The Project Gutenberg eBook, A Girl of the Plains Country, by Alice MacGowan

A GIRL OF THE PLAINS COUNTRY

A GIRL of the
PLAINS COUNTRY

BY

ALICE MACGOWAN

Author of “Judith of the Cumberlands,” etc.

NEW YORK

FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

MCMXXIV

Copyright, 1924, by

Frederick A. Stokes Company

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America

A GIRL OF THE PLAINS COUNTRY

CHAPTER I
THE ARRIVAL

The little girl on the back seat of the stage clung to one of the uprights of the vehicle as though she feared that when it stopped she would, in her enthusiasm, hurl herself bodily from it, and into this strange, interesting, dusty life of the plains country.

Hank Pearsall, manager of the Three Sorrows Ranch, who had driven the sixty miles in to Mesquite to meet the new owners coming all the way from New York, looked at her small face with its pointed chin, great black eyes under the thatch of dark curls, the repressed vitality with which she sat there giving more of an impression of urgency than most people could have given by running and jumping, and thought to himself that here was one who would all her life be a little happier, or a little more miserable, than the average.

The child returned his gaze with an eager, welcoming sort of look, and her eyes followed him as he stepped to the side of the stage. What she saw was a tall man of fifty, in the sort of clothes she was beginning to be familiar with—flannel shirt, trousers tucked into cowboy boots, and a sombrero, which he took off now, uncovering thick, crinkled hair of a wonderful black-and-silver sheen. His face was tanned and bearded; it had a look of calm about the brows and temples; but the very deep blue eyes looked as though there was always a twinkle in them. He smiled at the little girl, but spoke to the man in the front seat.

City people, the Van Brunts. Hank knew that the wife and mother had died suddenly on the way out. To the elegant gentleman, handsome, with the marks of dissipation in his face, and the sleeping baby looking so strangely out of place in his arms, Hank said a little doubtfully:

“Mr. Van Brunt? Pearsall’s my name. I’ve brought the ambulance for you folks. It’s right across there.”

The young man climbed out and shifted to get a hand free to offer, answering in a low tone, and with great courtesy:

“We’re very glad to get here, Mr. Pearsall. This is my aunt, Miss Valeria Van Brunt,” and Pearsall turned to help down a small, silver-haired, fine-featured lady with a high, delicate nose and brilliant black eyes behind gold-rimmed nose-glasses. From the tiny jet bonnet to the high-heeled slippers and silk stockings, her fashionable clothing was dim with plains dust, and as she looked about at Mesquite—just a stage station, a bunch of shanties huddled together on the bald plain—she cried accusingly:

“Dear me, Charles! Is this the place? Why, it isn’t a town at all!”

Her nephew answered something, in that low, courteous tone of his, Hank didn’t hear what.

Among them, they seemed to have forgotten that there was another passenger to disembark at Mesquite. Pearsall realized with sure, swift sympathy, that the child was used to being forgotten; he put up his arms and lifted down little Hilda Van Brunt. They were all on the ground then, their luggage dumped beside them, and the stage jingled away.

“Is there any hotel?” Miss Valeria demanded. “We ought to have some rest—and dinner.”

“It’ll be all right,” the ranch manager said quickly. “I’ve fixed for you. The ambulance is ready, and—”

“Ambulance!” Miss Valeria interrupted. “Is anybody hurt or—or sick—or anything like that? We certainly can’t—”

“An ambulance is the regular family vehicle on all the ranches around here, ma’am,” Pearsall explained. “You’ll find it mighty comfortable traveling. I aim to have you get in now and drive out a piece to a good camping place. We’ll have our supper there. There’s plenty good bedding. And we’ll get a soon start in the morning. No—well, nothing that you folks would call a hotel, here. You’ll find it better that way.”

The baby on Van Brunt’s shoulder roused without a whimper, opened big, serious blue eyes and gazed about him. This gaze lit upon the little girl, fastened there, and slowly grew into a smile. His sister pressed in close to her father’s side and reached up to pat the baby, then thrust her hand into Van Brunt’s free one, urging:

“Oh, yes, papa—please let’s go and have a picnic. It’ll be so beautiful!” And Van Brunt said:

“Certainly, Pearsall. We’re in your hands now.”

The ranch boss got his passengers into the ambulance, Miss Van Brunt and her nephew with the baby on the back seat, Hilda perched beside him on the front. As he gathered up his lines he smiled down at the tousled dark hair from which she had promptly pulled the much-trimmed small hat.

“Now for our picnic, sister,” he said. “We’re a-goin’ to have a good long one. Sixty miles long. And camp overnight on the plain. I’ve got grub a-plenty, and everything fixed.”

Hilda just gave him a smile and a little bubbling, inarticulate sound of delight in answer to this. Presently, when they went over a bump in the trail, her short legs made it necessary that she grasp his arm to keep from being shot forward over the dashboard.

“Why, here, this won’t never do!” said the old man as he stopped the ponies, tied the lines to the brake-handle, and fished out from among the supplies a box which he wedged securely beneath her feet. When they started on once more, he said in a confidential tone: “Ye see, I put you up here, because Auntie ain’t used to rough traveling; and your father, he’s got little brother to look out for. You and me can stand the jouncing, can’t we?”

With a sure instinct he had sounded the right note.

“Course we can!” the little girl echoed it with a sort of lyric jubilance. She took a long, pleased look at him, and began:

“Auntie finds it very hard to bear this kind of life. The nurse we had, she came as far as Amarillo; but she said she never in all her days saw such a flat country—and she despised it—and she just couldn’t put up with it—and there wasn’t any money ever made that would pay her to. So she went back. She went back to New York.”

“I expect this does look considerable different from New York,” Hank allowed mildly.

“Oh, it does!” Hilda glowed. “Beautifuller. I love the way it looks. Aunt Val, she’s been a great many places. But this—she wasn’t ever here before. She’s been to Europe, and to Egypt where the pyramids are, and the Sphinx that’s all getting covered up with sand. I—” Hilda sent a half-shy, questing look into the old man’s twinkling eyes—“I know a good deal about Phœnicians, and Cæsar, myself—Thor and his hammer, and Apollo, and the Holy Grail. My mother used to read to me about them.”

“Yes,” assented the ranch manager easily. “I guess them’s mostly New Yorkers and such. I haven’t the acquaintance of any of ’em.”

Hilda was silent for a few moments. This new friend was plainly somewhat given to humor. He might be jesting with her. Presently she spoke:

“But when—when my mother died in Denver, and there wasn’t anybody to take care of Burchie and me, papa telegraphed to Aunt Val and she came. It was very good of her. She doesn’t like the country—nor children, very much.” After a pause, she added, in a diminished voice, “Do you?”

“Do I what, honey?” asked Pearsall, starting a bit, for his mind had wandered from her prattle.

“Like children very much—and the country; this,” and her looks indicated the big world about them.

“Why, yes—yes, sure,” he protested. “I like this country, sister. And I certainly git a-plenty of it. But I’m a mighty lonesome person, sometimes—I’m a plumb lonesome old feller. You see there’s no child that belongs to me.”

“Haven’t you got any little girl?”

“No. No, not any little girl—” Quite a long pause, then,—“or boy either.”

Hilda moved uneasily, and her eyes went to his face and back again, plainly under the stress of acute compassion.

“Well,” she hesitated, “I’ll be your little girl, too, if—if you want me. You see, papa’s got two of us.”

The noises of the big vehicle had often made it necessary for the child to stretch up and put her rosy mouth close to her companion’s ear in speaking. Now these last words were forwarded very carefully, and with a swift, backward glance toward the rear seat. Miss Van Brunt was engaged with a smelling bottle; Van Brunt held his son on his knee and stared across the baby’s head toward a future which plainly daunted.

“That’s a bargain, sister,” said the driver. “From now on you’re my little girl, too. And I’m your Uncle Hank. There’s a few youngsters in the neighborhood, and that’s what they call me.”

That was a memorable drive, and it decided some important issues in the lives of those who made it. Sixty miles southward of Mesquite, in Lame Jones county, lay the ranch of the Three Sorrows which poor Katharine Van Brunt had bought with the remnant of her big fortune that Charley’s dissipation had left—the haven to which she had thought to bring her weak husband and her two children. Now she slept in her grave in beautiful, far-away Denver, and the husband and children were going alone toward the home she would have made possible for them, but which, without her, looked doubtful indeed. An hour—another hour—the team of cow ponies loped steadily across that high upland floor of brown plain.

