Hilda sat on the floor in the hall, Burchie beside her. She was still a thin little thing; and though she had now come into the growing age—that period so called out of all the years it takes us to reach our full bulk and stature, eight-year-old Hilda had as yet not accomplished much of its work. She perched there with her slim legs drawn up so far that the pointed chin almost rested upon her knees. The gaze of the big, unwinking eyes was on the open doorway of the parlor.

A child’s world is a strange place, not by any means the world of the adults about it. To the infant—viewing all matters from another point—a table is a serious and interesting piece of furniture, with things upon its top that you cannot see; a chair, a somewhat less doubtful structure, which you sometimes climb, if you can, thereafter to sit upon it with your insufficient legs dangling. To it—even to a child of Hilda’s age—that which immediately surrounds it is life—is the world; the persons of its household and its social circle make up humanity; the laws it there meets seem to its feebleness fixed as those of the Medes and Persians. Thus or so say the customs or decide the grown-ups—the infallible ones; it is well or grievous, but you cannot help it; you have no influence, much less real power, to change or to defy.

To Hilda, sitting quietly there on the floor, the world was a great level plain, inhabited not so much by mankind as by cattle. The capital of this realm was Home—not merely the Three Sorrows ranchhouse as it had been in her father’s time, but the kind of home that Uncle Hank meant when he promised that dying father that the children should always have one. There are persons who spread around them this atmosphere of security against the jars and offenses of life, of safe comfort amid its loneliness or hostility; rich, selfless natures that dispel, as a flower its perfume, the sense of home. Hank, tall, bearded, deep-voiced, so much man in all his attributes, yet carried it with him. He served it at the tail of a chuck wagon or in the one-night cow camp. One could even imagine him bringing it into the cold and unhopeful air of a palace.

“Yes, we’ve got debts to pay and obligations to meet, and it’s goin’ to be close work for a spell,” he had said to Miss Valeria, when he talked matters over with the helpless, dismayed woman. “But there’s one thing sure, we’re a-goin’ to have a home for these children here in the meantime.”

His first move was to build the long-delayed messhouse for the boys; his next to send away for a good Chinese cook. Thus came to them Sam Kee, elderly, silent, with all the best traits of his race; Sam Kee who made a garden and raised such vegetables as had never been dreamed of on the ranch, who would lay aside his usual reserve and scold shrilly to get the right cows kept in the right pasture for the making of butter and cottage cheese. Sam Kee had become the corner stone of domestic comfort at the Sorrows, where now the little family ate alone, Uncle Hank at the foot of the table, Miss Valeria at the head, while the boys had a cook of their own.

To be sure there sat enthroned, away in Chicago or Kansas City, a vague power known as The Price of Beef. Inexorable, unapproachable, arbitrary, it ruled this mortal life. To it all questions of improvement in one’s material well-being were referred. By it all earthly hopes, all ambitions and vanities, stood or fell. You needed shoes or stockings? You longed for piano lessons, or you had set your fancy upon a pink sash or a certain picture book? Well, if beef were “up” you probably got—upon proper representation—the object of your desire. But if beef were “down”—then, in the matter of piano lessons, pink sash, or picture book, you did without; and so far as shoes and stockings were concerned, you just continued along with those you had. For Uncle Hank had made it plain to Hilda that the mark of all moral and mental inferiority—I had almost said degradation—was to sell beef when it was “down.”

When Henry T. Pearsall was appointed guardian for the children of Charles Van Brunt, deceased, the administrator of their estate, when he entered upon the familiar task of making one dollar do the work of two, eking out money for the interest on mortgages, keeping things running until, as he phrased it, “he could sorter get his feet under him,” this Price of Beef ruled him too.

But Miss Valeria Van Brunt had the strength of the weak, and Hilda heard with only a passing sort of surprise that Uncle Hank would, if necessary, even sell beef when it was down to send her and Burchie to Fort Worth. It seemed the crime was justifiable when something was the matter with your ears.

For after Charley was gone, the monotony and the crudeness of ranch life seemed finally to become unbearable to Miss Val. She came to Pearsall almost in tears, declaring that Burch had some sort of ailment which affected his hearing and that he ought to have a specialist’s care and treatment at a sanitarium. Uncle Hank was bewildered.

“Something the matter with the boy’s hearing? What makes you think so, Miss Valery?”

