Spring came along while Aunt Val and Burchie were in Fort Worth.

Think of it—think of being away when that happened! Hilda wouldn’t have missed it for anything. For she knew that this country of the Staked Plain played a yearly prank. Throughout the long, dry summer it hid beneath the soft green-brown that clothes its mighty levels, dreaming delicate mist of dream, that showed to mortal eyes as mirage. In winter, it lay under the great reaches of snow. But on some magically determined day in spring, when you were not thinking of anything in particular, it suddenly burst out upon you and shouted, “Booh!”

“Booh!” cried the Texas plains of Lame Jones County (a place supposed by the foolishly learned to be a dry, windswept, featureless waste, almost desert) in a great voice that had no sound, and seemed to come from everywhere at once. And you looked about and said, “Why, you almost scared me!” You looked a long time and then you said, “How beautiful you are—oh, how beautiful! Where have you been all year?”

“Right here!” laughed the Texas plain. Its laugh was green, oh, green with pure joy, radiant with incredible stretches of blue and rose and gold—wild hollyhocks, cactus blooms, phlox—nodding, dancing in the April breeze.

Hilda was getting along without any knowledge of cities, except the London or New York of romance, or the Bagdad that came into a fairy tale. She’d never even been to Mesquite, for she and Uncle Hank turned back from the Bar Thirteen after that Christmas blizzard, and the old man found plenty of work on the Sorrows to keep him there. But who would ask for more? Her world was bounded by the great pastures that stretched out and away to the horizon; the foreground of existence was made up of the daily small happenings at school or around headquarters, as the low, rambling stone house was called. Visitors here were few and far between; the people of her home world were Sam Kee in the kitchen, the cowpunchers over at the bunk house, with Shorty O’Meara, Buster, Missou’ and Old Snake Thompson for prominent citizens and Uncle Hank for kindly ruler.

Sam Kee let her mix up things sometimes in his big clean kitchen. She propped Rose Marie beside her in a chair and read to the doll; or she drifted about the house murmuring verses or speeches from her favorite stories. Oh, she was happy at the ranch, with Uncle Hank—she sometimes felt guilty that she didn’t miss Aunt Val, or Burchie—or even her father—at all. Her mother’s memory was getting to be a dim thing, like a beautiful sweet dream that you tried to call back in the morning—and couldn’t.

When Uncle Hank shook his head a little once or twice and said he was afraid she was sort of running wild, she knew what he meant, but she didn’t tell him. It was her “personal appearance,” as Miss Belle had called it when she spoke to her on the matter. The truth is, it was getting harder and harder for Hilda to make herself neat for school. She looked at the great acres of hollyhock, phlox and daisies and wished that a little girl could just grow dresses as they did. There had been a big supply of clothing provided by her mother: so many linens, such a number of ginghams, and the heavier frocks in proportion. In Aunt Val’s time Hilda just picked out whatever she thought she’d like to wear and put it on. There was never any trouble about it then, only sometimes if she went down stairs in the morning wearing a little lace frock with ribbons and the open-work stockings and slippers that belonged to it, Aunt Val would send her back to her room again to put on something “more suitable.” But now, even Aunt Val was gone, and pretty much everything that had traveled to Texas in the big trunk was worn out, soiled, torn or getting too small for her.

She was growing to be a tall girl—“leggy” Shorty said, and Uncle Hank shook his head at him for the word. But there couldn’t be any doubt about it—her legs were getting longer. Sam Kee said the same thing when she complained that he must have shrunk the skirts of her dresses in the wash.

“No! No slink in wash.” He looked at her severely out of his slant black eyes. “Skirt no slunk. You stletch. You legs stletch fas’ now.”

“Well; I can’t help it.” Hilda had been on the point of tears.

“No wanchee help.” The Chinaman grinned amiably. “Mebbe pu’ soon be big leddy. Heh! Sam Kee feed you plenty good glub—thass why. You tell Uncle Hankie. He buy you dress plenty big.”

Hilda sighed, and looked enviously at Captain Snow, the white kitten, a fine half-grown cat now, in high favor with Sam Kee, who said that “pu’ soon now he ketchy lat.” Captain Snow’s coat grew right along with him, and was laundered where it was, in calm leisure moments. How much better!

Upstairs, strewed about on the chairs and tables of a disused bedroom, were the discarded fineries Miss Val had left—splendid to play princess in; but they didn’t offer anything for a decent “personal appearance” at school. And the matter of stockings and shoes absolutely stumped Hilda. You couldn’t pin them together, or let them out. You just couldn’t make feet that had got too large go into shoes that stayed the same size. Finally, in desperation, she brought out a pair of French-heeled, beaded slippers of black satin that had pinched even Miss Val’s small foot, and were therefore thrown aside little worn. These could be held on with a string tied around the instep and ankle. And a pile of Miss Valeria’s worn-out silk hose began to furnish the stockings. Hilda made this do for school; at home she took to going barefoot.