“Like the sea,” whispered Hilda, enraptured. “Just like the sea, only the water’s all grass—and you can drive over it. It jounces; but you and I—we can stand the jouncing.”

The fierce glare of mid-afternoon softened, grew milder and milder as the day waned. Hilda felt that she had never really seen the sun set before. It went down in a great glory of painted sky that rushed out over the floor of the plain so that everything—the ponies, the ambulance and its little cloud of dust—swam in it.

“It’s getting very late, Mr.—er—Pearsall—isn’t it?” Miss Valeria asked unhappily from the back seat. “Isn’t there danger of our being lost if we try to travel in the dark?”

“No, ma’am—not with me—you wouldn’t git lost, day or night,” Uncle Hank, as the little girl already called him in her own mind, turned a smiling face over his shoulder to answer. “But we’re most there now. See them willers where the moon’s a-risin’? That’s our camp.”

“Willers where the moon’s a-risin’.” It jingled in the little head like poetry; it still sang there as they swung in beside a small creek that was just a succession of water holes with dry rocks between, and she was lifted out. For, oh, the moon was rising, and so beautiful! It came up, a great shield of white in the pink that had somehow crept around from the sunset in the west; it looked over the willows and turned them black on one side and silver on the other; it shone on the little girl very knowingly, as if to say, “I’m not the same moon at all that I was back in New York—you and I know that.” And every bit of beauty, whether it was in the sky or on the earth, everything that was dear and lovely in this new life—and so much was—she attributed to the new friend whom she was going to call Uncle Hank forever and ever.

The others had climbed out very gladly; Miss Valeria was established on the cushions from the seats with the baby beside her. Hilda was allowed to help—or to think she helped—Uncle Hank, when he came back from unharnessing, watering and picketing the horses, and set about getting the evening meal. She ranged as far as the creek bank for little sticks, and fed them into the side of the fire where the coffee-pot was. Hank had brought a box from the back of the ambulance which seemed to hold a whole pantry, and was broiling steaks on the other side of the fire. Bread was cut, canned milk and jam and other things opened, butter brought out, with knives, forks and plates—tin plates, and funny knives and forks and spoons such as you generally saw in the kitchen; one or two little stew-pots simmered on their own beds of coals; Hilda looked from them all to the shadowy earth, the moon-filled sky, quite overwhelmed with the magic she saw in both. Above them was such a great space of silver light as she had never seen before; down here, right in the center of it, burned their single point of fire; she watched its flame go up and up, saw pieces of it break off to fly away to the big white stars and the moon. She almost forgot to eat her supper when it was put out for her on its plate. (Supper was a new word to Hilda. It was dinner, at home, in the house. It must be supper when you cooked it and ate it like this out-of-doors.)

Aunt Val ate hers, and seemed to like it pretty well; but afterward she looked uneasy, and said anxiously:

“I’m afraid this night air will bring on my neuralgia.”

Hilda looked at her in wonder. This lovely, wandering air that was turning over the willow leaves as though it wanted to look at the dark under-sides of them, that came touching her cheeks, softly fingering her hair; it seemed to Hilda that if it really “brought on” anything that thing must be mysterious and delightful.

But Uncle Hank got up quickly, saying:

“I’ll fix your bed for you right now, ma’am; you’ll be as snug there as if you was in your own room,” and went over to the ambulance. When Hilda followed him a little later, there was a bed all made up in it, with sheets and pillow-cases and everything, just like a bed at home. Aunt Val made haste to get into it, and Hilda drifted back to the fire. She wished she had got Aunt Val to show her how to fix Burchie’s food. Papa was tending to it now. When Burch had had it, he went right off to sleep, and was carried over and put in beside Aunt Val.

The new proprietor of the Three Sorrows, when he had laid the baby in the ambulance, walked on past the vehicle and was lost in the shadows down by the creek. Pearsall began to clear up and wash the dishes. Hilda asked if she might help, and was given a towel for drying. Uncle Hank began to make cheerful conversation.

“This was a mighty long trip for a little girl like you—all the way from New York to Texas. Didn’t you get tired?”

“Oh, no,” said Hilda, earnestly drawing her towel between the tines of the iron fork she was wiping. “You see, there was a boy on the train that had blue eyes, like Burchie’s and mothers, and—and—” blushing furiously—“like yours, some. He was a big boy. At least he was a good deal bigger than me. His father and mother were there, too; they came all the way from New York to Denver in the train with us. And, oh, he was most interesting! When my mother got sick, the boy’s mother wouldn’t go on and leave us. They all stayed. And he—The-Boy-On-The-Train—he took care of Burchie and me when—when the funeral was. Aunt Val hadn’t got there, then.”

“That’s all, honey; we’re done, now,” said Pearsall. He saw that the child’s lips trembled as she stood fumblingly but determinedly rubbing dry the last cup. So he added, cheerfully, “We’ll set by the fire a spell before you go tuck yourself into bed.”

There was neither sound nor movement within the ambulance. Van Brunt did not return from his stroll downstream. These two, man and child, sat beside the camp-fire. Hilda’s big black eyes looked long into the great swallowing darkness of the plain, then she turned to her companion, who was filling his pipe.

“I don’t think I’d be afraid here,” she said, a little doubtfully.

“Sure not!” heartily. He skipped a coal lightly up in his bare fingers, made it light his pipe, and flipped it off again. “What would you be afraid of, sister?”

“Well,” slowly, and watching his face, “I don’t think there would be whiffenpoofs here.” He didn’t smile—she had been afraid he might. So she added the explanation, “You see, they mostly stay in dark halls and on stairways, whiffenpoofs do, and they grab you from behind.”

“No,” Uncle Hank shook his head decisively, “no whiffenpoofs here—if there is anywhere—which I doubt.”

“Oh, yes, they’re in houses.” Hilda was pretty firm about it. “And—” She hesitated, looked away from him, then shot him one of her shy glances before she went on haltingly—“And another reason I thought I wouldn’t be afraid here is that there aren’t any doors.”

He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked at it, then at her, and asked blankly:

“No doors?”

“Yes. And so there can’t be a door-imp. When it’s getting a little dark,” she spoke low now, and very fast, as though she were afraid if she didn’t hurry she wouldn’t have the courage to tell it all, “when it’s getting a little dark in the house, and they send you into another room to get something, the Skulking Door-imp watches for you. He comes out and looks around the door; then his head is the thing that you think is a knob. You see, he’s invisible to every one but me.”

“Truck like that,” said Uncle Hank, putting the pipe back into his mouth and drawing his arm around Hilda, “is enough to scare a little girl.”

“It does scare me, Uncle Hank,” she confirmed gravely. “And those aren’t all. There’s ghosts. And there’s the Barrel-tops—queer kind of creatures that just roll after you. I most scream right out sometimes when the Barrel-tops come down the dark hall chasing me.”

“Well, I’ll bet you four cents,” and he shook her gently with his arm, “that they don’t never come down no hall out here in Texas. I’ll be willin’ to just bet. Them things can’t live in this high-and-dry Texas plains climate. Where on earth did you ever get such notions, anyhow? Did some one tell it to you, or did it come out of a fool book?”

“No,” said Hilda evasively, “nobody told me, nor read it to me. I—er—I just knew it myself.”

“Well, then, you must’ve made it up, child. I wouldn’t do it if I’s you. I wouldn’t have no such critters.”

“I try not to, Uncle Hank. I don’t want to have them. They—oh! what’s that?” as a long, jingling, chiming whimper came from somewhere in the surrounding dusk. She flung both arms around the old man’s neck and burrowed her head on his breast. He held her tight, and laughed gently.

“Nothing but a little old coyote, honey,” he told her. “They don’t ever hurt anybody. He smells our bacon rinds. You must go to bed now, child. If any whiffenpoofs or suchlike cattle trouble you in the night, you come out to Uncle Hank—hear? Uncle Hank’s death on all them kind o’ varmints.”

He saw her to the ambulance, then turned and replenished the fire and, filling his pipe, sat down to await Van Brunt’s return. An hour later the two men were asleep, wrapped in their blankets. There was no sound save the wind in the cottonwoods and the occasional, far, coyote cry, the nearer chirp or stir of a bird. During the earlier part of the night Van Brunt groaned, turned and turned again; roused, sighed, rose to feed the dying fire, sat a while beside it, and went back to his blankets. Then he slept heavily, and for a long time the camp was silent under the moon and stars. In the dark hour just before dawn the old man wakened suddenly and opened his eyes to see Hilda crouching beside him, her hand on his shoulder.