“Oh, I’m quite sure of it. Mr. Pearsall, you must have noticed that he’s not talking as he ought. When he wants anything, he just points to it. I have to make him speak.”

“But when he does talk—it’s all right. I never heard a young ’un of his age speak so plain, I believe.”

“That’s not the question. Mrs. Silcott says,” she was quoting the lady from Ohio now, “that her cousin had a little boy—or maybe it was a little girl—who was just the same, and that they let it run on till nothing could be done. The hearing was actually lost. The child became deaf and—finally dumb. This must be attended to, Mr. Pearsall, and at once.”

Uncle Hank gave the little lady a long, puzzled look. But no one could argue with Miss Valeria Van Brunt when her mind was made up; he had found that out. After a while he said slowly:

“Well, ma’am, I’ll get the money together just as soon as I possibly can. If you feel that-away about it—I guess the money’ll have to come.”

Then he had added that statement about selling beef even though it were down. He didn’t have to do it that time, because he got a good chance to make a trade with McGregor. Yet the fact remained that he would have. He would even have put a mortgage on—and a mortgage must be an exceedingly desperate undertaking, for he looked that way when he said it.

So Aunt Val and Burchie were to go to Fort Worth to a sanitarium there which some one had recommended. There had been great preparations in the past weeks, clothing ordered from New York, and this afternoon Aunt Val was entertaining at tea some ladies from the C Bar C and the McGregor ranch. She had told Hilda that, for the occasion, she might put on Burchie one of the new suits that had arrived, adding:

“And do try to make yourself look nice, Hildegarde. I’m afraid you’re a very untidy little girl. Wash carefully. Wash brother carefully, and pick out a new, plain dress—white linen will be best.”

Good thing Aunt Val asked for white linen. It was about the only frock Hilda had that would have passed muster, and Miss Valeria was just as apt to have suggested something that had been worn out and outgrown long ago. If Hilda could have got the words together to say it, her statement would have been that the mere surface of things made altogether too much difference to her aunt—that with her the serious question was, not what was inside your head, but how was the hair on that head combed and smoothed up, how well the face on its front, the ears that ornamented its sides, kept washed? Always and always the thing you said to Aunt Val was of much less importance than the way you said it.

Having listened to a jerky sermon as to what would be polite to say to the visiting ladies, Hilda had decided that silence was the wise policy, so she had retreated as far as the hall with Burchie. She might not speak, but she couldn’t help hearing, and these tea-ing ladies—and in particular that friend of Mrs. Capadine’s from Ohio—had offended her deeply. They sat in the parlor, while here in the hall she played with Burchie, rounding up for his amusement cattle of twigs in pastures marked off by the pattern on the rug. No doubt the ladies looked at her and thought her a good child. They would have been startled to know that much of their talk was judged—and condemned—by the active brain beneath the damp, carefully smoothed down thatch of dark curls.

Burch refused to be interested in the roundup of twigs. He made one of his silent demands for the building blocks that he loved to set up and tear down, set up and tear down again. They were on the shelves on the other side of the living-room. As Hilda was slipping through to get them, her aunt stopped her.

“What is it, Hilda?”

“I only wanted to get Burchie’s blocks. He doesn’t care to play roundup.”

“And you do?” Stout Mrs. Capadine reached out a hand, and when Hilda stopped at her knee to say politely that she did, “Well, I expect you’ll be the ranchwoman of the family, then—a regular little cattle queen.”

“Uncle Hank’s already taught me to ride pretty well,” Hilda told her seriously. “I have to grow a little taller, and my arms have to be longer, before I can learn to rope.”

Once more back with Burchie and the play on the floor, she heard the Ohio lady caution, laughing:

“Take care. Little pitchers have long ears, you know.” And Mrs. Capadine lowered her voice away down when she next spoke.

“Well, when Mr. Capadine told me that Lee Marchbanks had applied for the guardianship of the children, I didn’t know but you’d asked him to act in that capacity, Miss Van Brunt; but I see that your arrangement with the present incumbent still stands.”

“Act in that capacity” was a little beyond Hilda. She had no doubt that Colonel Lee Marchbanks could do it; and “present incumbent” was surely something disagreeable; but her uneasy mind settled on the question—what children the Colonel might wish to be guardian of.