She did not follow Sam Kee’s suggestion that Uncle Hank be bothered with any of these troubles. Aunt Val and Burchie there in Fort Worth were costing him an awful lot of money. There were mortgages. Hilda didn’t know what a mortgage was, but when she asked Shorty he said it was something that ate money and spit fire. Hilda understood this to be more or less figurative. But anyhow, if Uncle Hank had mortgages to deal with, she wouldn’t add the worry of her clothes. Besides, she was getting along pretty well now that it was warm weather. She did just love to go barefoot.

So she was barefoot when she ran, one hot Saturday afternoon, down the long box-elder avenue, and turned eastward, going after some milkweed pods she had seen the day before growing in a place where the trail came in from the Ojo Bravo. She was playing Persian Princess, and needed some of the lovely silvery-white pompoms that could be made from these pods. It was a good way off where the weeds grew, but she didn’t stop to get her pony. Maybe one of the boys, or even Uncle Hank, would be coming in—it was getting toward supper time—and give her a ride home behind him.

And sure enough, as she came within sight of the milkweeds, there was Uncle Hank on Buckskin, loping in from Ojo Bravo way. She left the trail and made for the weeds, running faster now, to get the pods and be ready by the time he came up with her. She was just reaching out to pick them—they had to be taken off carefully, or they would open out and all blow away like dandelion balls—when Uncle Hank’s big voice roared out at her, from where he had pulled up Buckskin:

“Stop!”

Hilda stopped, fairly frozen. Never had Uncle Hank spoken to her like that before. She stood there like a well-trained pointer dog, rigid in the attitude of running.

“Stand. Don’t move—for your life. I’m a-going to shoot!”

A hideous moment, then a noise that seemed to Hilda to split the sky, and send the earth reeling. Uncle Hank leaped from his pony and was running toward her. He had her now. She was lying back over his left arm, while the pistol in his right hand cracked again.

“Uncle Hank’s baby! Did he scare her most to death? You ain’t hurt, Pettie. Look. See what it was I killed.”

She opened unwilling eyes, first at the clouds that still ran circles above her in the blue sky; then she saw Uncle Hank’s eyes, almost as blue, and full of the same fathomless kindness.

“Over there by the milkweed you was goin’ for—look, Pettie.”

And now she held herself erect a moment, and saw the brown, rusty coil, the shattered diamond-shaped head, of the rattlesnake Uncle Hank had shot. She hid her face against the blue flannel sleeve and trembled.

It was afterward—after he’d gone over to make sure the snake was dead—when she could get her breath easily again, and was climbing up on Buckskin with him, that the old man, looking down at the little foot set on his boot-toe, whispered:

“Barefoot!”

They rode a moment in tremulous silence, then he said sternly, “Never let that happen again, Pettie. You wear your shoes.”

“I love to go barefoot.”

“Pettie,” he turned and looked at her, “I don’t like that. Your pa’s daughter ought to be brought up a lady. She ain’t got no place in the barefoot brigade. You mind what I say about the shoes. Keep ’em on.”

“All day? In the house?”

“D’ruther you would,” and he swung her down at the ranch house door.

No more was said of the matter. But at supper time, it was with the feeling of a martyr that Hilda came creeping down stairs stockinged and shod—after a fashion. She paraded around in front of Uncle Hank while they waited for the meal, but he paid no attention other than to remark cheerfully that he had two men’s work to do to-morrow—if it was Sunday—and didn’t she want to take one of them off his hands. Sitting at table during the meal, Hilda had no chance to give Uncle Hank an object lesson in the superiority of bare feet over ill-fitting shoes. If he got away from her and off to bed, she’d not have a chance till next day.

“Anybody seen that left glove of mine?” he asked, when he finally pushed back from the table. “I had it in here to mend, and I reckon Sam Kee must a-put it away for me where I can’t find it. Run ask him, Pettie.”

Hilda ran. As she came ostentatiously hobbling back, the glove in her hand, Hank failed to take it. Thank goodness, at last he was looking at her feet.

“What you got on, child?”

“Shoes—like you told me to,” said Hilda, sadly. “Or slippers, rather.”

“Slippers?” He eyed with disfavor the shabby glories of Miss Valeria’s cast-off footwear, the toothpick toes, the preposterous heels. “Slippers, heh? Well, you just go and pull ’em off—and don’t you ever put ’em on again.”

“Oh, may I, Uncle Hank? I wanted to ask you if I could—in the house. But I thought after I promised—”

She was half way to the door when he called after her: “You take them things off and put some sensible shoes on.”

She turned, and said in a weak voice:

“These are all I’ve got, Uncle Hank.”