“Uncle Hank!” she gasped, “I had such a dreadful dream, and when I waked, why, you see that ambulance is like a room; it’s got things like doors in it; and I was afraid the door-imp—”

“All right, sister.”

He lifted his head and looked about. She had left her aunt unawakened in the ambulance; she had skirted the form of her sleeping father—and come to him—to him, the friend of a day!

“Here!” whispered the man who had said he was all alone in the world. Swiftly he unwound his blankets, wrapped the small nightgowned figure in them, and settled her cosily, reaching down to get his boots and draw them on.

“But you aren’t going away, Uncle Hank?” quavered the child.

“Not fur,” returned he humorously, as he went over and put more wood on the fire, then seated himself beside the giant cocoon from whose top protruded the small face with the big black eyes. These eyes, under the influence of a good grip on a man’s blue flannel sleeve, gradually lost their wildness. They filmed gently; the long lashes descended halfway, were swept up again with a startled gasp; and after two or three checkings and haltings, Hilda slept. The ranch boss replaced the blankets when from time to time her small, impatient arm flung them off.

Lost in the immensity of night, the camp-fire died down, was replenished, died down again, and showed only winking embers as the east began to blush with a new day.

CHAPTER II
AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART

Southwestward again, all that day—beautifully long for the little girl, wearily lengthened for Miss Valeria who alternately complained of the speed and urged the driver to hurry a little. Pearsall always gave her the same good-humored answer, as though it had been a child fretting at him: “Ponies got forty-odd miles to go, ma’am; have to just hold this same good road pace.”

At noon they stopped and got out for a rest; a “dry camp” he called it, with only water from the canteens to make their coffee. Through the afternoon, the thud-thud of hoofs, the creak and swish of wheels on dry turf, like a monotonous old tune, almost sent Hilda to sleep where she sat beside Uncle Hank on the high seat. Then, when the sky flamed once more red with sunset, suddenly there was living green in front of them, the ambulance swung through an open gate, up a long avenue of young box-elders and black locusts, at the end of which they could see a low stone house, broad, sheltering, hospitable, with its dooryard of Bermuda grass, at the edge of which Pearsall pulled up, got out and helped the others down. Van Brunt, who had sat silent and uncomplaining for hours of heat and weariness, exclaimed:

“This the ranch? Why, Pearsall, I didn’t suppose there was such a green place in all the Panhandle.”

“Well, there’s not another like the Three Sorrows, I can tell you,” answered the old man, busy with bags and valises; and as they moved toward the house Miss Valeria murmured that it was better than could have been expected.

Hilda, hanging back, saying nothing, gazed about at the new home with eyes that loved every stone in its walls. Its pleasant rustle of leaves and lisp of water, after all those miles of splendid, arid plain, made her eyes smart with happy tears. The beautiful wing-like, curving sweep in which the line of young cottonwoods, following the happy course of a tiny irrigating ditch, flung away around one corner of the building—here was a world where anything—lovely—might happen. Those willows over yonder by the little lake (the old man called it a watering tank), they looked just like Nixies crouching down in their long green hair. There was mystery in the very appearance of the plain about them. When a Chinaman came to the door she could have shouted with delight.

He was a strange, limp effigy of a Chinaman, like a badly made rag doll, his slant eyes and pigtail giving the impression that he had lately been hung up on a line with other such toys. Apparently he was young, though the Oriental never looks to our eyes either exactly young or old, and certainly he was morose. The queue on his head, the dull blue blouse he wore, his funny black-and-white boat-shaped shoes, all charmed Hilda.

The first thing she saw that looked like the old home back in New York was a familiar rug spread out at the foot of the stairs in the hall.

“I s’pose your full-sized carpets ain’t come yet,” Pearsall explained, as he showed his employer the living-room on one side, the ranch office on the other. “These mats looked a good deal worn,” he indicated the dull bloom of Turkish rugs disposed here and there, “but of course they’ll be nice and soft for the children to play on.”

Van Brunt assented kindly, and neither he nor Miss Valeria offered any explanation. It was near supper time. The open door at the end of the hall showed a shouldering group of masculine forms, ranch riders, heretofore familiar to the eyes of the newcomers only in pictures. The foremost of these detached himself, came forward, and was presented as O’Meara—“One of your boys, Mr. Van Brunt.” Hilda liked the look of him, and was more pleased when he spoke.

“We didn’t know where you’d want your things,” he said modestly. “We took everybody’s opinion—even the Chink’s—but at that we couldn’t make out what some of ’em was intended for. We just put the trunks around here and there to make it seem home-like.”

Hilda wondered that her aunt’s response to this should be so faint. Shorty O’Meara’s ideas on furnishing and interior decoration had immediate success with her. The open door of the office room showed a big desk, some chairs, and a pile or two of books on the floor. The little girl left that without further inquiry, and went into the living-room where a spindle-legged, inlaid dressing table, with its sweep of mirror, neighbored a trunk and several dining-room chairs. There were more books here, on the floor, the chairs, the window-sills. These latter were very deep. They might well have been specially designed for sitting in of rainy afternoons to look at picture books or play with dolls. The grown-ups walked about and looked somewhat unhappy. She had forgotten them almost in her survey of her new home. She presently got Burch and lugged him about, talking to him, since he was the only individual present sensible enough to really appreciate the attractiveness of the place. The roughcast plastered walls looked so sheltering and strong. The open doorway into the dining-room showed a great long table. All of those men were going to eat there. She groped vaguely for a line in a ballad with which her mother used to sing her to sleep—something about the baron sitting in his hall and his retainers being blithe and gay. The table wasn’t in the hall, of course, but otherwise it was just the same.

Then came Aunt Valeria’s voice calling to her from upstairs; she followed that weary lady, and she and Burch were washed and made seemly for the table.

That first supper was a wonderful meal to her, too, with a lot of tall men trooping in to sit at the board. Their bronzed faces, their keen, forth-looking eyes, used to search great levels, the air of individuality, of independence, laid powerful hold on the child’s fancy. Every time a spur jingled beneath the table, or one of those big voices boomed out suddenly, her heart leaped in swift though uncomprehending response.

Afterward, in the living-room, she heard with some anxiety, Pearsall doubtfully suggest to her father that they might want to build a separate mess house for the men. Her father said no, he didn’t mind the men at the table; and Hilda heaved a great sigh of relief. She had already struck up quite a friendship with blond, talkative Shorty O’Meara; she had even made some timid overtures to a lank, elderly cynic who lived up to the name of Old Snake Thompson. To have her social adventures in this direction curtailed would have been trying.

The days that followed the arrival were strange, interesting ones. Her father was wrapped in an obscurity of dejection and grief; Miss Van Brunt was a victim of neuralgia which she declared the plains wind had developed. The child had only the baby brother, with the occasional companionship of Uncle Hank and some of the younger cowboys; yet she made eager acquaintance with this new life; and it was to the old man she came for information or to share with him her joys.

“All the horses you ride are yellow ones, Uncle Hank, aren’t they?” she asked him one evening when he came in from the range.

“Yes, honey, I’ve rode a buckskin pony for a good many years. I reckon the folks wouldn’t hardly know me on any other color of hoss. I sort of think they’re becoming to me—don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, very,” Hilda assured him gravely. “What’s this one’s name?”

“Why, you see, I just call ’em all ‘Buckskin.’ It’s easiest.”

Sometimes he took her out for short rides, of an evening, holding her before him on the saddle of the tall buckskin horse with a blaze face, or the little dark buckskin pony that had a brown mane and tail. Traveling in this fashion one evening across pastures she pointed to a queer, humped object, sway-backed, with a ewe-neck, and a rough coat of brindled hair that stuck up like the nap on a half-worn rug.

“What’s that, Uncle Hank? It looks something like a calf.”

“’S a dogie, honey,” he explained, absently.

“A dogie,” the child repeated. “Dogies are a kind of animal I don’t know. Is it wild, or tame?”

Pearsall laughed.

“You was right in the first place, sister,” he said. “That pore little skeesicks is a calf. It lost its mother when it was too young to eat grass rightly; so it sort of starves along, and gets stunted and runted. We call ’em dogies. You’ll see one every once in a while, round over the range. They’re no good to nobody—nor to theirselves.”

“Oh,” said Hilda, under her breath.

A day or so later, finding her a bit drooping, Pearsall questioned:

“What’s the matter, sister? Is something worrying you?”

