Pearse came on Sunday. That was great luck. Great luck, too, that Uncle Hank should have happened to be at the house when the sheriff rode in with his posse. He might just as likely have been out somewhere on the range; for though he tried to keep Sunday on the Three Sorrows, where the business of life deals with living creatures—cattle—there will be acts of necessity and mercy—the ox to be gotten out of the ditch, and that sort of thing. But he’d been there, and he’d saved the day, for her and for Pearse—though he didn’t know it himself. Then, as soon as he’d done so, Hilda did wish he’d go off to the Spring Creek pasture and leave her the place clear. Yes, she’d heartily wished that—and never noticed that it was the first time in all her life that Uncle Hank’s presence had, for any reason, been unwelcome. She had finally to take her chance, while he was in the house, to steal down to Pearse to tell him all about the sheriff and set his mind at rest.

“Well,” he said quietly, “if they’re thrown off the track for a little while, that ought to be enough. I didn’t do what they think I did. They’ll find the right man. It was this way, Hilda: I camped Friday night out toward Wild Horse canyon, with three men. I didn’t very much like their looks and they weren’t giving any names.”

“How did they look, Pearse? Describe them,” Hilda interrupted; and when he’d done so, they were identified in her mind as Fayte Marchbanks’s three Romero cousins. Some time during the night Pearse’s horse got away. He felt sure now that one of those three men must have taken off the hobbles and turned it loose, or more probably led it to some near-by place of hiding and picketed it on a short rope, for in the morning they all got out and helped him hunt for it, and that hadn’t been the way they acted the night before, by any means. Also they talked a great deal about feeling to blame for the loss of his mount and wanting to help him out. So they gave him a led pony that they had with them, explaining that it had a broken shoe and he’d better ride easy, turn in at the first ranch he came to which had a blacksmith’s outfit and get the pony re-shod. He did this, but fortunately before he’d told that ranchman his errand, the man offered him the information that a sheriff’s posse was out after cattle thieves and that, in lifting the cattle, these thieves had killed a man and stolen a pony with a broken shoe.

He saw the plot then, but it was too late to turn back. He rode all day Saturday, trying to push on to the Three Sorrows. Finally, Saturday night, he abandoned the pony whose broken shoe left a trail that the officers would follow, and in the morning had drifted in, across pastures, to the bank by the spring at the asequia, when he looked up and saw two black eyes staring at him right out of the side of a hill.

Hilda had brought down needles and thread and was doing her best to make a neat job of mending his coat while they talked.

“Where’s Burch?” Pearse asked suddenly, as they heard the thin, penetrating echo of Sam Kee’s gong from upstairs and Hilda got unwillingly to her feet. “He must be a good-sized boy by now. Think maybe you’d better tell him about me? He could help you, couldn’t he?”

“Burch is in Fort Worth with Aunt Val,” said Hilda, and was thrillingly glad it was so—that she, Hilda, alone, could do anything for the blessed Boy-On-The-Train. “Aunt Val’s the aunt I told you about, that came out after you people had left Denver. Papa sent for her to come to Texas with us. She doesn’t like it on the ranch. I must run now. Are you all right? I’ll bring you down some supper. Sam Kee will give it to me. Sam was splendid with the sheriff.”

As Hilda had expected, the Chinaman was willing enough to give her a good meal for her fugitive, but before she got it smuggled down to him she almost hated Uncle Hank for being so much in the way. There was the later adventure of stealing down with some bedding, and assuring Pearse that he’d be free of the house as soon as Uncle Hank left. He seemed deathly tired and almost careless of what might come if he could only rest.

That was Sunday night. And after Sunday—Monday comes. You can’t help it. It’s just that way. They string the days of the week together without any regard for people’s feelings—or even the necessities of the case. How could she go to school on Monday and leave Pearse there hidden in the cyclone cellar? Of course, Sam Kee would never tell; also, the Chinaman had furnished food enough to last through the day: But it was like parting soul from body to ride away from the Three Sorrows that morning, to turn her back on what might chance, to give up hours with her fugitive that might have been hers.

