young Lochinvar did in that poem we learned back in the fifth grade. Remember?”
“You mean the one about Lochinvar coming up out of the West, ‘through all the wide world his steed was the best,’” Bess laughed.
“Yes, that’s the one,” Nan assented. “Remember how we loved that thing and how we used to say over and over again the stanza that followed the one where he asked the bride to dance with him
“And then at the end,” Bess went on, “there was this,
“Oh, Nan,” Bess laughed when she had finished, “when I was a kid I thought there couldn’t possibly be anything more romantic than that.”
“Nor I neither,” Nan admitted, “And I thought of it often when we were in Scotland last summer. But do you know, Bess,” she giggled, “that Young Lochinvar of today would have to dash up in a car—”
“Yes, or in Mexico it might be a burro,” Bess laughed heartily at the thought.
“Say, what are you two making such a rumpus about,” Laura stuck her head in through the door. “First thing you know, they’ll be locking you up as a couple of laughing hyenas, because you are making such a racket.”
“Come on in, Laura,” Nan invited, “We’ve just got a silly streak, that’s all. Bess, here, had a couple of crazy ideas that she aired. She’s all right now. You can come in,” she finished reassuringly. “What’s up?”
“Oh, nothing,” Laura answered in such an unusual tone that Nan knew immediately something was wrong.
“Come, what is it?” she asked again, going over to Laura and closing the door behind her.
“Oh, it’s Rhoda,” Laura admitted when the door was closed. “Nan, something terrible’s happened and Rhoda is in her room crying her eyes out. Won’t you come and see if you can’t do something for her.”
“Of course,” Nan started for the door at once. “But what’s happened?” She and Bess asked this last together.
“Rhoda just received a telegram from her father asking her to come home at once.”
“Why?”
“Oh, girls,” Laura herself was almost in tears, “Rhoda’s mother is seriously ill and they don’t know whether or not she will live until Rhoda gets there.”
“Go downstairs,” Nan took command of the situation at once, “and find cousin Adair. Tell him what’s happened and ask him what to do. I’ll go to Rhoda. Bess, you had better come too,” she continued. “Somebody will have to fix her bags so that she can leave at once. Now, don’t any of you cry in front of Rhoda, we’ve got to help her to be as brave as possible. Maybe it isn’t as bad as it seems.” With this Nan and Bess and Laura set about to help their friend and, for the time, all thoughts of their Mexican journey were forgotten.
Mrs. Hammond, Rhoda’s mother, had entertained the girls a couple of years previous to the present story, on the Hammond ranch in the West. They all remembered her as a beautifully graceful, sweet woman. Blind for many years, she had not let her affliction crush her spirit and was, perhaps, one of the happiest, nicest people they had ever known.
Those who have read “Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch or The Old Mexican’s Treasure” will remember Mrs. Hammond too and remember well her first meeting with the girls.
“I’ll never forget it,” Nan had told her own mother again and again. “As we rode up to the veranda of the low-roofed ranch house Mr. and Mrs. Hammond stood there on the porch waiting for us. She was a tall lovely person. I liked her the moment I saw her. As I came up the steps behind her friend, Mrs. Janeway, she took hold of me and asked ‘Who is this?’
“Before I had a chance to answer she ran her fingers lightly over my face, even feeling my ears and the way my hair fluffed over my forehead and the way my eyebrows were. Then, without any hesitation and before I had said anything at all, she said, ‘Why, this is Nan Sherwood that I have heard so much about.’
“When I asked her how she knew, she laughed the prettiest laugh I’ve ever heard, outside of yours, and said that she knew because Rhoda had written home about me and because she was a witch. She knew the others by touch too. Oh, she was such a nice person and so good to us all the while we were there!
“She never once said a thing about her blindness. She seemed to take it for granted and never excused herself on account of it.
“I only hope that, if ever anything terrible happens to me, I will remember her and be as sweet and uncomplaining about it as she is.”
The other girls had felt the same as Nan. All had left Rose Ranch with a very warm feeling for Mrs. Hammond and they were all better girls for having met her.
In the days that followed their return to school that year they sent her a gift along with their bread-and-butter notes. Ever after that, boxes Rhoda received from her Western home always contained some sort of goodies specially marked for Rhoda’s Lakeview Hall friends. So Mrs. Hammond had become a well-beloved friend to them all.
Now, when the telegram came telling of her serious illness, they all felt personally concerned.