“Uncle Hank,” she explained, with some diffidence, “my heart is sad about dogies. I saw two of them to-day, and my heart is sad about them, ever since.”

(She had wanted to say, in the language of one of her favorite ballads, “My heart is wae”; but judged that that might be a little too much for her companion, and tried him with a simpler literary form.)

“Is it, honey?” inquired the old man, easily. “Oh, I guess I wouldn’t worry about ’em. Remember that we don’t ever butcher ’em, nor even brand ’em.”

“That’s part of the sadness,” Hilda maintained, shaking her head. “It’s just like I used to want to cry when I saw the little dwarfed people in the shows, that aren’t children, and never will be grown up.”

Into the long talks which the two held together of an evening, Hilda often introduced that hero who never had any other name than The-Boy-On-The-Train.

“He knew most everything, Uncle Hank,” she once declared.

“I reckon so, honey,” assented Pearsall; but he seemed to Hilda not sufficiently impressed. She sought in her recollection for definite marvels to attribute to this favorite, and came hard up against that trying fact we all meet, that you cannot communicate to another the fascination you have experienced. It is something to be felt, not put into words. Pressed thus, Hilda stated one day to Uncle Hank that her hero could understand the language of birds. He accepted it with much too great facility, reconciled thereto by the fact that a person in Hilda’s book of fairy tales, which she had shown him earlier in the evening, could do the same. But the statement kept its author awake the greater part of the night, and a penitent, small Hilda climbed up into his arms as soon as he sat down after supper next evening and explained:

“Why, Uncle Hank, you know The-Boy-On-The-Train, he couldn’t quite—what I said—understand all that the birds were talking about.”

“Couldn’t he, Pettie?” inquired Hank placidly.

“No,” said Hilda with solemnity. “He might just as well have, but he couldn’t. He could just understand what people said; but—” The small face flushed deeply; word forms rushed fluidly about in the stress and flux of her emotion—“but he understanded that awful good.”

If Hilda had come to a group of children, The-Boy-On-The-Train must have grown dim behind the stirring realities of actual companionship. But in the lonely life that began for her now, he filled in many an hour which might be otherwise forlorn. He did not lose vividness. She saw him at that ranch he had spoken of, riding the marvelous pony which would shake hands, perfecting himself in those manly sports upon which he had casually touched, and which her lively fancy was liberally providing for him. As time went on, he grew of course; yet he remained delightfully a boy, her champion and hero in the dream world which was always so real to the imaginative child.

Meanwhile Pearsall, who had been for some time manager for a non-resident owner, had only remained to go over tallies, count of stock, and deliver to the purchaser the ranch and its appurtenances. This work was done now, the details all complete, and upon an evening Hank had brought his tally sheets and the mass of statements and figures to young Van Brunt in the ranch office, where he sat explaining the situation patiently to the other man.

It was past the children’s bedtime; Burch was asleep upstairs; but the little girl had twice been sent from the room with an admonition of increasing sharpness from her father. And still Pearsall could see from the tail of his eye that she hung just outside the door.

“But, Pearsall,” Van Brunt, helpless city man, repeated in a sort of blank dismay, “you don’t mean to say you’re leaving me—right now—when I need you worst? Why, what on earth will I do?”

“You know,” said Hank mildly. “I explained it to you last week, Mr. Van Brunt. When the ranch was sold, back three months ago, I looked out for another job. I got one, with the Quita Que, over in New Mexico, and they put me on forfeit—”

“No business man,” broke in Van Brunt. “I suppose I didn’t understand. The fault is mine, Pearsall. But this—I—I’m about as competent to run a ranch as Burch would be. I somehow took it for granted that you were to be manager. Can’t we—I will gladly pay that forfeit, if you are willing to stay—long enough at least to get me started.”

Hank raised a warning hand as Hilda’s face again showed at the door. The child did not edge in, as she had edged before! She made straight for Pearsall—though she winced at her father’s impatient exclamation—climbed to the old man’s lap, and looked searchingly into his face.

“Uncle Hank—you—going away?” She choked on the last word, then added half desperately, “Not—to stay? You’ll come back—won’t you?”

Van Brunt’s strained attitude relaxed a little; he sat back vaguely in his chair, glancing from one to the other, the dismay in his face gradually giving way to a half doubtful gleam of hope. Hank was silent a moment, Hilda watching him, openly restraining tears. The manager had seen more than one Easterner launch himself and everything he possessed in this cattle ranching game, and, ill prepared, inexperienced, lose all. Before him was another candidate for just such another calamitous failure. But it was the warm little body trembling on his lap, the big dark eyes searching his, that he was most conscious of.

“That’s all right, Pettie—about me going away,” he began hesitantly. Then with more certainty, and setting her gently down, “You run along to bed, honey.”

She moved a little, with childhood’s tragic reluctance, in the direction of the door, then turned with just a mute look into his face. Hank gave her a reassuring smile.

“Time them big black peepers was shut, Pettie,” he said easily. “And it’s all right. If I do have to go away, I’ll come straight back. Don’t you worry. I’m not goin’ to quit the Sorrers. Reckon I’ll stay as long as you do.”

“Then—” began Hilda. But her throat swelled so that she couldn’t finish it. It was going to be, “Then, if you will never forsake me, I will never forsake you,”—a line from one of her best loved fairy stories—all of that, even here before papa. But the best she could do was, “Then—I’ll go—Uncle Hank.” And she crept out.

When they heard her feet pattering on the stairs, Van Brunt began to speak, but Hank stopped him with a shake of the head.

“No, Mr. Van Brunt; I’ll pay the forfeit. It’s me that’s ruing back on a contract with the Matador, not you. I’ll stay.” Then, after a pause, “I thought likely I’d have to—that is, if you wanted me—that first day driving down from Mesquite. I’m all set to stay. That’s settled. We’ll say no more about it.”

CHAPTER III
THE FIRING SQUAD

Domestic existence at the Three Sorrows was, in those days, a very unsettled affair. Came the day that sullen Chinaman left. Charles Van Brunt had ridden to Mesquite. All the boys were out on the range and the baby was asleep upstairs. Hilda and Aunt Val were alone with the problem. The little girl stood by, while to Miss Van Brunt’s protests, which finally came to be almost hysterical, the yellow man made brief response: “No can do. Velly lonesome.” And though the lady pleaded with him for quite a distance down the long avenue of box elder and black locust, he walked stolidly away in those boat-shaped shoes of his. His lips were tightly shut, his blouse tightly buttoned across a resolute bosom, and his queue tightly coiled around a skull which housed the working machinery of a mind with which poor Aunt Val had never been able to establish communication, nor Hilda to get upon friendly terms.

Uncle Hank himself got supper that evening, but he remarked somewhat humorously that he couldn’t spare himself to cook. He persuaded Missouri into donning an apron and going to work in the kitchen.

“Why don’t they get another Chink?”, the cowboy grumbled.

“Well, as I understand it, they have wrote somewheres for one, but they haven’t heard yet,” said Pearsall.

“No, nor they won’t,” was Missouri’s opinion. “A Chink’s plumb shy of one of these here lonesome ranches. I bet I’m in for a life sentence,” for a ranch rider hates to cook.

Nothing that really could have been called a neighborhood existed in the cattle country of the Lame Jones County of that day, yet the Van Brunts had not been at the Three Sorrows a week before there was an invitation for Miss Valeria to bring Hilda and Burch to spend the day at the Capadine ranch, six miles east of them, and enjoy the company of Clark Capadine, Jr., and the ranch’s young guests, the two Marchbanks children. Shorty drove them over in the buckboard—a vehicle Hilda approved of far more than the shiny closed carriage at home in New York.

To Hilda that visit was a first introduction into the life of her peers as she was to find it from that time on. Clarkie Capadine was a good-natured boy of ten, whom Hilda would have liked very much if she had been capable that day of any natural or comfortable sentiments. But the Marchbanks boy, an advanced person whose name was Lafayette, shortened and pronounced in the Southern fashion, “Fayte,” scorned her utterly. He scorned also his sister Maybelle, five years younger than himself, and therefore near Hilda’s own age. Yet his contempt of Maybelle was nothing worse than the male intolerance of the foolish female, while Hilda learned from him, coldly, insultingly, that she was a tenderfoot. She was not only a child, and a girl at that—she was a tenderfoot. Did she know what chaparajos were?—tapaderos?—latigos?—a cinch, even? She did not. Maybelle was not expected to deal much in these terms on account of her deficiencies as a girl; but Hilda didn’t even know what such things were for! She was a tenderfoot—that’s what she was!

