After that roping match, on the ranch of the Three Sorrows—a small island of human life and interests, surrounded on every side by a sea of grass whose fishes were cattle—year followed year until five had been added to the number of them, and Hilda was thirteen.

The carriage, now a sober, elderly vehicle, had carried Miss Val and Burchie many times as far as Mesquite on their journeyings to Fort Worth, for Miss Val—who was now frankly the invalid—found there at the sanitarium a system of baths and massage which she said helped her neuralgia very much. But it never helped it enough to let her live at the ranch more than a month or so at a time, and Burch she must have with her. She put him in a Fort Worth school and said she’d keep him under the doctor’s observation till he should be perfectly sound.

To anybody else’s notion but hers, he had been that for a long time. It appeared there had never been anything the matter with his hearing; anyhow, he was now a particularly well-grown boy for his years, still silent, and with that air he might have inherited from his father, or caught from Aunt Val, of being just a visitor at the ranch. He never seemed to belong to it—or it to him. Hardly any of the things Hilda cared most for were of interest to Burch.

Of course, he was off there in Fort Worth during the “Winter of the Big Snow,” that heart-breaking season which followed the blizzard that marooned Uncle Hank and Hilda on the Bar Thirteen. The Three Sorrows had been provided, as well as Uncle Hank could provide, against such a happening with stacks of the coarse laguna hay; but Hilda would never forget that time when, kept home from school by the weather, she tried to help with the poor weak cows that pawed at the frozen snow without being able to get through to anything they could eat, or licked it without being able to get anything they could drink. Uncle Hank said she worked like a little Trojan, and from that year she felt herself more and more increasingly his right hand.

So the brother to whom she wrote dutiful letters, whenever she wrote to Aunt Val, and who soon began to send her back short answers that were rather better written and spelled than her own, came to cut little figure in her life of work and play. At school there were companions of her own age to contend against, confide in—boys and girls who lived the ranch life. And there was always The-Boy-On-The-Train to remember. In all this time, Hilda had never forgotten him. He seemed more real in some ways than Burch or Aunt Val or any one or anything that had belonged to the old life. All else that concerned that time got dim and changed; he remained the one who was always just right—the one who could do no wrong.

But when there is a live boy, like Kenny Tazewell or Clarke Capadine, at hand to ride races with, how then? Does one forget the absent—at least while the hot blood is drumming in one’s ears, and every trick that Uncle Hank has taught is needed to keep the pony going straight, to stay on him and avoid dog-holes? We-ell, maybe so. But when the there-present boy wins, and isn’t very nice about it, and there might be some suspicion that he didn’t ride fairly, ah, then one recalls with pride and joy The-Boy-On-The-Train, the being without fault, the dweller in the fair mirage-land of memory, who could be nothing less than noble and generous!

He would never have ridden the faster pony. He would be incapable of crowding one in so close to the fence that it was pull up or be scraped off—and that, too, after treacherously offering that side of the road in all appearance of good faith. No, no! Far otherwise. He would have brought the proud-crested barb, or the milk-white palfrey swifter than the steeds of dawn, or the coal-black stallion eagle-winged, for his lady to ride. He would have helped her on, resigned the best place, and smiled when her mount outran his’n—oh, well, then, his.

The Marchbanks children had never come again to the Capadine ranch. Colonel Lee Marchbanks stayed in New Mexico. They all went into Hilda’s world of memory and tradition. The further edge of this world of tradition and memory melted into the world of books. And Hilda had got to be a great reader of books.

There had come to Texas with the Van Brunt furniture quite a library. Some of it was unpacked and filled the bookshelves in the living-room; when it overflowed these, a lot of it went into the little place they called the office; but there were still books in boxes in the cellar. The things Hilda loved best she read over and over; she knew pages of Marmion and Lady of the Lake by heart, not to mention her beloved ballads. Great musical, stirring lines from these were always jingling through her head when she played at home. Sometimes she went about saying them under her breath. Or—and this was a sort of fearful pleasure—saying some lines of her own that she more or less made up as she went along.

If you did that long enough, the things around you changed, kind of melted into a dream: the ranch house became a castle; Shorty and Missou’ and the others were retainers; old Sam Kee, in the kitchen, was a Swart Paynim—he made a very good Swart Paynim, indeed.

With one of Aunt Val’s cast-off dresses on, a veil arranged for the headdress of a castle lady, the dream thrived splendidly. At these times she instinctively dodged Uncle Hank and the boys as much as she could. It broke in dreadfully to have one of them sing out: “Hello, Hilda—playin’ lady?” It even hurt to have Uncle Hank look at her with absent fondness and call her “Pettie,” when it seemed he might almost have seen that she was the despairing lady of “the house of the Rhodes,” with bloody Edom o’ Gordon besieging her walls.

