at Daddy Bunker and Mother Bunker were
talking about so earnestly the night before!

"Oh, Daddy!" burst out Rose, clinging to his hand, "are you going so far
away from us all? Aren't you going to take us to Cowboy Jack's?"

"Why do they call him that?" asked Vi. "Is he part cow and part boy?"

But Daddy Bunker replied to Rose's question quite seriously:

"That is a hard matter to decide. It is a long journey, and you know
school will soon begin at Pineville. And you must not miss school."

"But, Daddy," said Russ, very gravely, "you know you take us 'most
everywhere you go. It--it wouldn't be fair to Cowboy Jack not to take us
to see him, would it?"

Mr. Bunker laughed very much at this suggestion, and hurried them all
through the rain toward Captain Ben's bungalow.

CHAPTER III

THE SILVER LINING

One might think that the accident at the old house would have been
excitement enough for the six little Bunkers for one forenoon. But Russ
and Rose, at least, and soon all the other children, were bubbling with
the thought of Daddy Bunker's going West again to look into a big ranch
property to which one of his customers had recently fallen heir.

To travel, to see new things, to meet wonderfully nice and kind people,
seemed to be the fate of the six little Bunkers. Russ and Rose were sure
that no family of brothers and sisters ever had so much fun traveling
and so many adventures at the places they traveled to as they did. Russ
and Rose were old enough to read about the adventures of other
children--I mean children outside of nursery books--and so far the
older young Bunkers quite preferred their own good times to any they had
ever read about.

"Why!" Russ had once cried confidently, "we have even more fun than
Robinson Crusoe and his man Friday. Of course we do."

"Yes. And _they_ had goats," admitted Rose thoughtfully.

The thought of daddy's going away from them, in any case, would have
excited the children. But the opening of their school had been postponed
for several weeks already, and Russ and Rose, at least, thought they saw
the possibility of their father's taking Mother Bunker and all the
children with him to the Southwest.

"Only," Russ said gravely, "I don't much care for the name of that man.
He sounds like some kind of a foreign man--and you know how those
foreign men were that built the railroad down behind our house in
Pineville."

"What makes 'em foreign? Their whiskers?" asked Vi, h