“Oh, Nan,” Laura came into the room where Nan was helping Rhoda dress and comforting her as much as possible, “I can’t find your cousin anyplace. He seems to have gone out on business and he didn’t leave word with anyone as to where he was going.”
“Well, we’ve got to find him, that’s all.” Nan was not one to give up easily in any circumstances. “Have you tried to locate Walker Jamieson?”
“Yes, and I can’t find him or Alice either. You don’t know where they were going, do you?”
“No.” Already Nan was regretting that she had helped Alice and Walker out. She felt that she needed them now, very much. “I tell you what you do, you call up the railway station and find out what are the best possible train connections that Rhoda can make. Then reserve her a compartment. After that call those offices where we were yesterday and ask whether cousin Adair is there or is expected.
“By the time you finish, Rhoda will be ready and we’ll be downstairs at the telegraph desk. We are going to wire her father so that he can have someone at the station to meet her.”
At these instructions, Laura flew across the hall to her own room to make the calls, for she wished to keep things as quiet as possible around Rhoda. In the meantime, both Amelia and Grace had heard what had happened and came to help.
The girls were all sticking together in trouble even as they always did in pleasure, and it was a great comfort to completely bewildered Rhoda.
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.
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 blustering, 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.
“Here, here, what’s happening back there?” Adair MacKenzie turned from his place next to the driver and frowned at the girls. “Can’t have this. No blubbering on this trip.”
Nan smiled a wan smile at the word.
“Thought you were a brave girl,” Adair went on. “Now, dry away those tears,” he ended, and turning, resumed his work of instructing the driver as to how to drive.
It was Laura who unthinkingly started them all off again.
“Makes you think, doesn’t it,” she remarked, “of the number of things you overlook doing for your mother when you’re around her? Will I ever be good,” she continued, “when I get home. I’ll wash the dishes, set the table, run to the store, do anything and everything without question.”
Laura sounded so serious and so unlike herself in her seriousness that even Nan had to smile, as she agreed. “That’s just the way it makes me feel,” she said.
“Oh, Nan,” Bess protested, “and you’re always so good to your mother. I’m the one that’s mean. Why, I never do a thing around the house if I can help it.” And Bess spoke the truth. The daughter of a family that had plenty of money, Bess was a pampered child. As a general rule, she had little regard for either of her parents. Whatever she wanted, she asked for without regard for cost. What she couldn’t get from her mother, she frequently managed to get from her father, and the two were well on the way toward spoiling her utterly when she went off to Lakeview with Nan.
There, away from home among strangers in a place where she had to live up to certain well-defined rules, Bess had improved considerably. Those that have watched her since her first appearance in “Nan Sherwood at Pine Camp” have seen a change come over her gradually. She is a little more thoughtful, a little more considerate of other people, but she still has a selfish streak which at times like the present confronts her so that her conscience pricks her sharply.
“When I get home,” Bess spoke more quietly than was her wont, “I’m going to do a little reforming myself. I’m going to pay more attention to what mother has to say. I’m going to be a better daughter.”
“And I am too,” Laura agreed.
“And I,” Grace and Amelia said this together.
So even while Rhoda Hammond in a plane that was winging its way toward her western home, was remembering little, dear things about the mother she was so fond of, her friends were thinking of her and making resolution after resolution about their own conduct toward their parents.
The days that followed were punctuated by telegrams received from Rhoda.
“Arrived safely.” That was the first one. It told nothing at all of her mother’s condition.
“Mother’s condition very serious. Not much hope.” That was the second and the girls scarcely had the heart to go on with Adair MacKenzie’s party. Privately, they gave up hope entirely, but Adair tried to keep their spirits up. “Never can tell about these things,” he said after reading the message.
“Some improvement. Pray. Love. Rhoda.” The third one read, and everyone felt better.
Then for two days, there was no word, and everyone’s hope just dwindled away to nothing. During these days, it was Walker Jamieson with his knowledge of Mexico and its ways that put what life there was into the party.
The eight hundred miles over the new Pan-American highway from Laredo to Mexico City was through gorgeous tropical and mountain scenery, and all the way Walker regaled the girls with stories and legends about Mexico and its history.
He told bloody stories of bandits coming down out of the hills, attacking travelers, kidnaping them and then robbing them, or holding them for huge ransom. He told of warfare between the Mexicans and the Indians back in the hills. He told of lost tribes who still worshipped the Sun God, talked their native tongue, still lived in the way those who had built the pyramids had lived.