But one day, in the spring of the year she was thirteen, rummaging in the cellar, trying to pry open a heavy box of books, she made a wonderful find. Back of these boxes, concealed by them and forgotten, because they had stood untouched there for years, she discovered an opening in the earth wall—an unmistakable door. It was low, not very wide, unframed except by the earth-and-stone walls of the cellar side, made of rough, heavy planks marked with hieroglyphics of dust and draped mournfully with cobwebs; it had iron hinges like those on the stable door, and was closed only with a loop of leather and a big nail. Silent, unknown, unsuspected—a very gateway of mystery—all alone down there under the ground, this crude, sinister, little door stung Hilda’s imagination like a strange, threatening word out of another tongue, whispered in the dark.

Trembling, she pushed upon it. It gave inward creakingly. Utter blackness was beyond it. She flew up the cellar stairs to Sam Kee with a breathless demand for a candle. After some argument, the candle was secured and lighted. She hurried to the cellar and, with a heart that beat to suffocation, cautiously shoved open the door—her door—her discovery.

She entered, not without half-ecstatic tremors. It was an underground passage! She traversed twelve or fifteen feet of the narrow corridor, where earth showed between rough planking, and came to another door. This one sagged half-way open, revealing a fair-sized chamber, earth-walled also behind its planks, and with a heavily timbered ceiling, big beams in its corners and at intervals along the sides, and a window with a batten shutter opposite the entrance. She stood a moment, enraptured, the candle flame going up very straight and sickly in that unaired space. Then she went almost reverently across the floor of beaten earth, set down her candle and pulled at the rusty hasp of the shutter. It came back suddenly with a creak. Daylight streamed in—sunlight—checkered by a strong lattice of naked woodbine stems. Between these she peered. There was the spring, with the sheen dancing on its waters as it pulsed away into the asequia. She must be standing inside of the steep green mound by the willows, the “mountain” up which Burch had proposed to drive the new carriage. This window must pierce its slope, masked by the woodbine. She had in fact come upon the forgotten cyclone cellar of the ranch house. In a daze of delight, she looked about her.

“Oh, oh!” she whispered under her breath, then flew to bring in an old broom from the cellar outside, and with it some cloths; swept and wiped away the accumulated dust. Her mind was clamorous with plans. Rose Marie and Captain Snow would be the only companions she could have here, the only sharers of the secret whose discretion might be trusted; and the place must be made fit for the great white cat’s fastidious fancy, the doll’s cambric daintiness.

There was a big box for the table, a smaller one for a chair, and Burchie’s disused high-chair to prop the doll in. At one side was a shelf with some empty bottles and cans on it. These she replaced by an armload of her favorite books from the library. She made a game of this, though there was nobody in the house but stolid Sam Kee, who never asked any questions. It was delightful to pile up the things she wanted taken down, then scout and see that “the coast was clear,” catch them up and run with them, outwitting espionage, evading pursuit. When all was done she surveyed the chamber and its furnishings with satisfaction. Here was the place to read, to make up stories, to dream and act those she read or made up. In short, here was a new stage—secret, safe, solitary—on which the never-ending, always-changing drama might go forward. Here was innocent escape from the world about her, well-loved, comfortable, but too definite, too importunate to permit the dream—the blessed and beautiful dream—which would undoubtedly come true in such a place as this.

One sunny, blowy Sunday afternoon Hilda forsook the light of day and made her way through the dark passage into the cyclone cellar, her candle held high in one hand, the other carefully conveying a battered tray on which were some cakes and half a glass of jelly. On the box table lay a sort of costume into which she got, after she had set down tray and candle before the doll’s fixed stare.

The dress was her favorite of all those cast-offs of Miss Valeria’s, a changeable silk, shimmering from green to gold as the plain itself did when the buffalo grass was tall on it and the wind went over. There was a froth of lace and little bright-colored ribbon bows for trimming, exactly like the tossing bells of wild hollyhock or the phlox that bloomed in millions on that plain. Oh, it was a heavenly dress to wear when you were playing Flora MacDonald rowing Prince Charlie across the lake, or Katherine Douglass barring the door against the enemies of King Jamie—barring it with her arm, which they broke as they burst through!

To-day it was to be Flora MacDonald, and the asequia—the little irrigating ditch—was to be the “practicable water” for the scene. Hilda pulled the veil into place on her hair, swung the long trailing skirts smoothly down her slim little figure and slipped across to open the shutter behind the masking lattice of woodbine stems, her lips already moving, murmuring fragments of high converse, phrases of faith, loyalty, gratitude, renunciation. Her big black eyes swam full, misty with the vision. She had stepped—as always on entering the cyclone cellar—from Texas soil into the realm of romance.