The day was clouded by the murk of Fayte’s sneers. He condescended to rope the girls as they ran screaming; but being rated as dumb driven cattle, even by so mighty a person, wasn’t much of a consolation. Finally he scalped his sister’s dolls by the simple process of pulling their wigs off. Maybelle went whimpering to Mrs. Capadine, who indignantly told the boy that he would not be allowed to go on the return visit to the Three Sorrows which Miss Valeria was already proposing. Fayte said sullenly that he didn’t want to. He said that the Three Sorrows was his ranch, anyhow—by rights—and far’s he was concerned he didn’t care to go and see other people living on it.

His ranch! What could Fayte Marchbanks mean by that? The next day Hilda took the question to her father, but he only laughed. It was Uncle Hank—Uncle Hank, who always talked to one the same as to grown-ups—who finally explained the matter to her, allowing tolerantly, “Oh, just a kid’s bragging. Fayte Marchbanks says things like that, I expect, because his Spanish grandpa, old man Romero, was the first owner of this ranch, and did give the place its name—the Rancho of the Three Sorrows.”

“What do you suppose made him call it such a sad name, Uncle Hank?” Hilda wanted to know. “Do you suppose he had them—three sorrows?”

“He did so, Pettie—in his three daughters. Michaela, his oldest, she took smallpox from a family of Arkansas movers that came driftin’ through these pastures two weeks before she was to have been married. Her looks was ruined. She went into a convent up in Santy Fe. Lola, the next one, was killed in a train wreck. And Guadeloupe, the third, his baby, and the prettiest of the bunch, ran away with Lee Marchbanks, which is Fayte’s and Maybelle’s pa. He said neither of them should ever step foot on his land while he lived. Old Romero’s wife was dead, and he never had no sons. He took the trouble about his daughters hard. He drank up all his property—” Hilda had a moment of wondering how he could do that—“and then drank himself to death.”

“Maybelle says her mother is dead, too,” said Hilda. “They had the sorrow, didn’t they, Uncle Hank? Maybelle and Fayte, I mean.”

“Um—well—it’s all in the past, honey. And Lee Marchbanks—Colonel Marchbanks, they call him, now—is a rich man, I hear, over in New Mexico. Jest leaving the kids with Mrs. Capadine while he brings out his second wife from the east somewheres. I expect they’ll have a fine lady for a mother when they go back.”

“Yes,” said Hilda, turning this information over slowly and curiously in her mind. “I didn’t know that.” She stole a look over her shoulder, through the open door, to where Miss Van Brunt, dressed exactly as she had been used to dress back in her New York home, sat reading a magazine. “Of course I have Aunt Valeria,” she remarked hesitantly.

Hank’s glance followed hers; he crinkled up his eyes in a look that was half smiling, half pitiful. Poor Miss Valeria always looked somehow like a person who had come to stay for only a day or two. The wind that whooped up over those great levels from the Gulf, and brought life and refreshment with it on the hottest summer noon, the wind that Hilda loved and made a playmate of, was to Miss Van Brunt a terrible bugbear—a sort of standing accusation against the whole west Texas country. When it blew three days on end, she went to bed with a nervous headache. When the domestic affairs of the household grew too puzzling, she went to bed with a headache, anyhow; one day Hilda heard Buster say to Missouri in the kitchen, “This here ranching proposition’s got the New York lady plumb buffaloed. Yet she’s sort of game, too—so game she won’t holler. I like to watch her not knowin’ what the mischief’s a-comin’ next, nor whichaway to turn, and pretendin’ she’s plumb wise to the rules.”

“It would be impossible. We never did so in New York. The Van Brunts do not do things that way.” These were Miss Valeria’s weapons of defense, the statements with which she met and repelled clamorous demands.

“Just a ladylike way of yellin’ ‘scat’ to the whole business,” said Buster.

As for the outside affairs, a mere change of ownership was a small matter, so long as Hank Pearsall’s experienced hand still guided them, and they seemed to run smoothly enough. Charley Van Brunt, too, lived at the ranch of the Three Sorrows, a guest—a quiet, graceful guest—whose incompetence was a shield against responsibility. He endeared himself at once to his men by the unvarying courtesy and sweetness of his bearing and the boyish recklessness he displayed when he chose and rode a horse, selecting always for looks and style, without regard to the beast’s disposition. It was plain that he drank heavily in the long evenings when he sat alone in the library, his manager, looking on, hoping that as the first keenness of his grief wore away, this matter would be bettered.

But it was the other way. When Charley began to rouse from the stupor of bereavement, he began also to leave the ranch, on trips to Mesquite, and beyond to El Centro; whence the news came back to Hank that Van Brunt was drinking hard and playing high. He found by natural instinct the clever, well-bred, profligate young Englishmen over on the Bar Thirteen, pensioned—or exiled—by their own families; and after that, between the trips to town, there was drinking and card playing at the Bar Thirteen. In those days the Three Sorrows was the finest property under private ownership in the Panhandle, with pastures all fenced—a rare thing at that time—watered by three noble creeks whose springs were never dry. It had been well stocked when Katharine bought it. Now Hank looked helplessly on, thinking of the two children, saw the money from sales of beef poured into the bottomless pit of Charley’s dissipations. And he understood that more than one mortgage had been put on the place, and that a choice pasture had been sold outright.

And Hank had another small worry, to which he finally applied his own remedy. The men loved to sit on the long back porch, chairs tilted against the wall, waiting for supper. They were freshly washed as to faces and hands, damply slick as to hair; their innocent enjoyment of company other than their own was so evident that it would have been a hard heart indeed which would have grudged them the society of the children; yet Hank listened and was troubled. Did all cowboys swear so much? Had Snake Thompson’s language always been what it now appeared? This might be Charley Van Brunt’s ranch, Charley Van Brunt’s back porch, and these might be Charley Van Brunt’s children—well, as a matter of fact, the ownership of all the articles mentioned was so placed—yet Hank felt himself obliged to speak out and speak distinctly on the subject.

“Boys,” he put it, “you-all have got to ride herd a little closer on your language. Swearing—leastways more’n reason—around where children air at—”

“Say, Hank,” broke in Shorty O’Meara, “how much is in reason to swear when your stirrup leather busts on you, and your left eyebrow hits the ground?”

“Aw, g’long with you,” Hank admonished, half sheepishly. “You know how much. If you don’t you’ll soon find out.”

Old Snake Thompson’s sense of humor, liberty and justice was outraged. Snake used very little language of any sort; when he talked at all it was apt to be done almost exclusively in more or less conventional and automatic profanity, and he made husky protest:

“But, Pearsall—Goddlemighty—I mean—how’s a man to talk? How’s a feller to express hisself? How’ll we get along without any o’ them words?”

“Well,” said Hank dryly, “I could give you a pretty fair list of substitutes.”

“Substitute cuss words?”

“Yes, jest that. You may never have took notice to the fact that I don’t cuss, nor chew tobacker? Well, I used to do both—fact, I was something of a star performer in them two lines.”

“What made you quit, Pearsall?” questioned Shorty discontentedly.

“I quit,” said Hank, “when I got to be a family man, in a manner of speaking. I had a—there was a small chap at my place then, nigh about Pettie’s age, and I sort of looked it over, and made the change on the little feller’s account.”

“Huh!” grunted Old Snake. Shorty made no comment, but Missouri said with feeling:

“This da—durned cattle country is a mighty lonesome land, with few pleasures in it, if you ask me, and a man that neither chews nor cusses misses a sight o’ comfort.”

“Oh, I dunno, Missou’,” the boss demurred mildly, “I’ve tried it both ways, and I don’t see much difference in the comfort. I get as much good out of a cup of coffee as I used to get out of a jolt of red-eye. I’d ruther beller a camp meetin’ hymn, or ‘The Dyin’ Ranger’ than chew tobacker. ‘Con-twist it!’ or ‘Sufferin’ snakes’ or ‘My granny’ is the most horrible oaths I use.” He concluded with sudden seriousness, “I’m not a-joking; I won’t stand for it, boys; I’ll fire the first galoot that turns loose and cusses or talks rough around where the folks is at.”

So the three S cowpunchers rode in off the range of an evening now, the most harmless associates for the little girl. About headquarters they spoke—though somewhat haltingly at times—a tamed and disciplined language, devoid of offense to the tenderest ears.