At school, Miss Belle found she had a strange Hilda in her classes. The banner pupil was inattentive; no statement seemed to get through to that mind, which her teacher knew to be usually so quick. A book before her, motionless, apparently scarcely breathing, Hilda sat at her desk, the image of a very studious little girl. But she did not use the slate and pencil that lay under her hand; she did not see the printed lines before her. What if the ranch house at the Three Sorrows should burn down while she was away? It was a stone house—but couldn’t stone houses burn? The things in them could, anyhow. What if Sam Kee fell suddenly ill and, in his extremity, “confessed all” to Uncle Hank? What if she, Hilda, were thrown from her pony on the way home and broke a leg—no, turned an ankle—that was more like the girls in stories—well, what if she turned an ankle and lay helpless and couldn’t get down to see after Pearse? What would become of him?

Her mind flew wildly to her aunt. If Miss Val had been at home would she have dared to trust her with Pearse’s secret? Aunt Val hadn’t met Mr. and Mrs. Masters, but they were her sort of people; she would think that a boy brought up as Pearse had been couldn’t be a cattle thief. Well—Uncle Hank would think so too if he knew Pearse. But there was that way Pearse had looked when he heard Uncle Hank’s name. She tried to forget it. It was too bad when people you were so fond of wouldn’t like each other.

And of course it had to be that afternoon that visitors came to the school. It was only Mrs. Capadine and the new Capadine foreman’s wife; but Miss Belle wanted to show off the school, so she called on Hilda Van Brunt, as she always did at such times. And Hilda disgraced herself. Worse—she disgraced Miss Belle and the school. Three times she said “I don’t know,” and one of those times the question was such that any baby would have known the answer. Miss Belle was asking it that way to make it easy.

As a last resort Hilda’s teacher called on her to recite—“speak a piece” they called it when they mentioned it on the playground. You’d think that was the thing she could do in her sleep. She loved Friday afternoons because of the speaking. She now, standing in front of them all, dashed nervously into:

Then, suddenly, her mind jumped three miles and a half. What was Pearse doing? Had they found him? She came back, with a jerk, to the schoolroom, looked down at the faces of her schoolmates as they sat at their desks, arms folded, listening; at the plump, expectant ladies in the chairs. Then she repeated her statement about the stag. Three times she said it; that stag, if he was full the first time, must have been quite dangerously filled when she got to the next line—

Well, even then it would have been all right; she might have gone on from there. But there was a snicker all over the room, and she realized that she had said “Ronan’s mill.” Even the visiting ladies were laughing at her. She burst into tears and sat down, hiding her face in her arms on the desk top. She heard Miss Belle—Miss Belle, angry and mortified—telling her that she would have to stay after school!

Nothing to do about that. She just sat with her head on her desk and cried and cried. The company left. The other scholars all filed out—Miss Belle was letting them go a little early—Hilda heard them getting on their ponies, riding away. Then Miss Belle came and sat down in the seat beside her and put her arm around her, saying, more kindly:

“What’s the matter, Hilda? You’re not a bit like yourself to-day.”

“Oh, Miss Belle,” Hilda’s face, all swollen with tears, came up; she laid hold of the ruffle on Miss Belle’s shoulder with shaking fingers; “oh, Miss Belle—let me go home. I—I’ll do anything for you—if you’ll only let me go home—now.”

“Why, Hilda,” the teacher was only a big girl herself, “I believe you’re sick. Do you feel bad? Is that it?”

“I feel awful,” choked Hilda, and didn’t mean to be untruthful; but she knew afterwards how Miss Belle understood that. “If you’ll just let me go home, Miss Belle—it’ll be all right. Let me go, please.”

“In a minute.” Miss Belle got up and hurried to her desk and began writing something. She came back, folding it, asking anxiously, “Do you think you can stand the ride home, Hilda? I hate to send you alone. Want me to go with you? I will, if you need me. It’s out of my way, and I’ve written to Mr. Pearsall—but if you think you need me—”

“Oh, no, Miss Belle. I’m all right.” Hilda was on her feet, reaching for the note for Uncle Hank. “Yes’m, I can ride home all right. Oh—thank you, Miss Belle!”