The open shutter let in the dancing light reflected from the water, and all checkered with the beautiful thatch of tender green leaves that the woodbine was sprouting. Without coming to earth at all, Hilda felt the joy of it. Leaning ardently forward, she rustled the woodbine stems, whereupon some one, stooping to drink at the spring just outside her casement, started violently, sprang half erect, whirled and stood staring directly into her face.

A fugitive! Even to Hilda the fact spoke plain. She—expecting to see, with the vision of fancy, exactly what now confronted her in the flesh—was not greatly startled. The young fellow stood looking at her, his head, with its fair hair flung up, the blue eyes full of terror. While she gazed at him, lips apart, unable to emerge from her spell of fantasy, he reached out vaguely to the dusty, big hat that lay beside him on the grass, got quite to his feet and, with a glance behind him, came up to the woodbine lattice. He laid a shaking hand upon it, peering through at her face, anxiously, doubtfully—and began with a sort of faltering haste:

“Can I—could I get—in there? Can you hide me? They’re close after me!”

“They” had been “close after” pretty much everybody in Hilda’s cyclone-cellar world for a long time now. He looked the part, and this was the one thing he could have said without jarring the dream, without so much as brushing the down from the tip of its rainbow wing. At the words, she sank back gratefully into the realm of the fabulous, and he receded from the world of reality to follow her there.

“Why, yes,—your—” she hesitated an instant. “Your Majesty,” she whispered, just above her breath.

Perhaps he was not quite sure of the word; perhaps he was too perturbed to notice such a detail.

“Quick!” he urged; “show me how to get in there.”

Something about his face challenged and puzzled her. There was a haunting resemblance about the look of his eyes. Yet all realities strove vainly for more than vague recognition now. She was in a sort of rapture as she leaned forward and whispered:

“Stay for me; I will not fail you.” Then, to make sure: “I’m coming. I’ll bring you in here.”

She gathered up her draperies and ran. The daylight world of the Three Sorrows had never seen those trailing, faded splendors, ravished from Aunt Val’s cast-offs; but haste was indicated. A moment later, to the young fellow at the spring, hanging doubtfully on his heel, a hunted glance over his shoulder, preparing for flight, there came skimming across the grass a quaint figure. The dress of Hilda’s contriving trailed behind her flying feet, the tangle of mist-fine dark curls was half covered by a coiffing veil, worn in the manner of castle ladies as they appear in the frontispieces of feudal romances. The fugitive looked in wonder. She ran to him and took his hand and pulled him toward the house. He held back a little, but she urged vehemently:

“You’ll have to come right through here. It’s the only way.”

In the kitchen door, at sight of the Chinese cook, the young fellow checked wildly. Hilda gripped his hand in both hers, and dropped momentarily out of her part to explain:

“It’s only Sam Kee. He doesn’t count. He never tells on me—do you, Sam?”

The Chinaman looked placidly about eighteen inches over their heads, smiled, and seemed to imply that the room was empty except for himself. There was something reassuring in this attitude, and Hilda’s chance guest followed her quickly down the cellar steps, behind the pile of boxes, and through the passage that led to the cyclone chamber.

“Are you—are you an-hungered?” she asked, with a sort of half-tentative hardihood.

He dropped down on the box seat and eyed the food with an air so exactly suited to his rÔle that she took heart and fell into the familiar phraseology:

“Here is the humble meal I have provided. If you will rest and refresh yourself, I’ll, I’ll—”

Her voice trailed a bit at last. The newcomer was looking at her with so sharp an inquisition that it sent a vague pang through her heart.

“Yes,” he said slowly, “I’m hungry.” The blue eyes went swiftly over the items on the cracker-box table. Under that glance they seemed to diminish somewhat in bulk and decline in nourishing quality. Hilda became acutely aware of the realness of his trouble, the actual dust on his clothes, the parched, cracked lips, the exhaustion and distress of his whole young figure.

“I can get something more,” she said hurriedly. “I can make Sam Kee give me a glass of milk and some bread, and, I guess, some—some—chicken.”

“Wait—” He caught her as she passed, examining her face with that bluntly inquiring, suspicious gaze. “Can you get the things without anybody else knowing? You wouldn’t tell any one else—”

“Oh,” cried Hilda, aghast. “Betray you? No, no, no—never—of course not!”

Slowly, as though still half uncertain, he released her. She turned and almost ran through the familiar dark passage. In her breast choking sympathy reproached the triumphant delight of having her play come true. And there hung, as it were, on the heels of these swifter emotions, a slow, uncomprehending sense of hurt at the fugitive’s lack of trust in her.

Negotiations with Sam Kee were brief, for Hilda had that within her which reckoned with no refusal. It seemed to her but a moment that she was gone, yet she found that her guest had eaten the last crumb of the little cakes. He fell ravenously upon the more substantial food she brought back.

“Sam Kee’s making a cup of coffee,” said Hilda.

The young fellow nodded his head. When he had finished the food, he looked across at her and said:

“I guess I’ve got to tell you about myself.”