“No,” Aunt Val was speaking in her most New York voice, very languid, “I didn’t write to Colonel Marchbanks; he wrote to me. This man Pearsall is—er—well-meaning, of course, but I can’t help feeling that an educated person, a gentleman, such as Colonel Marchbanks seems to be, might be a more fortunate selection.”

“This man Pearsall!” They were talking about Uncle Hank. Then the children they spoke of were herself and Burchie. Mechanically, Hilda pushed the blocks about to keep Burch quiet, listening with all her ears now, while in the room there the talk went from bad to worse, till finally Miss Valeria spoke of Uncle Hank as uncouth. Hilda hadn’t much idea as to what that might mean; but it sounded bad.

Justice was not to be had here; but there was a theater which she maintained in her child’s mind, where all these elbowing and shoving assertions and commands—often both vague and contradictory—that Aunt Val put on people were turned right around and Hilda’s own idea of fair play and human satisfaction had the say. She herself was the character that adorned and ruled that stage, but not in any such guise as Hilda’s friends would have recognized. This was a presence of lofty stature, and of a countenance and glance insupportable to evil-doers—a creature called forth by the helpless child fancy oftener than grown-ups suppose. For some reason whose explanation I will leave to others, it spoke always in shrill falsetto, that high sing-song which is the voice of the Chinese actor. But it never had to speak more than once. Not only people, but things and conditions, hustled to do its bidding.

In there—right back in that parlor—Aunt Val, seated among her visiting ladies, had said that Uncle Hank used bad grammar! And the lady from Ohio had agreed that he was ignorant, though good-hearted. The big black eyes yet flashed; Hilda retired to her mental theater and hastily set its stage as the ranchhouse parlor, dragging onto it Miss Val herself, the visiting ladies from their several ranches, and the pert outsider from Ohio. On chairs of unworthiness there she stuck the offenders. To them she saw enter this big, haughty, terrifying other self of hers. It came swishing through the room, about seven feet tall, irreproachably clean of countenance, teeth and finger-nails, with conquering eyes and a paralyzingly correct toilet. Often it never spoke at all; merely froze the guilty ones into silence with one glance as it passed; but this was a time for plain speaking.

Uncle Hank was not ignorant! Ignorant, yourself, Miss or Madam Ohio! Could it be possible that she, Hilda, alone of them all was aware that he knew more than anybody else in the world? Why, you starched-up lady with your gold spectacles and shiny slippers, it would need a lifetime’s toil for you to come into half his stored wisdom concerning coyotes and why they howl; touching prairie dogs, wild mustangs, cactus, jack rabbits, trail-herds, boggy fords, relating to “when we were down on the Pecos,” or “one spring on the Canadian,” or, “when cows stampede.” Uncle Hank was beautiful too. No one living had such eyes as those blue ones of his; his smile was as the very rays of the sun; his voice; his touch—! Hilda knew that sometimes children had to get along without relatives and without parents; but that any little girl could possibly face existence without some sort of Uncle Hank was beyond her powers of belief. Supposing that she—even in her own proper and insignificant person—should lead these glib scoffers to Uncle Hank’s trunk, lift the lid and show them where his Sunday suit lay? If that did not convict them of shallow judgments, surely the bottle of cologne would do the trick. It was imported, so Uncle Hank said; and to Hilda’s thinking its possession was better than a patent of nobility.

Hilda’s secret court of justice and the visit came to an end about the same time. The ladies, who never knew what they’d been through in the little girl’s mind, came out into the hall; the buckboard that was to carry two of them, the ponies for the others, were at the door. Hilda rose, made her bow and said her good-bys in that queer, artificial tone that pleased her aunt. Burchie had stood solid on his two feet; not a word out of him; just a pink fist up, methodically wiping off kisses—and Aunt Val let him. She and the ladies even exchanged pitying glances over the top of his head. But Hilda knew that Burch heard all they said perfectly, and could have talked well enough if he’d wanted to—and surely Aunt Val knew it. Grown-ups—all but Uncle Hank—were dreadfully puzzling. Finally Hilda had led little brother away, given him his bread and milk, put him to bed, and now had come back to her evening perch on the door-stone where she always watched for Uncle Hank.

