Page:The Girl from Hollywood.djvu/31

The Girl from Hollywood 27

And so Pennington had come West with Mrs. Penning- ton and little Custer, Jr., and had found the Rancho del Ganado run down, untenanted, and for sale. A month of loafing had left him almost ready to die of stagnation, without any assistance from his poor lungs; and when, in the course of a drive to another ranch, he had hap- pened to see the place, and had learned that it was for sale, the germ had been sown.

He judged from the soil and the water that Ganado was not well suited to raise the type of horse that he knew best, and that he and his father and his grand- fathers before them had bred in Virginia; but he saw other possibilities. Moreover, he loved the hills and the cafions from the first; and so he had purchased the ranch, more to have something that would temporarily occupy his mind until his period of exile was ended by a return to his native State, or by death, than with any idea that it would prove a permanent home.

The old Spanish American house had been remodeled and rebuilt. In four years he had found that Herefords, Berkshires, and Percherons may win a place in a man’s heart almost equal to that which a thoroughbred occupies. Then a little daughter had come, and the final seal that stamps a man’s house as his home was placed upon “the castle on the hill.”

His lung had healed—he could not tell by any sign It gave that it was not as good as ever—and still he Stayed on in the land of sunshine, which he had grown to love without realizing its hold upon him. Gradually he had forgotten to say “when we go back home”; and when at last a letter came from a younger brother, saying that he wished to buy the old place in Virginia if the Custer Penningtons did not expect to return to it, the colonel was compelled to face the issue squarely.

They had held a little family council—the colonel and Julia, his wife, with seven-year-old Custer and little one- year-old Eva. Eva, sitting in her mother’s lap, agreed