“Well,” the teacher stood in the door watching the streaking figure of a little girl on a pony vanishing down the trail toward the Three Sorrows, “well—if that was any one else but Hilda Van Brunt I’d say she was putting it all on to get sent home. Maybe I needn’t have said three days—but Mr. Pearsall will know when he sees her.”

Oh, the confidence of the grown-up world that the youngsters they care for and look after are so easily understood! Hank, peering over his spectacles from Miss Belle’s little note, in which she said she found Hilda nervous and overexcitable, was afraid she wasn’t well, and thought maybe she’d better be kept home from school for two or three days’ rest, saw before him a Hilda whose eyes were big and almost wildly bright, whose cheeks flamed with unusual color. He laid two fingers against the hot curve of one.

“Feverish, Pettie?” he suggested.

“Aunt Val would say I had a temperature.” Hilda laughed a little excitedly. She hadn’t had to tell any story. All she needed to do was to keep still and let them fool themselves. She wouldn’t have done it for her own sake—but for her fugitive down there in the cyclone cellar anything was fair.

For five days Hilda stayed at home from school; and the boy, Pearse Masters, lay hid in the cyclone cellar. Hilda heard through the boys that Sheriff Daniels was still searching for him. It seemed the trap the Romero boys—if it was they—had laid with that broken-shoed pony still deceived the officers of the law. And Hilda’s behavior these days was queer enough to make Uncle Hank feel that she needed to be at home rather than in school. Most of the time when she was upstairs her heart was in her mouth, as the saying is, or anyhow so close to her mouth that it jumped right into it if some one spoke suddenly to her. The feeding of her captive, planning for his comfort, scouting for his safety, kept her at a nervous tension.

Pearse wasn’t nervous; he stood being cooped up in that little dark hole all day wonderfully. Whenever the coast was clear, and all the men off the place, she hurried down to him. She had scoured the office for checker and chess board, packs of Authors, a puzzle game or two that ought to be lying about somewhere. But mostly she and Pearse would just talk. To the girl of thirteen, this Boy-On-The-Train was, of course, different from the one she remembered as so wonderful, from the figure that had lived in her recollection all those years, having added to him a great many things that hardly belonged to a real, flesh-and-blood boy. He was a more experienced person than Hilda might have expected; he was as tall as a man, and better-looking, Hilda decided, than any one she had ever seen. He had an awfully interesting disposition; he could be merry and full of fun—but as hard as flint, too. He got that hard look in his eyes whenever she mentioned Uncle Hank. Well, then, the best way was not to talk about Uncle Hank to him at all. So they played checkers and told stories, and Pearse sent her upstairs for books she’d told him were on the shelves up there, but she hadn’t thought she’d like. And he read aloud to her from some of them—and, oh, she did love them!

But the one thing that was always right between Hilda and Pearse was their feeling for this beautiful plains country of the West. They both loved it! Like her, Pearse would rather ride than anything in the world. She was crazy to have him see the Three Sorrows in daylight; for you couldn’t get any idea of things at night, which was the only time he had to get out and move about; and, of course, he couldn’t have got any real view of the place that day he came in over it, afoot, half starved, parched with thirst, thinking only of some place to hide.

Finally, she did get Sam Kee to keep watch, when everybody else was out of the way, and she took Pearse out through the front door, all the way down the box-elder avenue to the trail, back again, around by way of the asequia, past the spring and the kitchen garden, to the corrals and stables, and out into the home pasture, where some of the best horses were.

He praised it all, as she had been so eager to hear him do. And Hilda had been anxious, without saying a word of the sort, to show him how well Uncle Hank managed and took care of them all. She was the more urgent about this, since she felt, down deep in her heart, that she didn’t actually want Pearse to meet Uncle Hank—this time. He’d come back some day, when all the tangles had been straightened out, and then—it was breathless, exciting to have him all her own guest, her responsibility—but, oh, she loved it!