While she sat there turning over these recollections in her mind, the warm gold had faded to delicate ashes-of-roses. The light waned with infinite gentleness and tenderness. A great spirit of quietness sighed across the open land, enfolding the few tiny evening sounds that began to make themselves heard. Her mind wandered from the questions she was going to ask Uncle Hank. It was funny about those little brown owls that sit up at the mouths of prairie-dog holes; how they will turn their heads to watch you as you walk around them, and keep right on turning, until, if you’d walk around them often enough, they would wring their little heads right off. Oh, yes, they will. Indeed and truly. Shorty had seen ’em, mor’n once.

A cooler air blew in from the southwest. The shine had gone from the window panes. A cricket chirped close at hand, and, without having consciously heard it, the child momentarily glanced that way. Then back to her vigil and her reflections.

It was funny about a dogie. It was funny, and it was sad, too, that a dogie—

Suddenly in the growing dimness, far out on the Ojo Bravo trail, a tiny speck began to vibrate. To the untutored gaze, it might well have been a jack-rabbit or a coyote, or even an idly cruising tumbleweed, but to the eyes that were watching it now, full of eager love, already deeply versed in plainscraft, that speck was instantly recognized as Uncle Hank on Buckskin. Aunt Val and the ladies who had been visiting her; the little brown owls who twisted off their own heads; the dogies, those forlorn orphans of the range, whose affairs had barely swum over the verge of her mental horizon—all were thrust headlong into the rag-bag of oblivion. The little feet struck the ground with a sharp spat; lightly as a blown feather Hilda was off, running down the trail.

That was approaching toward which the twenty-four hours so inevitably swung. The vibrating speck came nearer and nearer and resolved itself into a most knowing-looking buckskin pony carrying a tall man clad in the usual dress of the cowpuncher. Galloping horseman and running child continued to approach each other. They hailed simultaneously.

“Hi, Pettie!”

“Oh, Uncle Hank!”

Buckskin was checked; the grizzled head leaned far forward; one foot in its cowboy boot was lowered from the stirrup; Hilda’s was planted on it; the small brown hand caught firmly in the big, strong one; and the child swung up in front of the old man. The pony, as he felt the additional weight settle into place, always started soberly on toward the ranch house.

The regular thing after that was for the two on Buckskin to bring forward the record of history from the point where it had been dropped—when they separated in the morning—to the present moment.

Questions and answers usually alternated. The day’s happenings were tallied over. By one and by the other, possibilities were submitted and gravely passed upon, information volunteered, incidents recounted seriously, yet in tolerant and hopeful spirit, the tousled black head leaning against the blue flannel shirt. Hilda was the putter of questions. Uncle Hank the answerer, the source of all wisdom. This evening she was scarcely up and settled before she began:

“Uncle Hank, when papa died, did Fayte Marchbanks’ papa want to be our guardian—Burchie’s and mine?” She leaned her head back against the blue flannel shirt and tried to look at Uncle Hank over her forehead. His beard was a good deal in the way. She couldn’t see much.

“Now who in time would ’a’ told you anything about that?” He was out of patience—though not with her. It encouraged her to proceed.

“But he did?”

“I reckon he did, Pettie.”

“But he can’t—he can’t ever—could he, Uncle Hank?”

“No!” Hilda loved Uncle Hank’s voice when it was full and grave like that; it was so satisfying; it settled things; it gave her little thrills all down her spine. He went on. “Your pa left you to me—in a manner of speaking. Plenty witnesses. I—”

“Oh, Uncle Hank, I’m a witness,” a quick rush of tears in the black eyes. “I heard him say it, Uncle Hank. I heard you promise. It made me—” No use to begin that—she never could tell the old man how it made her feel toward him. So she finished softly, “I’m a witness.”

“So you would be,” Hank agreed. “But there was no need to call on you for that, Pettie. I did name it to Miss Valery when she come to me speaking of Lee Marchbanks having applied; I told her same as I told the judge when I took out my papers. It’s nothing for a child like you to pester her little head about.” But the mention of Aunt Val brought back all Hilda’s bitterness.

“Well, I think it was mean for a man to want to do that—want to be our guardian, I mean—when you’re it,” she said.

“Sho! I wouldn’t talk that-away about some one you never seen—nor me either, for that matter. It chances I’ve never laid eyes on Colonel Lee Marchbanks; but from what I hear, he’s all right.”

“Well, he’s Fayte Marchbanks’ papa, and I don’t like Fayte a bit. Fayte said the Three Sorrows ranch belonged to him—if he had his rights. Is that the reason his papa wanted to be our guardian?”