“You needn’t,” Hilda maintained loyally.

He sat for a while, looking away, a clenched hand lying on his knee. Twice he drew in his breath to speak, and turned his head, without ever quite bringing his gaze around to hers. Suddenly he got up and went to the window. He stood there, plucking at the vine leaves. Her big black eyes followed him; they noted that bright hair—dusty now, sweat-darkened in streaks, yet such as a prince ought to have; they dwelt on the outlines of his tired figure, rimmed with its halo of light; gallant, victorious, yet in danger, needing her—she could read all that into it. He whirled abruptly and came toward her.

“Suppose they told you I’d killed a man,” he said.

There was an awful silence in the close little room. Hilda was as one who comes upon a dizzying abyss, horrible, chaotic, yawning to swallow both dream and reality. But she was made of heroic stuff. In spirit she approached the edge and looked down, wincing but resolute and clinging to the hand of her hero.

It was terrible; why, yes, to be sure it was terrible. But, oh, it had a gorgeous thrill to it! What was the use of hiding a fugitive and enduring “all” for his sake if he hadn’t committed some dreadful deed—several of them, for that matter? Richard Coeur de Lion slew men in heaps and piles; so did King Harold. Why, all the kings and princes did, and the splendid warriors, in those old times. Shorty knew fellows that had killed their man, and Buster and the others, too; and they said they were good boys just the same. More than once there had been a man at the Three Sorrows table, or sequestered in the Three Sorrows bunk house, about whom it had been an open secret that he was “on the dodge” because of a shooting scrape. If you came right down to it, Uncle Hank himself had lent the last one a horse and money. These considerations did not decide Hilda’s course. She was for her fugitive anyhow, right or wrong, and whatever or whoever might have been against him. But there was a certain pleasure in realizing her immediate public opinion to be with her. Aloud, she said:

“How—why—how did you know to come to me?”

He answered, curiously, with another question, coming slowly back and sitting down again:

“This is the Three Sorrows ranch, isn’t it?”

“Yes.”

“I thought it was, but I didn’t dare to ride up and ask.” Then, after a moment’s pause, in which he studied her, “You must be Hilda Van Brunt.”

“I am Hilda.”

“Thank God. I’m all right, then.”

“Yes,” said Hilda. “I’ll take care of you.”

“Is your father in the house? Can you bring him down here?”

They were sitting on opposite sides of the box table, the candle between them sending up its flame very tall and straight and steady. When the boy said this Hilda’s little peaked face looked suddenly white, because the eyes became bigger and darker with the dilation of their pupils. She locked her hands hard together in her lap to keep from sobbing outright in her excitement. She reminded herself of the dust on his clothes, the feeling of his hand when she had taken it to drag him past Sam Kee. There was nothing to be so dreadfully frightened about. After a long time—the boy watching her, puzzled and uneasy—she got her voice under control.

“Didn’t you know my father was dead?” she asked, very low. “He was killed in a roundup seven years ago, and there’s nobody to look after my brother and me and the ranch—and even Aunt Val—but Uncle Hank.”

The newcomer sat perfectly still a moment, staring blankly. Slowly the bright head went down on his arms, his shoulders began to heave.

Hilda gazed with an agony of repressed pity at that prone, boyish head. The young fellow seemed to her a man, and his grief a thing to shake the foundations. Her hand longed to steal out and touch him, but she drew it back. She looked about the dark little plank-walled chamber, lit by its one candle. With a start of something so alien that it was almost distaste, her eye encountered Rose Marie’s saucy, smiling beauty over among the shadows of one corner. Yet the big, somber burden of Hilda’s yearning sympathy was played upon, shot through and through and lightened by delectable, rosy shafts. It was so very real; it was so very dear to be of use—to be of great use. With instinctive tact she took no notice of her guest’s outburst, but crept away to take the dishes to Sam Kee. Returning, she gave considerate warning with a little fumble at the inner door, and when she entered caught up Rose Marie and thrust her out of sight (a gesture as significant in its way as, in an earlier day, was the investing of the Roman lad with the toga virilis) this was no affair for dolls. She edged into the seat across from the fugitive. Presently he raised his head and spoke:

“Hilda” (somehow his use of her name startled her), “those men are after me—if they get their hands on me—I guess they’ll hang me.”

“Oh,” breathed Hilda, and the dream began to draw away.

“I remembered that Three Sorrows was right over here in Lame Jones County”—yes, that’s just what he said: “I remembered that the Three Sorrows was right over here in Lame Jones County,” and Hilda’s eyes grew bigger as she gazed at him. Her breath began to come short.

“You’re—” she whispered.

But he went on, not heeding, “I knew if I could get here, I’d be safe.”

Then Hilda cried out:

“You’re The-Boy-On-The-Train!”