And the long talks in the cyclone cellar, when he told her how he came to be adrift here in the western cattle country, heading for a job over on a New Mexico ranch—they were like chapters out of a story—a much more fascinating story than any in the books.

When he and Hilda saw each other last, he’d been a rich man’s son, just back from Europe, where he had been traveling with his parents. Now both Mr. and Mrs. Masters were dead.

“They weren’t my real parents, you know, Hilda,” he explained. “I was only an adopted son.”

Hilda’s heart gave a little bound; the wandering heir—the prince in disguise—was an adopted son. Pearse was going on:

“They had other children—grown and married. We’d traveled around a lot, in Italy and Switzerland. My tutor went with us. We lived in England a while, and a while in Italy; and one whole summer in Ireland; and in those places I went to school. Gee!” she heard a little gulp, “I was happy then. But Father got called home on some important business, and the next day after we landed in New York he was killed—in a street-car accident.”

“Papa was killed in a roundup,” murmured Hilda.

“Taken suddenly that way,” Pearse went on, “his business was left all at loose ends. Mother went to live with her married daughter. I felt I couldn’t go there—except to see her. They didn’t like me. Well—I guess they hated me.”

“Why would they?” Hilda bristled.

“Natural enough,” said Pearse easily. “I suppose they’d never wanted Father and Mother to adopt me—a poor little rat running away from an uncle that beat him.”

He laughed when he said that, but Hilda’s eyes were full of tears.

“Mother was sick when she went to Nelly’s house,” he went on. “She died within the month. I felt then that there wasn’t anything in the East for me. I belong to the West, Hilda—same as you do. Father had owned a share in that cattle company in New Mexico. He always said that he intended to leave it to me—or give it to me—but now I couldn’t find out a thing about how it was left. Nelly’s husband and George had everything in their hands. Anyhow, I felt sure that Father’s name would get me a job on the JIC, if I could get to them. I sold my watch and my books and some other things to get the railroad fare, depending on my own work to make good with the company, once I had the job. Had a fine opinion of myself, didn’t I?—a fellow that would let himself be taken in by such a bunch as the three I camped with that night, and get set afoot on the bald plain, with the sheriff after him—have to sneak in to a little girl like you for help! Hilda, you’re a lot better at cattle-country business than I am.”

“I’m not, Pearse. I just know the ways out here a little better. And I don’t know them so very well. Maybe, after all, you’ll let me go to Uncle Hank and ask—”

She stopped there. The blue eyes that had been laughing were suddenly full of anxiety; the voice, too, was anxious as Pearse said:

“You’ve been awfully good to me, Hilda—a regular brick in every way. Now you won’t go and spoil it all by—” He broke off, frowning. Hilda stared at him apprehensively. Finally, he said:

“I’ll make a bargain with you; no use pretending that I like the man you call Uncle Hank, or that I enjoy the idea of meeting him again. But I will some time. I’ll come back some time when I can walk up the front steps. I’d never have sneaked in here to hide if I’d known he was manager of the ranch; but as I have done so, and found you again, Hilda, and we’re such good friends—I’ll come back. Now let’s forget it.”

Words wouldn’t come. Hilda felt sure that if she’d tried to make them, tears would, instead. She just shook her head silently. That might have meant anything. Pearse seemed to think that it meant she agreed to what he said.

“All right;” the gruffness and rasp were out of his voice now. “Let’s just talk about ourselves, then. When I get over to New Mexico I’ll write back to you. You and I aren’t going to quarrel because of any one else—are we? We’ll always be great friends.”

“Oh, always—always!” That was what Hilda said, with all her heart—and wondered at herself a little for saying it. How could she be friends with one that wasn’t friends with Uncle Hank? Yet she must be—she must. And maybe, some day, when she and Pearse had been good friends for a long while, she’d get him to think differently about Hank—she’d be the peacemaker between them. Anyhow, there wasn’t much time now—she couldn’t waste any of it arguing with herself.