“Now see here, don’t you fix up a story and fit it onto the other feller without by-your-leave. That ain’t fair. I expect Lee Marchbanks does wish his first wife’s father hadn’t sold the Sorrers out of the family, but too much thinkin’ about what the other feller’s thinkin’ has made a lot of trouble in this world before now. Let it go at what he done. And he done no more than to ask appointment as guardeen—and I guess he had your Aunt Val’s permission for that. You couldn’t understand the ins and outs of it now.”

“Mrs. Capadine said he wanted control of the property—what’s control, Uncle Hank? And she said it was natural. I don’t think she ought to have said that. And they all talked about minor children, the estates being wasted before they came of age. Is a ranch an estate, Uncle Hank? What’s of age—am I of age?”

Hank chuckled and shook the thin little shoulder softly. “You’ve asked me so many questions I ain’t a-goin’ to answer nary one of them,” he said. “Them ladies were talking general and wide-flung, Pettie. They don’t mean to throw off on your Uncle Hank none.”

But Hilda knew of something that was not general and wide-flung, that applied directly to him.

“What does uncouth, mean, Uncle Hank?” she asked.

“Now, you ask me what I can tell you,” he returned genially. “That there was a great word with my mother, back in the Tennessee Mountains. When we young ’uns rampaged about so far, she’d use it on us. If we raced up to the table and commenced filling our mouths too full before we got good settled in our chairs, she’d tell us not to be uncouth and make us lay down knife and fork and set for a spell.”

“I wish you’d do that way, too, Uncle Hank. You just correct me if I’m ever uncouth. I’m sure you never are.”

Hilda thought she was very diplomatic to put it that way, but she was a little startled to feel the broad blue-flannel chest against which her head leaned lifted by a silent chuckle, and to have Uncle Hank echo:

“Uncouth—I bet your Aunt Valery thinks so—and says so! Why not? Way I talk must sound heathenish to a New York lady.”

“Well, I like the way you talk,” the little girl held to her point.

“That’s right,” Hank agreed. “You like it—for me; don’t you foller it. You’re to grow up a nice lady, and talk dictionary, like your Aunt Valery does. When you folks first come here, I tried to brush up a little; when your pa left you to me, I shore thought I’d straighten up my language; but it couldn’t be did. I’ve gave it up. I’ve done gave it up. I’d look a bigger fool trying to talk New York fashion than what I do using the lingo that I was raised on and learned in six weeks of an Old Field Hollerin’ school back in the Tennessee mountains. A hollerin’ school?” as Hilda looked puzzled. “We-e-ell, some calls it a yelpin’ school. It’s a school where all the young ’uns sits on benches and hollers their lessons. The school teacher—be it man or woman—walks up and down between them benches to see that the scholars mind their books, and don’t leave off studying; and the feller that hollers his lesson loudest is the best scholar—see, honey? That’s what it is.”

“I should think it would make an awful noise, Uncle Hank.”

“It does, that. You can hear one of them yelpin’ schools for nigh a mile.”

“But—I should think you couldn’t learn anything—on account of the noise,” the little girl went on.

“You got to learn,” Hank said. “Teacher cuffs you side o’ the head if you don’t. You can get used to most any way of doing things, Pettie. I got as far as long division, in the cipherin’, and read ’way into the Bible—taking all the hard words as they come. Then my pa died off, of lung fever,—pneumonia they call it now—and I had to go home and run the farm for my mother. We hadn’t got to grammer yet. Don’t know if the teacher knew it himself. So you see that left me with just the English language to use, and after I come to Texas I picked up the Texas language that a man uses workin’ cattle.”

“Well, you can run a ranch ’most better than anybody, and Shorty and all the boys say so.”

“Yes, your Uncle Hank can run a ranch.”

“Well—you can teach me that—you can teach me to run a ranch.”

“Why, yes. Reckon I can.”

“Well, I can ride some now, can’t I? And I’m not afraid—very bad—any more. I’m going to be lots of help to you, Uncle Hank, aren’t I?”

“Lots of help,” the man repeated softly.

“When Aunt Val goes to Fort Worth, there’ll be just you and me to run the Three Sorrows ranch, won’t there? And you’ll teach me all the time—”

“Outside of school and your books, Pettie. Outside of them, we’ll be full pardners. You and me’ll run this ranch.” And he swung her down on the door-stone.