The Capadines were to come over for noon dinner—which was the only meal you could take visiting on ranches, it seemed, unless you spent the night. Missou’ had said things—Uncle Hank went into the kitchen and shut the door when he said them—but finally he got the dinner, Uncle Hank keeping an eye on him to see that it was all it should be for company. Fayte Marchbanks had come, after all. Things went pretty well while the children were with the grown-ups, for it appeared that Fayte had nice company manners, when he cared to display them; Aunt Val thought him a very well-bred boy. But after dinner, Burchie in the house with Aunt Val and Mrs. Capadine, while the two fathers smoked on the porch, it began to be trying.

On the journey out, among other and greater losses, a trunk containing the children’s toys had gone astray and was never recovered. So Hilda had nothing to offer for Maybelle’s admiration but one small china-all-over doll, which had been held out for her to play with on the train. She realized with a good deal of satisfaction that Fayte Marchbanks couldn’t scalp it; the hair was painted on its china head; small and rather miserable as it looked there were advantages.

The two boys presently ranged off with Fayte’s air rifle, playing at hunting big game; the two girls settled down in the roots of a big tree and arranged for a little dinner.

“I wish I’d brought my dolls,” Maybelle said discontentedly. “I would—only I thought you’d have a lot of your own. You said you had.”

“I have, only—” and poor Hilda told again the story of the lost trunk.

“Well, then, I should think they’d buy you some new ones, if they can’t ever get those again,” Maybelle argued.

“They will,” said Hilda eagerly. “Father’s going to next time he goes to town.”

“But he’s been in town lots of times since you lost ’em,” said Maybelle, the practical. “Why doesn’t he bring you—one decent one, anyhow?” She looked scornfully at the china-all-over.

“He forgets.” Hilda’s lip trembled, but it would never do to let any one see how cruel the hurt of this forgetfulness was. “That is, he has been forgetting it, but if ever he goes to Fort Worth he’ll remember, and then he’ll bring me the most beautiful doll that money can buy. It’ll be so long,” her trembling hands measured the length, “and have kid shoes and a white dress and a blue sash—he’s promised. Now I’ll go and get something for our party.”

Hilda was gone to the house quite a while. Missou’ had been hard to persuade, and didn’t want to let her have the little cakes. When she came back she found Maybelle curiously excited, while the two boys stood back, Clarke Capadine looking rather scared, Fayte grinning.

“Will you boys come to our party?” she asked doubtfully, taking stock of what Missou’ had finally given her, wondering whether it would be enough.

Clarke muttered and looked down, but Fayte grinned more than ever.

“Sure. Let’s make it a funeral—if there’s scraps enough to bury. The firing squad’s been here while you were gone.”

And then she saw the scattered bits of china sprinkled over the play-house, the rifle in his hand.

Hilda didn’t know for a minute quite who it was that screamed. Something that was not herself seemed to come up in her throat and issue from her mouth in a volume of sound that scared the children and brought the men running from the porch. Quickly as they came, Uncle Hank was quicker. He had jumped away from the pony he was just about mounting over at the corral, and run across the lawn; Hilda was in his arms when her father and Mr. Capadine arrived.

“What in time’s the matter?” the old man asked. Clarke Capadine had stood his ground, but Fayte Marchbanks was running. Hank caught sight of the gun in his hand. “Is the child shot?”

“My doll! My doll!” Hilda’s voice had come down to a moan. “I hadn’t but just one, and—”

Maybelle’s finger was in her mouth. She took it out to point to the little sprinkling of white scraps.

“Hilda—are you hurt?” That was her father. “Put her down, Pearsall. See if she’s injured.” Uncle Hank set her on her feet. The gust of passion had gone by. She was weak from it—and terribly ashamed.

“He broke her doll,” the old man explained. Hilda loved him for the serious tone. Maybelle giggled. Hilda heard another laugh somewhere, but it wasn’t Mr. Capadine, for he said:

“That boy ought to be thrashed.”

She turned and buried her face against Uncle Hank, sobbing now, but very quietly.

“Hilda—don’t be silly,” came Miss Val’s impatient voice. “Go get another doll to play with. See—you’re spoiling all the good time for your little visitors.”

“I—hadn’t—but just one,” it came very muffled from the folds of Uncle Hank’s coat. Her father said quickly,

“Oh, that’s so. But, Hilda, I’m going to buy you more dolls. Be a good girl now. Stop crying.”

“I don’t want but just one, papa.” Hilda choked, raised her head and tried to straighten her face. “When—when will you get me my doll?”

They were all looking at her. It was a terrible moment. Yet Hilda somewhat forgot it in the importance of that question.

“The very next time I go to town,” said her father. “The handsomest one I can find, dear. Now go on with your play—and don’t let’s have any more hysterics.”

He went back to the house. Clarke Capadine had slipped away in the direction Fayte took. Uncle Hank stayed a few minutes, till he saw that Hilda seemed to be herself again, then he mounted and rode away to his work.

But that evening, when Hilda came at bedtime to bid him good night, she looked so woebegone, and her feet dragged so that he inquired:

“Not afraid to go upstairs alone, air you, Pettie? Been seeing any of them Skulkin’ Door-imps lately?”

She shook her head.

“No—not much. That isn’t it. Never mind.”

“Or Barrel-tops?” Hank pursued cheerily. “You let me know if any of them come around—and I’ll stave ’em in for you.”

“The—the doll.” She got out the two words, and could manage no more, but let them lie as they fell.

“Sure enough!” The old man caught her up in his arms and started for the stairs. “That doll-baby’s still on your mind, ain’t it? I know. Uncle Hank’ll carry you up to bed.” And on the way he whispered, “Never you mind, Pettie; there’s got to be a trip to Forth Worth right soon—Forth Worth—a real big city; and I’ll make sure your doll-baby comes back from there.”

CHAPTER IV
THE DOLL

In two weeks after that Hilda’s father went to Fort Worth. Hank drove Charley to Mesquite. His last words, as he handed the valise up to his employer in the El Centro stage, were:

“And once more, Charley, whatever else you do, or don’t do, for the love of mercy, don’t forget to fetch a first-class doll for Pettie. I’d ruther see you fail to close the trade with the J. R. Company—I’d ruther you forgot the whole everlastin’ outfit of supplies—than to have you come back without that there doll-baby. It’s a dirty shame that we big, two-fisted, long-legged men haven’t got the child a doll before this.”

“All right, Pearsall; I’ll not forget.” Van Brunt shook the old man’s hand, and the stage drove away.

Surely, now the beautiful doll was certain to come home! The evening Hank got back—and every evening afterward—Hilda crept up into his lap to explain to him, over and over, how golden its hair should be, and what pretty tan shoes and white kid hands it should have. Now that—to her mind—the homecoming of the doll was made certain, the tide of feeling which had been so long repressed was loosened. The little tongue ran freely, the great dark eyes glowed as she repeated to him:

“This long, Uncle Hank—just this long—bigger than any Maybelle had—see?” The small hands measured about fifteen inches of stature. “And blue eyes, I told him—like yours, Uncle Hank; not black, like mine and papa’s.”

Uncle Hank’s admired blue eyes would dwell upon her with troubled gaze. He had done his best. He recalled that last admonition to Charley. But now, shrinking in mind at thought of the possibility of another disappointment for Hilda, but shirking the cruelty of hinting his dread to the child, he would say slowly:

“Um—honey—why, Fort Worth, you know—Fort Worth ain’t New York. This here doll’s liable to be not much of a looker—no such doll-baby as you had before you come out here to Texas. It might not even be as good as some of the Marchbanks girl’s—”

She would interrupt him, declaring earnestly, “Oh, Uncle Hank, it’s going to be very beautiful!”

But there came no word from Charley Van Brunt; it was as though Fort Worth had swallowed him up. He was to have been gone a week; it was two, and he had not returned. The ranch boss wrote again and again to the hotel where his employer was to stop; even Hilda, with Uncle Hank guiding her little brown fingers, struggled through a small, smudged sheet of hieroglyphics. And when it was well into the third week and there was no answer, the manager sent Shorty to Mesquite with a telegram prepared entreating an immediate reply. But he got none—no message of any kind returned to him from Fort Worth. Old Hank, smiling and cheerful, carried a very anxious heart.

At the end of four weeks Van Brunt came home; a gentleman—oh, most certainly a gentleman, always; never less than that—but looking strangely ill and out of countenance. He was much thinner than when he went away, and much less sunburnt, and he had forgotten most of the matters which had taken him to Fort Worth.