She got Shorty—Shorty was close-mouthed, and he seldom asked questions—to shoe her pony Sunday on his front feet, and the night upon which they had agreed that Pearse must get away she used the utmost of her influence with Sam Kee to get the necessary provision of food. She had a little money—her small hoard toward the joys of Christmas. It was eleven o’clock when she was able at last to slip down cellar and bring back her guest. They had a night of white moonlight for the enterprise, such a night as only the high plains country ever sees. It appeared that every object was as clearly visible as by day, yet all was subtly changed, flooded with mysterious beauty.

The low, spreading ranchhouse silently brooded its sleepers; but cottonwood leaves whispered loud in a light night breeze above the little stream that flashed its myriads of sparkles back to the moon. The Willow Nixies over by the tank were dimly visible, bowing down as at some magic affair of their own. Suddenly, upon the lonely stillness, a mocking bird gave voice. Up from deep, deep, ancient wells that song bubbled, liquid, divine. The boy stood a moment and hearkened, Hilda watching, breathless, furtive. He made an impatient gesture and moved on. Without a word, the Sunday horse was led out from where Hilda had tied him. She went to a peg on which hung a handsome saddle, bridle and saddlecloth.

“They were papa’s,” she said.

“All right,” Pearse spoke with some difficulty. In silence he bridled the pony, saddled him and made the bundle of provisions fast by means of the long tie-strings. “I’ll take them, Hilda. I’ve got to. But I’ll send them back as soon as I can.”

“Oh, no—” Hilda was beginning, but he interrupted her:

“What’ll you say to Mr. ——. What’ll you say to your Uncle Hank?”

She trembled a little at that, but answered with reasonable steadiness:

“I think I’ll ask him not to make me tell him anything about it. I never have asked Uncle Hank that, but he’ll do it for me. Here—you must have this.”

Her little brown hand was putting some coins into his, and he caught the fingers and closed them, distress, reluctance, in look and action.

“I hate to take your money,” he broke out.

Hilda’s face raised to his, white in the moonlight, seemed more than ever all eyes, as they slowly filled with tears. The many-hued, gleaming cloak of romance was slipping from her; she began to feel the chill of naked realities. In vain she strove to have it that she was arming her prince for the fray, defending her fugitive, making good his escape; she could not think one thought or draw one breath as Kate Barlass, as Flora MacDonald, or any of the rest of that devoted throng. She was just herself—her own small, lonely self—out behind the corral with Pearse, unknown to all the sleeping household; and it was the last time she would be there with him. He was going away from her. A little money—what did it matter, one way or the other?

“Oh, you must take it—you must!” she protested, the choke of rising emotion in her tone. “I wish it was more. There’s only two dollars and thirty-five cents.”

His voice failed huskily. He stood looking at her a moment, as though he would have said more; then, without a word, shook his head, turned, and his foot was in the stirrup. The realization that this was good-by reached its climax in Hilda’s heart. He was really going away. Like a big, black, engulfing wave rolled over her the thought of the time coming when there would be no Pearse to talk to or read with, to feed or care for; no delicious hiding and intriguing enterprises—nothing but the round of ranch and school life. Blindly, she caught at his sleeve.

“Oh, don’t! Don’t go! Come back in the house.”

A whirlwind of sobs shook the slim figure, and Pearse hastily, awkwardly, put his arm about her to steady her.

“Let’s tell Uncle Hank!” she gasped. “He’ll explain to the sheriff and those men. He can. You’d better stay here, Pearse.”

She looked up into his face in the dimness, and knew, before he spoke, that he was going to refuse.

“Hilda—I can’t. If I’d known he was manager here, I’d never have come in the first place. I told you that. If ever I see you again— Oh, say, Hilda! don’t cry so. I just can’t stand to see you feel so badly.”

She dried her eyes with piteous eagerness and strangled the sobs that still shook her.

“Goo-good-by, Pearse. Good-by—and good luck,” she achieved without a break. “You’ve got it all clear in your mind about the trail?”

“All clear. Good-by,” answered the boy hoarsely. And, not venturing another look at her, he rode away.