Alice listened breathlessly to all he had to say. Nan and her friends hung on his every word. Adair MacKenzie listened and grunted noncommittally.
From Laredo to Monterey, he told these stories and from Monterey to Villa Juarez until everyone, whether he would admit it or not, felt deeply the spell of Mexico.
Then from Villa Juarez to Tamazunchale, across rivers that were bordered by heavy tropical foliage, everyone except Adair MacKenzie was more or less silent absorbing quietly the beauty about.
“Listen!” Nan had the temerity to interrupt one of Adair’s outbursts against their chauffeur. Surprised by the command, Adair chuckled and kept quiet. Nan had heard the song of a tropical bird. Its call was picked up by another on the other side of the road. The chauffeur slowed down and then, at Adair’s command, stopped.
For a few moments everyone listened, and then Nan pushed open the door of the car and got out. The others followed. To the right and to the left of them the luxuriant growth made the place like nothing else they had ever seen before. The birds that flew out of the thicket were gorgeous things in brilliant colors. The butterflies that drifted from flower to flower were lovely too. But the biggest surprise of all was the orchids.
“Why, they grow wild!” Bess was amazed. The only ones she had ever seen before had been in the window of a florist’s shop on Madison Avenue in Chicago and in a shoulder corsage worn by Linda Riggs at a school ball. This last had made Bess exceedingly envious, despite the fact that Linda had been reprimanded afterwards, by Dr. Prescott, for wearing it. And now, here they were growing all about her, wild! Bess could scarcely believe her eyes.
Walker Jamieson laughed at her. “You like them?” he asked. “Didn’t know, did you, that they grew any place outside of a hothouse?”
Bess shook her head. It was the first time in her life that she had ever really been moved by nature in any form. The others felt the same. The air seemed quiet and heavy and yet full of all sorts of strange noises too. Grace was timid in the face of all the strangeness and held on to Nan’s hand.
Nan’s eyes were big and wondrous. It was like tropical jungles that she had read about. It was like something she had never even dared hope to see. She was quiet. Silently Adair MacKenzie watched her, and felt pleased with himself that he had shown it to her. In regarding her, he felt almost as though he himself had created it for her special benefit.
She caught his glance, looked up at him and grinned. “Wish I could take a piece of it home with me,” she said.
“You can.” Walker Jamieson sounded as though that would be the simplest thing in the world.
“How?” Nan asked in the tone of one who didn’t believe a word of what she heard.
“Easy.” Jamieson’s eyes twinkled, for he knew that she thought that this was only another bit of his foolishness. “All you’ve got to do is get a camera and take a picture. Then you’ll have it for life.”
“But I can’t,” Nan was serious too now.
“Why?”
“First, I’ve no camera and secondly, I don’t know how to take pictures.”
“Oh, we’ll take care of that,” Walker Jamieson waved these difficulties aside as though they didn’t amount to anything. “I’ve got a camera in the car, and, if you want, I’ll show you how to get the best results. I’m in your debt anyway,” he whispered.
“Do you mean that about the camera and everything?” Nan was incredulous.
“Mean it? It’s a promise, isn’t it?” Walker drew Alice into the conversation.
She nodded her head happily. She knew, if Nan didn’t, that Walker had made a hobby of photography and just the year before, had won a prize in a national show.
“We’ll begin, just as soon as we get back in that car,” Jamieson promised further. “When we get to Mexico City, we’ll buy some more films and the camera is yours to do with as you will until we return to the States.”
So, because of an impulsive wish and an impulsive promise, Nan began almost immediately to develop a hobby that, even before her Mexican adventure was over, was going to have amazing consequences.
From Tamazunchale to Mexico City, the drive was quite another experience. The road now was hewn out of sheer mountain rock. The car climbed and climbed, until the girls’ ears felt strange and Bess declared that she could hardly breathe. She forgot this, however, when they, upon Alice’s insistence, this time, got out again. All around them, huge mountain peaks rose to great heights making them all, except, perhaps, Adair MacKenzie, feel small and insignificant.
Straight down below them they saw rivers and waterfalls that looked small and white and unimportant, like a thread that some mighty hand had dropped carelessly in the greenness. Then they got in the car, went down the mountainside again, and they came to a lovely white village in a fertile green valley.
Here they stopped and ate.
“Can’t understand this jargon,” Adair MacKenzie laid the menu that had been given him down and looked utterly disgusted.
“No sense in their making it like this,” he continued as though it was a personal insult that anyone should presume to speak or write any other language than English. “Can’t see how they can understand it themselves.”