The child, who for days back had scouted continually the long box-elder avenue leading up from the main trail, met the buckboard far down below the big gate. Charley stopped the galloping ponies with an arm thrown out across the driver’s hands, lifted the small courier and hugged her to his heart and kissed her.

“Did she think Daddy had just run away and left them all? Well, Daddy was very busy; he—he had such a lot of tiresome business.” And, reaching down into his vest pocket, Van Brunt brought out and gave to Hilda a five-dollar gold piece.

In silence and in some apprehension she looked at the coin lying in her palm—as unavailable to her, as valueless in her eyes, as a yellow button. He had given it as though it were a precious thing, and Hilda just glimpsed the terrible suggestion that it might have been offered instead of a doll. No, no—that could not be—that was intolerable! She pushed the idea away from her as she sat so quiet-seeming to the careless eye, but in truth in such a tumult of choking emotion, upon her father’s knee.

Shyly and unobserved, her glance explored the buckboard. There was nothing whatever in it but her father’s valise; not a big valise, either; and her hopes and expectations dwindled. It would be a small doll; she saw that she must bring her desires down to that—and she did so. But she asserted passionately to herself that it was there—it was in the valise. No doll at all!—oh, it was impossible—it was not conceivable! She shrank in panic from the thought. Heaven would not permit such a cruel thing as that.

The house reached, the child stood about, in one obscure corner and another, watching, longing for the moment when the valise should be opened; amazed at the waste of time and talk, when the Important Things of Life were waiting in that mysterious casket. During an embarrassed pause, her father’s troubled eye caught sight of the little figure lingering in the doorway. He picked her up and lifted her high, demanding:

“What is it now, my small daughter? Is there something you want to know of father?”

This was a strange, an ominous sort of inquiry, and Hilda could barely choke out the words, “The doll,” in such a whispering, flattened voice as failed to make its way across the short distance from her trembling lips to her father’s ear, and he had to ask her over more than once.

His face fell, almost comically. A look of pain and shame flashed over it. It was plain (at least to everybody there except poor Hildegarde, who still clutched tightly a tiny shred of hope) that he had never thought of the matter since the moment of uttering his careless promise.

“Run away, Hilda,” Miss Val began, peevishly. “Why do you bother about such a thing now—?” But Charley cut her short:

“Why, dear,” his voice was husky as he set Hilda gently down, “I completely for—”

Hank Pearsall’s eyes were watching her in deep concern. This was what he had dreaded. Now he shook his head warningly at his employer, over the little girl’s, and interrupted in a significant tone:

“It’s all right, honey, it’ll be a-comin’ along with the freight stuff, when—”

“No, Pearsall,” broke in young Van Brunt, in fresh distress. “No, Pearsall, there aren’t any things coming by freight. I—forgot ’em all completely. I’ll get—”

It was too late. Hank could cover nothing now; the bitter truth was evident, even to Hilda’s incredulity, that there was no doll. Her father drew her to him, saying:

“There, there, dear, don’t cry! Oh, Hildegarde, love, don’t cry! I can’t—” His face was white; he looked almost as though he were near to tears himself.

“No, papa—no, papa,” she whispered, “no, papa, I won’t cry”; then crept away to have her agony alone, in her own private nook, an unused room upstairs, where there finally fell upon her the kind sleep of exhaustion.

The affairs of the house went on; supper was served and passed. Charley asked uneasily of the child’s whereabouts, and was diplomatically diverted by Uncle Hank.

Hilda suddenly opened her eyes upon the darkness. She slowly realized that it was night, and that she was lying dressed upon the lounge in the sitting-room. Somebody had taken off her shoes and tucked some covering over her. The strange feeling was upon her which people have when they go to sleep irregularly, at some unusual time and place, not dressed for bed.

At first she was dazed and remembered nothing of the afternoon’s happenings; then her sorrow came rushing back upon her in a flood. But the aftermath of grief was tearless. Poor baby—she had wept the fountain dry.

Now, as she lay, inert, she could hear the murmur of voices. They were men’s voices. Rising, strangely stiff and weary, she crawled across the dark hall and peered through the chink of an imperfectly closed door. The room into which she looked was the office, and the scene which met her wondering eyes was a curious one. There was that sewing-machine which the child’s mother had purchased and prepared to take with her household supplies to the Texas ranch. Sitting before it, and beneath the strong light of the hanging lamp, was Uncle Hank, in full cowpuncher regalia, just as he had come in from some urgent outside errand. The broad brim of his sombrero was swept directly off his face, to be out of the way; the grizzled curls lay on the collar of his rough blue flannel shirt, and his trousers were tucked into the tops of cowboy boots, whose high heels, armed with long-shanked spurs, clicked upon the treadles. His sinewy brown fingers were twisting a thread to induce it to go through the eye of the needle. Bending anxiously over him was her father, in smoking jacket and slippers. It was some moments before Hilda could view this scene with anything but incredulity, or believe it other than a dream.

About the feet of the men was a tremendous litter of things very strange to see in that place. There were yards of white muslin, and sheets of newspaper cut into queer shapes; on the floor a comforter—the pink silk one off the big front-room bed—ripped open and with its snowy cotton bulging out; a long-fleeced Angora goatskin that commonly lay in front of that same bed. As, wide-eyed and wondering, the child crouched silently at the door, the men were talking in low, guarded tones. Her father spoke first:

“Can you make it work, Pearsall? I don’t know what I did that was wrong, but it ran crooked and puckered, even before it broke the thread.”

“Uh-huh!” returned the old man softly. “She’s liable to buck a little at first; but if ye don’t spur her in the shoulder or fight her in the face, she’ll soon travel your gait. See?” For the machine had settled down to a steady purr. “Gimme somethin’ to sew—anything, to try it on.”

The child saw her father duck his sleek black head to pick up a scrap from the floor. Then she heard his laughing voice:

“Pearsall, I believe those long-shanked spurs of yours are what tamed down this bucking sewing-machine. I didn’t have mine on.”

“Shucks!” murmured Hank deprecatingly, bending to unbuckle. “That beats my time! I plumb forgot them spurs. Don’t blame ye a mite for laughing. That’s an old cowpunch, every time. It’s a wonder I didn’t try to ride in here on a cutting pony, with my guns on, and what you call a ‘lariat’ swinging! Shucks!”

He removed his big hat, dropped the jingling spurs into its crown, and reaching far over laid it back on the desk.

“If I was in your place, Charley,” he said over his shoulder, “or ruther, if I was a nice, polite gentleman like you, and owned a ranch—I wouldn’t keep an old galoot for my ranch boss that didn’t have manners enough to remember to take his spurs and sombrero off when he came into my office.”

Charley’s reply was only a smile and an expressive look.

The small watcher at the door gazed, still unable to entirely convince herself that she was really awake. Her father said presently, in a rather depressed voice:

“No, this wouldn’t do—not near. We’ll have to make a long improvement over it.”

He took up something from the floor. Alas, this must indeed be a brownie dream—but what a dreadful version of it! That which her father held and looked dolefully at was an atomy—a thing in human form—of a livid, blue-white, like a leper, and of ghastly outline, warped where the ill-guided sewing machine had wavered in its line of stitching. The being had a small, narrow, cone of a head, a neck like a pipe-stem, and limbs, long, attenuated, and lumpy where they had been stuffed hard with cotton rammed home by the help of penhandles, in an attempt to round out the starved proportions.

The child looked at this specter in dismay. Truly, it did fall short of grace—even of decent seemliness. She was glad her father thought so. She should never be able to produce a grateful countenance or bring forth any satisfactory thanks for a scarecrow like that. He spoke now:

“If we fall down on this doll factory business—well, when we fall down, for I see that is what’s coming; I’ve already made a mess of mine, and I bet anything you like that you’re not going to do any better—when we’ve tried it out and find we can’t fetch it, what I want of you, Hank, is to tell her—promise her—”

“No more promises, Charley,” Uncle Hank said, stuffing away at something he held out of Hilda’s sight. “If you’re leaving it to me, I say either dance up with the doll for her birthday or don’t hurt the poor baby any worse than she’s been already hurt with promises.”

“Her birthday!” Hilda swallowed a sob at her father’s startled tone. “Hank—do you know I’d forgotten absolutely that to-morrow is the child’s birthday!”

