Sheriff Daniels clung resolutely to the trail of that broken-shoed pony. He discovered, finally, who the man was that had ridden it away from the ranch where it was stolen. The thief was traced into old Mexico, then into a little place in Arizona, brought back from there, tried and convicted of that and of the killing. Every one supposed that it was he who had been at the Three Sorrows that day. His trial brought out the fact that the Romero brothers were the others in the affair. They disappeared from Lame Jones County and stayed away.

The matter was cleared up now; Pearse Masters could have come back openly now, if he’d wanted to. But he didn’t—he didn’t even write. A whole year rolled round, and Hilda had heard nothing from him or of her Sunday pony. Yet in the cattle country, where the distances were so great, people sometimes borrowed a horse and kept it for more than a year, waiting for the time when it would be convenient to return it by some friend traveling in the necessary direction.

Of course, feeling as he did about Uncle Hank, Pearse himself would never ride up to the Three Sorrows leading Sunday. Yet, in her own mind, Hilda never gave up the hope that some time she would find a way to bring the two together and make them friends. Nobody, she felt sure, could really know Uncle Hank and not love and trust him.

As time went on, and there was no Pearse and no word from him, and here was Uncle Hank, more than ever part of everything good and comfortable, Hilda slipped into a position of even greater confidence with him. It was as though she tried to make up to him for having liked—for still so very much liking—a person who thought badly of him. Those long talks on the door-stone in the evening would have surprised some people. Hank laid all his plans and ideas before the slim girl as he never would have thought of doing before her father. Hilda was going to be a ranchwoman. The Sorrows would belong to her and to her brother. She loved it all; she had the feeling for it; and the old man believed that a sense of responsibility could only come with a knowledge of what the responsibilities were.

So, in March of the year when Hilda was fourteen, she knew as well as Hank did what the financial situation was on the ranch, and why it had come to a point where her guardian was almost at his wit’s end to go on. He had saved everywhere he could, doing with less help than he needed always, getting more out of his men by good treatment, making up the lack by extra work of his own, buying supplies with careful judgment, hesitating over every expense except those that Miss Valeria demanded—no use hesitating with Aunt Val; she always got what she wanted in the end. But the Sorrows had never been able to run enough cows, as the cattle country phrased it. Hank had helped out wherever he could by taking other men’s stock to pasture, “on the shares,” or “for the third calf.” He had paid off the smaller mortgage and kept up the interest on the larger one.

He stood one afternoon near the side door of the ranch house, gazing out across the fields of the Sorrows, green as an emerald and sweet with the evening song of meadow larks. Hilda came up to him, slipped her hand into his and looked up into his face as though she had said, “What is it, Uncle Hank?”

“Pasture for ten thousand cattle,” he sighed, “and I reckon we’re a-doing well if we can count up twenty-eight hundred in all. Well, honey, we’ll make out somehow—we always have made out so far—but I wish the Lord would show me how.”

A big, six-mule freight wagon was just pulling up at the lower gate. They watched with interest while Slew-foot Crosby, the freighter, climbed down from the driver’s seat and started toward the house. When Slew caught sight of the two he raised a letter in his hand and shook it high above his head.

“Howdy, Hilda. Hey, Pearsall; I brought this out from Dawn for you!” he shouted.

“Hmm,” said Hank, “who’d be writing to me? Miss Valeria’s home, and Burch.”

Drawing up, Crosby handed him the envelope and waited to share any interest that might be in its contents.

Pearsall turned the letter over curiously a time or two.

“Looks like I ought to know that there handwriting,” he meditated, scratching one ear reflectively. “Now, who in time is it makes them kind of tails to the—? Hm-mm. El Capitan,” he squinted at the postmark. “Huh—El Capitan. Well, I don’t know as—”

“Why don’t you open it?” suggested Hilda, and Crosby winked at her and added:

“Yes, rip ’er up and have a look at the inside.”

Without further ado, Hank inserted his thumb and “ripped her up.” Carefully he drew forth and unfolded a soiled, dog-eared sheet of paper and stood studying it for some moments in silence, Hilda watching, Slew shifting from one foot to the other. Gradually the manager’s face changed, losing its anxious lines, taking on a half-surprised, half-incredulous expression. He looked out again over the green levels.

“Lord! Lord!” he whispered. “Why, this almost scares me.”

“What, Uncle Hank? What?” demanded Hilda, and the patient Crosby thanked her with a glance.

“All right, Pettie. Ye see, Slew, this here’s from my old pardner, Tracey Jacox, that I used to run cattle with down yonder on the Pecos. He—Trace, he’s had some difficulty there at Capitan. He’s wrote for me to come and get his bunch of cattle and keep ’em—that is, till he—”

“Till he gets out,” supplied Crosby, with prompt intelligence.