In the end, it was Walker Jamieson who did the ordering. “How about some nice mode de guajolote?” he grinned at Nan and her friends as he put the question. “It’s turkey to you,” he explained when they laughed, “stuffed turkey to be exact and a choice bit here. With it, we’ll have tortillas, the Mexican substitute for bread, and frijoles, the favorite Mexican bean. Sound all right?”
The girls nodded as they tried to find the items on their own menus. And Adair MacKenzie grunted that he would take the same.
The meal wasn’t entirely a success. Nan and her friends enjoyed it, but Adair MacKenzie grumbled throughout despite all that Alice could do to mollify him.
“Never mind, daddy,” she said at last, “in a couple of more days we’ll be at the hacienda—”
“Yes, and that housekeeper of ours better be there, or I’ll fire her.” Adair was off again.
Alice restrained a smile. For twenty years now, Adair had been firing the housekeeper and for twenty years she had been running him and his house just as she pleased. It was a joke that the motherly old lady and Alice shared.
“She’ll be there,” Alice tried to reassure him, “and so will that Chinese cook that we have heard so much about.”
Nan and the rest looked up from their turkey, half expecting a story, but Alice said nothing further. They finished the meal in silence and followed Adair to the car.
Then, by way of Zimapan, an attractive hillside village, remembered ever afterwards by the girls for its huge cacti, some more than thirty-five feet high, they continued on toward Mexico City. They passed through Tasquillo, and then over a sandy road between other tall cacti to Ixmiquilpan, a picturesque town where native Indians were tending sheep and spinning along the streets.
Here Nan took a picture, the first of many she was to take, of the girls as they stood in a market where they had just bought some gayly woven baskets. The sight of the Indians brought more stories to Walker’s mind and so, in the few miles that lay between them and their stopping place for the night, he told more tales.
He told stories of buried treasure left by the Aztecs in deep underground chambers, of turquoise and jade that was more lovely than any the modern world has discovered. He told of gold so plentiful that it had no value, of great temples that American Museums were spending hundreds of thousands of dollars to rebuild.
He knew all the stories, because, since his early childhood, spent in California where Mexican labor was plentiful because it was cheap, he had been interested in the country.
When, on the third day of their journey, they approached Mexico City, Walker Jamieson was in a particularly expansive mood, one designed to keep their minds off the question of what word they would find from Rhoda in the capital.
“Below you, ladies and gentlemen,” he said with a great sweep of his arm, “you see Mexico City, the capital of this surprising republic of Mexico. There you will find romance, adventure, everything.”
“Mexico City,” he went on, as though he were a guide introducing a party of tourists to its first sight of a city, “lies, as you can see from here, in a mountain valley on the Great Central Plateau. Constructed on a former lake by those Aztecs who once made of this whole region a grand and glorious place, it was called by them ‘Tenochtitlan’, an Aztec word meaning ‘Belonging to the property of the Temple.’
“When the Spaniards conquered Tenochtitlan, they found grand palaces and elegant homes under the shadow of the mountains that lie all about. They found gardens more beautiful and more highly cultivated than any they had ever known. They found wealth and splendour such as not even their vivid imaginations had ever constructed. They found everything,” he finished dramatically, “and they drove the people who had conceived it out, and they took it unto themselves, and it went to ruin. You see now, the modern city, and as you go through its streets, you will find everywhere evidences of all these changes living side by side with the new that the present generation is in the process of building up.”
Walker Jamieson had started his little harangue half in fun, but as always when he talked about the old city, he grew serious as he went on. Now, as he noted the half scowl on Adair MacKenzie’s face, the look of interest on Alice’s, and the attention of Nan Sherwood and her friends, he paused.
“How am I doing?” he directed the question to the group in general.
Adair MacKenzie grunted.
Alice beamed, her eyes full of pride in him.
And Nan and her crowd nodded their heads for him to go on.
“So, my public adores me,” he said in a mocking self-satisfied tone that caused Alice and Nan to laugh aloud.
With this he wrapped his guide’s cloak about him again and went on.
“As you go about,” he said, “and look up from day to day at the mountains that surround you, you will soon be able to name them all from Chiquihuite, ‘the basket’, to El Cerro Gordo, ‘the fat hill’, but there is none that has a more fascinating story than La Sierra Madre over there to the west.” He pointed as he spoke. “That’s the famous one with the two volcanoes, Ixtaccihuatl, ‘the white woman’, and Popocatepetl, ‘the mountain that smokes’.