Something warm came to the little watcher from the glance of Uncle Hank’s blue eyes as he looked up. He hadn’t forgotten it. She guessed now that when he was in the kitchen there with Missou’ so long, and she wasn’t allowed to come in, it must have been a birthday cake that was being baked. She tried to tell herself that this would make up for the lack of a doll. She wished Uncle Hank wouldn’t say that about promises—they were better than nothing—better, anyhow, than having some such frightful thing as that which dangled from her father’s hand offered to her as a doll. She was glad when he insisted rather desperately:

“But I say, Pearsall, you’ll have to promise her one. She’ll believe you. We can’t get anything out of this that will fill the bill.”

“Can’t? Why, we’ve got everything to do it with, Charley. I’ve gentled this sewing-machine; here’s white domestic, and cotton to stuff with, and all the need-cessary materials. As for a pattern, why, you’ve got me to go by, and I’ve got you, in the mere number and placing on of arms and legs and such.”

He glanced at the object in Van Brunt’s hands.

“I reckon you went mostly by me—in the—the—geography of that critter. Gosh! Charley, it’s a plumb straddle-bug, and whopper-jawed at that! Now—here”—the sentences came out in sections, irregular fragments, through many pins and needles and other implements which Hank held in his mouth—“here—I have went by you. We’ve got to cut ’em tolerable fat, or they stuff too slim; I see that. That’n”—he chuckled softly—“that lean lizard’s a Pearsall—and a Pearsall I don’t want to acknowledge. But this is a pretty fair Van Brunt. She’s most ready for clothes now.”

“I’ll bring some of my things,” Van Brunt suggested, turning toward the door to his own room.

Hank looked dubious. “It’s lady fixin’s—flub-dubs—we want—fancy ke-didoes, ye know. Course, we can’t wake up Miss Valeria to get ’em—but I don’t suppose a man’s riggin’s would—”

“A man’s riggin’s!” echoed Van Brunt, laughing under his breath. “You don’t know much, Hank. Just wait a minute!” and he was gone.

Hilda’s already overburdened heart sank at the thought of the morrow. That she should fail to offer some sort of gratitude for these well-meant efforts on her behalf never occurred to her. The awful gulf which yawns between a child’s point of view and that of the grown-up gaped black at the seven-year-old’s feet; yet she was loyally resolved to bridge it, when the time came, with such show of enthusiasm as she could muster.

Her father had gone through the further door. Uncle Hank had quit the motion of his elbow that she knew meant stuffing, and was threading a needle. He spoke softly to himself; he had a way of doing that; Hilda loved it.

“H’m—promises! Pettie got promised every time he went to Mesquite that she’d be brung such a doll as could be got there. It was forgot. It’s been forgot this time. Any feller that promises her any more dolls from anywheres is bound to look to her like somebody that promises to brings dolls—and then forgets.”

Poor Charley Van Brunt! The old man had another listener. He had come back, his hands full of stuff he was bringing to dress the doll, and he stopped in the door.

“You’re right, Pearsall,” he said soberly and Hilda didn’t understand till she was older that queer thing he said afterward. “I’ve all my life been promising to bring home dolls to the people I love and who love me and depend on me—and forgetting. You know what I mean. If it wasn’t dolls of some sort, then it would be dolls of another—repentance, reformation, amendment—all dressed up and shining. But I’ve always brought the valise home empty, haven’t I?”

“Well—and if so, Charley—if so? No reason you shouldn’t fly at it and make good right on the ground.”

“All right,” her father’s tone was grave enough to mean a great deal more than the present enterprise; he spread out his color-box and paints on the desk, made some further exclamation in a low tone, and went to work. There was silence in the office. Hilda knew that she ought to slip away. She was just going to do so when she saw Uncle Hank purse up his lips, look very fiercely at the needle which he was holding at a considerable distance from his face, finally thread it, and begin to speak, not to her father at all but to something he had evidently propped up on his end of the desk in front of him. It must be that product he had called “a pretty fair Van Brunt.” Shaking a finger at it, he began to sew on some small white object, glancing occasionally over his spectacles toward the invisible doll, murmuring to her:

“Now, you set there, Miss—well, what is your blessed name?—Miss Bon Bon—Miss High Stepper—Miss Tip-Top—and mind how you shoot off your mouth to-morrow. Ye want to be mighty clear on one point, and that is that you came from Fort Worth. Pa was just saving a little surprise when he failed to mention you to Pettie to-day. You was right there in that grip of his’n all the time; so don’t let me hear any remarks about a bronco sewing-machine, nor white domestic, nor Charley’s paint-box, nor Uncle Hank’s number forty sewing thread. Mind what I’m telling you, Miss Tip-Top; we don’t want a word of and concerning the spare-room bed-comfort. Fort Worth’s where you come from—Fort Worth; a-bringing the latest fashions in young-lady dolls; and Pettie’s not to be told things.”

Such discounting of her delight in the doll! It was a relief to her when, a moment later, her father raised his head to say:

“Look there, Pearsall—there are the petticoats and such like.” Charley spread out handkerchiefs of exquisite linen cambric. “And this,” unfurling a brocaded white satin muffler a yard or more square, “there’s enough stuff in this for a frock.” He put down several four-in-hand ties. “Those blue ones are exactly alike; enough of a kind to make the dolly a sash.”

“Yes, that’s right, Charley. I’ll sew ’em together and press ’em out and rig her a surcingle of ’em. The Fort Worth doll was going to have a blue surcingle—a blue sash—I ricollect.”

Suddenly Hank dropped the ties; a look of perplexity, almost of consternation, spread over his face.

“Great Scott, Charley! I’ve just this minute remembered—do you know that Pettie figured that doll was a-going to show up with white kid hands, and tan shoes on its feet—tan shoes! Now, how in time are we going to fix that?”

“I’ll show you,” whispered Van Brunt, as he once more hurried out of the room. He was back the next minute, with a pair of heavy tan driving gloves and a pair of white ones.

“Oh, fine, boy—scrumptious!” Uncle Hank’s eyes fastened upon them with a pleased look. Then he hesitated, holding one of them up to note that it was fresh and new. “But these are mighty good gloves, Charley, to—”

“I hope to heaven they are!” cried Van Brunt, and his pale face reddened. “I hope they’re good enough to make right a man’s broken promise.”

Uncle Hank said no more. One at each side of the desk, the two men worked for a time in silence, the watcher at the door drawing her breath softly lest it betray her presence. Suddenly the elder man began to speak:

“Ye see, Charley, I was a widder’s boy—the oldest; and the mother she used to make doll-babies for the little chaps. I’ve set up of nights toward Christmas, before now, to work this-here sort of racket. But mammy and me, we couldn’t paint—nary one of us—not a bit. A lead-pencil or pen and ink; eyes and nose and mouth—laid out mighty flat and square, I’m bound to say—’twas all the face them dolls of ours ever got. The hair was generally ink, too. The best we could do in that line would be some onraveled tow rope. This here Miss High Stepper’s face and hair are simply the finest ever.”

As he spoke he moved aside a little, and Hilda caught her breath in a gasp of incredulous joy. What vision of delight was this Uncle Hank held forth, turning his head to look at it sidewise, half questioning, half pleased?

Muslin had furnished the ground tone for its delicate complexion. Charles Van Brunt, with the help of his color-box, had been placing thereon not the usual countenance of the store doll, but the roguish face of a gay little mischief. There was nothing tame in her sweetness. Heavily black-fringed blue eyes looked out at you with stimulating significance. The lips smiled saucily. The long-fleeced Angora goatpelt had yielded a head of streaming crinkled tresses, which (after an interview with the color-box) showed an adorable gamboge tint. Head and body were fairly proportioned and well-shaped; and small anatomical inaccuracies were more than compensated for by her beaute du diable.

“What’s the matter with that?” cried the young father boyishly. “Say, she’s a corker, Hank!”

But now a new thought came to Hilda, which made her drag her fascinated eyes resolutely from the beautiful, smiling water-color face. They wished her to know nothing of the doll—to be surprised. With a last doting glance which caressed its perfections, she moved noiselessly back across the dark hall and into the sitting-room, shivering but ecstatic; oh, how different a creature from the bereaved little soul who had crossed that room, leaden-footed, sore-hearted, but a few moments back! She drew her slim legs up deliciously under the warm covers that seemed to close about her like the very arms of love, and with a deep, deep sigh of perfect peace, relaxed her comforted spirit to sleep.

Silence enfolded the ranch house. All the little nocturnal sounds that noisy daylight blurs or blots out gradually became audible. Somebody walked across the upstairs hall in stockinged feet. There was a stamping among the ponies down at the corral. A little owl called sleepily from the willows over by the irrigating ditch.