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CHAPTER II

HONK! honk! honk! The coarse wild notes pierced Ina Blaine’s slumbers. She opened her eyes, and in the dim room with cool gray dawn at the window she did not recognize where she was. Honk! honk! honk!

“Oh, wild geese!” she cried out suddenly, with rapturous recognition. “Oh, I’m home–home!”

All the time Ina had been away at school she had never heard the melodious cry of a wild goose. She had forgotten, perhaps, the most significant feature of the wild life about Tule Lake. But once the loved honk penetrated her mind, what hosts of sweet memories, stretching back to childhood! It was a welcome home. The sound offered some little compensation for the loss of the lake. Ina had been astounded and dismayed to see vast green and yellow and brown fields, crisscrossed by irrigation ditches, where once Tule Lake had rippled and smiled, a great shining oval of water lying between the gray sage hills and the black lava beds. Tule Lake was gone. It seemed to change even the towering white glory of Mount Shasta.

Ina lay there watching the dawn brighten through the casement. This large luxurious room was not the one in which she had spent her childhood and girlhood. That had been a tiny one, whitewashed, with a low slanted ceiling and one small window. “The days that are no more,” she whispered. That dear room, sacred to her dreams, was gone as Tule Lake was gone. The childhood days, so sweet and stinging now in memory, had passed away forever. Her old home was not the same. Father, mother, sisters, and brothers had changed. She realized all this with sadness. While she had been away at school, growing up, nothing at home had stood still.

The sun rose red over the sage hills and streamed in at her window, gilding the new furniture. A cool breath of morning, with a hint of frost, made her snuggle down under the warm blankets. She had awakened happily, but there had come with memory and thought a check to her joy. She had not anticipated change. Yet all was changed. Even she? Yet the honk of wild geese had found her heart true to the old life, the old order.

Ina Blaine was the third child of a family of four boys and three girls, the favorite of a Kansas farmer who had emigrated to northern California and had taken up a great tract of marshland along Tule Lake. In wet seasons his land was under water. He had labored there, along with several other farsighted pioneers. And when the government drained Tule Lake it was as if their fortunes had been touched by the magic of Aladdin.

But he had sent Ina to a Kansas college long before fortune had smiled upon him. He had a brother at Lawrence, in whose home Ina was welcome during the period of her schooling. It had not been his intention to leave Ina there all this time. But one thing and another, including lack of funds and illness in her uncle’s family, had prevented Ina from spending a vacation at home. So she had been away four years, during which wealth had come, as if overnight, to the Blaines.

To revel in being home, to delight in her freedom, to play a little after the long years of study, to put off the inevitable settling down to the serious things of life–these had been Ina’s cherished hopes.

“I must see the funny side of it,” she soliloquized, with a little laugh. “For it is funny. Dad so important and pompous–mother fussed over a multitude of new fandangles–Archie impressed with his destiny as the eldest son of a cattle king–Fred and Bob leaning away from farm work to white collars and city girls. Kate engaged to a Klamath lawyer! I really can’t savvy her. The kids, though, will make up for much. We’ll get along, when once they remember me.

“To begin, then,” said Ina, resolutely, and she got up on the right side of the bed. She was home. Whatever had been the changes in country and family, here was where she had longed to be and meant to live and serve. She had spent time in St. Louis, Kansas City, Denver, San Francisco, the last of which she had found most interesting. But she would never be happy in the confines of a city. She loved northern California–the vastness of it, the great white mountains, the ranges of soft round sage hills, lakes and rivers and streams, and in the midst of them the little villages here and there, not too close together, and the green flat ranches, still few in number.

“Last night when I said I’d teach school some day, didn’t dad roar?” she mused. “And mother looked offended. What has happened to my dear parents? I fear they must suffer for my education. I wonder what they have in mind. Heigho! I feel tremendously old and learned…. Back to the tomboy days for Ina! I’ll slide down the haymow with Dall. I’ll fish and ride and swim with Marvie. How keen he was to ask me that! … And Ben Ide? … Not a letter from him all these years. Dear old Ben! I seem to have forgotten much until now. How time flies! They wrote me Ben had gone to the bad. I never believed it–I think I didn’t. Ben was queer, not like the other boys, but he was good…. Has he forgotten me? Ben was a year younger than Archie. He’s twenty-four now. Quite a man! Five years didn’t make such difference when I was fifteen.”

Ina peeped out of her window. The east above the gray range blazed brightly gold, and the glow of the spring morning shone over the level waving plain where Tule Lake had once shimmered. Flocks of ducks dotted the rosy sky, and a triangle of wild geese headed toward the dim blue swamp land under the black lava mounds. Old Mount Shasta stood up majestically, snow-crowned and sunrise-flushed. The fresh keen air vibrated with sounds–honk of geese, song of spring birds, bawl of calf and low of cow. The pasture was alive with horses, cattle, pigs. Cocks were crowing, and out by the jumble of barns a cowboy whistled merrily.

Ina went downstairs and through the wide new hallway that connected with what had been the old house. Her father had made the mistake of erecting a large frame structure as an addition to the old half-log, half-stone house. It was significant that despite his rise in the ranching world he could not quite forsake his humble abode. And indeed he had his room and office there still. A kitchen had been added to the living room, which evidently, from the long tables and benches, was now a dining room for her father’s horde of cowboys.

Ina peeped into this dining room before she ventured farther. It was empty. Then she heard her mother in the kitchen. Ina ran through to surprise Mrs. Blaine helping the man-cook.

“Good morning, Mother. Where’s everybody?” cried Ina, gayly.

“Bless your heart, how you scared me!” ejaculated her mother, quite manifestly embarrassed. She was a large woman, gray-haired and somewhat hard-featured. “Nobody’s up yet, except me an’ your father.”

“Well! Why, Mother, Archie used to clean out the horse stalls, and Kate used to milk the cows!” retorted Ina, laughingly.

“They don’t any more,” replied Mrs. Blaine, shortly.

“I shall try, at least, to milk the cows.”

“Ina, your father didn’t give you a college education for that,” protested her mother, in vague alarm.

“But you used to milk cows and I’d never be above what you did,” said Ina, sweetly, and embraced her mother.

“Father has some big hopes for you, Ina,” returned Mrs. Blaine, dubiously. She did not quite know this long-lost, grown-up daughter. She seemed bewildered by circumstances of monumental importance, but which were unnatural.

“The cow-hands will be comin’ in for breakfast any minute,” she said. “You’d better go.”

“Why? I’d like to see them.”

“Your father said he’d not have any cowboys gallivantin’ round after you.”

“Indeed! But suppose I liked it,” retorted Ina, merrily. “You married dad when he was a cowboy.”

“But that was different, Ina.”

“I’d like to know how.”

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