"Why! it doesn't look anything like Nita," gasped Ruth, understanding immediately why Tom had brought the paper to her.
"Nope. You needn't expect it to. Those papers use any old photograph to make illustrations from. But read the story."
It was all about the niece of a very rich cattle man in Montana who had run away from the ranch on which she had lived all her life. It was called Silver Ranch, and was a very noted cattle range in that part of the West. The girl's uncle raised both horses and cattle, was very wealthy, had given her what attention a single man could in such a situation, and was now having a countrywide search made for the runaway.
"Jane Ann Hicks Has Run Away From a Fortune" was the way the paper put it in a big "scare head" across the top of the page; and the text went on to tell of rough Bill Hicks, of Bullhide, and how he had begun in the early cattle days as a puncher himself and had now risen to the sole proprietorship of Silver Ranch.
"Bill's one possession besides his cattle and horses that he took any joy in was his younger brother's daughter, Jane Ann. She is an orphan and came to Bill and he has taken sole care of her (for a woman has never been at Silver Ranch, save Indian squaws and a Mexican cook woman) since she could creep. Jane Ann is certainly the apple of Old Bill's eye.
"But, as Old Bill has told the Bullhide chief of police, who is sending the pictures and description of the lost girl all over the country, 'Jane Ann got some powerful hifalutin' notions.' She is now a well-grown girl, smart as a whip, pretty, afraid of nothing on four legs, and just as ignorant as a girl brought up in such an environment would be. Jane Ann has been reading novels, perhaps. As the Eastern youth used to fill up on cheap stories of the Far West, and start for that wild and woolly section with the intention of wiping from the face of Nature the last remnant of the Red Tribes, so it may be that Jane Ann Hicks has read of the Eastern millionaire and has started for the Atlantic seaboard for the purpose of lassoing one--or more--of those elusive creatures.
"However, Old Bill wants Jane Ann to come home. Silver Ranch will be hers some day, when Old Bill passes over the Great Divide, and he believes that if she is to be Montana's coming Cattle Queen his niece would better not know too much about the effete East."