“All you’ve got?” He picked her up and carried her to the lamplight as though she’d been a doll, examining the footgear. “Who in time would buy shoes like that for a child?”

“They weren’t bought for me,” Hilda had to admit. “They’re some old ones of Aunt Val’s.”

“Why don’t you wear your own?”

“My own are all worn out—and—and I can’t get my foot in any of them.”

For a minute Hilda thought Uncle Hank was very angry at her.

“Gimme them things off your feet,” he said, and set her down.

She handed the slippers to him. He took them, walked out through the kitchen calling to Sam Kee to bring a light. At the chopping block in the side yard, with the Chinaman holding his lamp high in the door, Hilda peering under an elbow, Hank caught up an ax and chopped off the French heels.

“There,” he grunted, pounding down nails, looking the slippers over before he brought them to her, “put ’em on, honey—they’ll do till to-morrow.” Then he raised his voice in a shout and called across to the bunk house:

“Hi—some of you boys! Shorty, that you? Tell Thomps to take charge up at the big pasture in the morning. I’ll not be there. I’m going to Mesquite.”

When he came back into the room with Hilda, he asked:

“Didn’t Auntie get you any shoes when she ordered all them things from New York?”

“No. She just got clothes for Burchie—to go to Fort Worth, you know. I guess she got him shoes. Mine weren’t so bad then.” She sat down and thrust out her feet to put the reformed slippers on. The old man stared at those feet and frowned.

“Are those your best stockings, Pettie?”

“Well, these are a pair of my every-day ones,” Hilda said slowly.

“You put on your best ones, then.”

“But the best ones are a lot worser—about having holes in the feet, if that’s what you mean, Uncle Hank. I keep them for best because they’ve got the holes mostly where they don’t show.”

The old man held out a hand for the stockings which she pulled off and gave to him. He stood with one drawn over his big fist, shaking his head.

“Pettie, these stockings ain’t got any holes in the foot,” he said unexpectedly, and she saw that his eyes were twinkling. “Ain’t any feet to ’em to have holes in. All that’s left where feet was is just a bunch of fringe. You bring me the best you’ve got, and I’ll show you how my ma used to foot stockings sometimes for us children back in the Tennessee mountains.”

Hilda brought the best of Miss Valeria’s silk stockings. The lamp was trimmed, turned high, Uncle Hank’s spectacles were got out and adjusted—which was almost a ceremony in itself—and he opened the big housewife that contained his needles and thread and a queer steel thimble open at the end. He sighed a bit over the coarseness of his implements and the fineness of the material he was to work on.

“Ain’t got no heavier ones than these, have ye, Pettie?” he asked, and when she shook her head, “Oh, well—it’ll never be seen on a galloping hoss, and that’s sure what you are these days, honey.”

The stockings were spread out evenly, their tatters cut away, a foot formed on exactly the pattern you may find in some woven stockings, a good new sole cut from the stoutest part of another stocking sewed in. The leg was seamed down to a reasonable fit for Hilda, and finally the job was complete.

“There,” Hank laid his scissors by. “Might stand you in hand to know how to do that right—if you should ever have it to do, Pettie. My mother held that a woman that would fix over a stocking by just sewing it into a kind of a bag, with no real shaped foot, as I’ve seen done, was a slommick.”

“Oh, I’ll fix over all the rest of them, Uncle Hank, now that you’ve showed me the way. I can do it. I’ll take pattern by these,” she looked fondly at the neatly folded pair lying on the table. “I won’t just sew them up into bags and be a slommick.”

Through her mind drifted the vision of what a slommick might be like—a slidey creature, of the most slatternly, reprehensible “personal appearance,” and with a sort of elongated head, trailing hands that fumbled whatever they touched, dropped things and left them lying. Yes, as Shorty would say, she “savvied slommick, all right.”

“You’ll not have to fix any more of ’em, this time,” said Hank with decision. “I’m going to Mesquite to-morrow.”

“Oh, Uncle Hank—and you’ll get me some stockings? Maybe two pairs? I can do with two pairs—and these that you’ve fixed over so beautifully. Or”—suddenly remembering the money-eating, fire-spitting mortgages—“maybe I could get along with only one new pair.”

He smiled a little, and said:

“Have to have new shoes, too. And I bet you need frocks, and other things. Uh-huh, I see you do,” as he caught her eye. “All of ’em have to be tried on, so’s they’ll fit. Nothing for it but to take you in with me.”

“Oh, Uncle Hank—is beef up?” Hilda asked breathlessly, and he laughed out.

“Does happen to be up, honey. Also, I wouldn’t have to sell a steer to git you what you need. But if I did, and beef was down to half price—and it would take the price of a herd—I’d sell. Uncle Hank’s little girl needs a new set of harness, complete—and she’s going to have it, too.”