“At one time, before the great Cortez conquered the country, these volcanoes were worshipped as deities. There were days set aside for their veneration, feasts in their honor, and elaborate ceremonies.”
“Just imagine,” Laura interrupted, “having a feast in honor of a mountain.”
“Strange, isn’t it?” Walker Jamieson agreed. “But wait, I have even stranger things to tell you.”
“I have no doubt.” The remark was Adair MacKenzie’s who, whether he would admit it or not, was really enjoying himself thoroughly.
“Ixtaccihuatl had a wooden idol representing her in the Great Temple and Popocatepetl a representation of dough of amarand and maize seeds. These idols you will see in the great museums of the city. The legend that surrounds them, if you will bear with me, goes something like this.
“Ixtaccihuatl was the beautiful daughter of a proud and powerful Aztec Emperor and his only child. As such, she was heir to his throne and watched and guarded throughout her youth. Her father adored her, but as he grew old and weak and his enemies began to wage war against him, he realized more and more how difficult it would be for a woman to hold together his vast and wealthy empire. So he set out to find a husband worthy of his daughter, worthy of the splendour that would be hers after his death.
“He called to his aid all the proud young warriors of his tribe and offered his daughter in marriage and his throne to the one among them who would conquer his enemies.
“This Popocatepetl that you see yonder went into the fight. He had long been in love with the beautiful princess.
“The war was long. It was cruel. It was bloody. But Popocatepetl endured to the end. Ah, but he was proud and triumphant when he saw that it would surely be he who would return to claim the princess whom he loved.
“But alas, his triumph was short-lived. His enemies, having failed in battle, stooped to the lowest form of deceit. They sent back to the Princess the false news that her beloved had been killed. She languished and became ill of a strange malady that not even the smartest witch doctors in the realm could cure her of. She died.
“Popocatepetl’s grief was more than he could bear. He wished to die too, so he caused to be constructed a great pyramid upon which he himself laid the beautiful Ixtaccihuatl. Next to it, he built another. There, he stands, holding a funeral torch.
“The snow has enfolded her body and covered that of the man that would have married her, but it has never covered the torch which burns on, a symbol of the love of Popocatepetl for Ixtaccihuatl.”
“And the smoke,” Nan said quietly when she saw that he had finished, “of the volcano is the smoke of the torch’s flame.”
“Smart girl,” Walker Jamieson slipped into a lighter mood now.
“And they believed that story?” Bess sounded incredulous.
“Yes, O doubtful one,” Laura answered the question, “and they had feasts for the couple. Didn’t you listen to the beginning?”
“Hm-m, they probably weren’t edible,” Adair MacKenzie suddenly remembered the meal he had found so distasteful a short time before.
Walker winked at Alice who patted her father on the arm, “Never mind, dad,” she said, “there’ll be food that you like later on.”
“Too late then.” Adair MacKenzie was not to be mollified now. “Be all burned up before then by these confounded Mexican chiles. Must have a million varieties. Find them in everything. Afraid even to order ice-cream. Probably comes with a special chile sauce on it. Somebody ought to teach these Mexicans how to eat. Do it myself if I had time. Always think that when I come here. Teach them that and how to build roads,” he added as the car bumped over the highway.
“Anyway, we’re coming into some sort of civilized city, now.” He looked about himself with some degree of satisfaction, for as Walker had proceeded with his account of the legend of the two famous volcanoes, the car had been progressing toward the city. Now it was on the outskirts and Nan and Bess, Grace and Amelia and Laura were craning their necks so as not to miss one single sight.
“How nice it would be,” Amelia remarked to the group after she had missed something that Walker had pointed out on the side of the road opposite to the one she had been watching, “to have a face on all sides of your head so that you could see all ways at once.”
“Well, all I can say is,” Laura returned dryly, “that you are doing pretty well with the one that you have. You might have missed the old flower woman back there, but you are certainly making up for it now.” With this she laughed and pushed Amelia’s head, that was now blocking her own line of vision, out of the way.
“Such pretty young girls,” Nan remarked as the car stopped at a crossroad to let a half dozen Mexicans cross the street.
“Aren’t they though?” Bess agreed. “One of them looked just like Juanita. Remember?”
Of course Nan remembered the girl that had been involved in the hidden treasure plot that was recounted in the story “Nan Sherwood at Rose Ranch.” The thought of her now brought Rhoda back to mind and her mother, and with it a return of the anxiety they had felt at not having heard recently from their friend.