“Well, yes—till he gets out,” assented the other mildly.

Crosby’s eyes followed Pearsall’s across the tremendous sweep of green pastures. He knew well what was in the manager’s mind.

“Comes in mighty good. I brought you something worth while this time, didn’t I? Well, so long! I got to pull my freight.”

He walked away down the long line of box elders to his patient mules. Left behind, the old man stood murmuring over and over: “Twen-ty—sev-en—hun-dred—cat-tle! Twen-ty—sev-en—hun-dred! Why, Pettie, it looks like a hand stretched right down to a drowning man. For, as sure as my name’s Pearsall, I didn’t know whichaway to turn this spring.”

“And we’re to keep the cattle how long, Uncle Hank?”

The old man took out the penciled scrawl, and she read with him:

“Reckless feller!” muttered Hank, and shook his head. “I always told him he’d shoot up the wrong man some time.”

He put the letter carefully back into his pocket, and they went to the house together.

That evening it was known at headquarters, and by the next morning it had flown all over the Sorrows that the boss was going to take an outfit down the trail to Sandoval County and bring home the herd.

“We’ll have to have, at the very least, twelve riders and a horse wrangler,” he said. “I’ll be cook and foreman both—that’s fourteen men in all. Four of us ll go from here, and I’ll hire ten men in Sandoval. It’ll take a hundred and twenty-five horses to handle that trail herd—and I’ve got ’em! Ain’t I glad now I kept all the ponies! It sure took nerve to do it. I’ll not have to buy a horse—not one. I feel like patting myself on the head for my smartness. Pettie, I’ll give you that job of patting. You might start on it right away.”

“How long will you be gone, Uncle Hank?” Hilda asked, in a voice whose utterance seemed somehow to displace very little ordinary atmosphere.

“Well, it won’t take more’n four or five days to get there—flying light. Then there’s the counting, road-branding, signing up contracts, hiring the new hands and getting supplies—I reckon it’ll take nearly two weeks to make the trip home with the herd. Say, jest about three weeks in all, Pettie.”

“Oh—three weeks!” whispered Hilda, and he looked at her curiously, but said nothing more.

Such an outburst of vitality the ranch had not known for years. There was an inspiring rush of preparation, a great looking to stirrup leathers, re-cinching of saddles, mending and overhauling of equipment, and almost more skylarking and horse-play. Out at the corrals, Shorty and two other boys who were to make the trip, stole up behind one another and knocked each other sprawling by way of a delicate intimation that the situation was humorous. They scuffled and rolled over and over like bear cubs, hammering one another joyously. All day, while working furiously, they turned again and again from their occupation to fight at the trembling of an eyelash. Shorty came wheezing out of one of these encounters with a black eye and bleeding knuckles, the shirt on his back torn to strips. But his only complaint was:

“Darn you, Buster—this is the best shirt I got,” with the husky threat, added, “I’ll wear you to a frazzle—when I get my breath.”

Burch and Miss Valeria were the only ones who seemed to be out of it all. The little lady looked up mildly once or twice at the extra amount of noise and bustle going on about her, then relaxed into her book or the endless piece of Battenburg which never seemed to get itself finished under her slim, aristocratic white hands. Burch was a silent boy, who cared enough about his books to have made a very good student and whose deportment would always have been rated one hundred if he hadn’t had such a queer way of taking an idea into his head, saying nothing about it, and putting it into execution—whatever it was—without any one’s permission.

There was the time when the school clock got out of order, and Burch took it out of its case to oil it. Miss Belle caught him with it just when he dipped it in a bath of kerosene. He wouldn’t say he was sorry. It went on all morning till the young teacher said she was going to whip him—and expel him from school. Even that didn’t move Burch to say anything but:

“I wish you’d let me oil the clock now and put it back in the case and put the hands on. It’ll run all right now.”

But Miss Belle wouldn’t even do that, and Hilda, crazy with anxiety, had ridden after Uncle Hank, begging him to come quick and not to let Aunt Val know. She’d been locked out of the school room. She thought Miss Belle was in there whipping Burchie. Miss Belle wouldn’t listen to her when she told her he was always learning about machinery; and maybe he really could fix the clock.

She and Uncle Hank had come into the school room to find a boy that had been whipped, a clock that was ticking away in good order—and a teacher who was hysterical.

“He ought to have told me that the watchmaker there in Fort Worth had showed him what to do—let him help him at such things,” she said.

Uncle Hank agreed to that, but when they were climbing on their ponies to leave, Burch said:

“Aw—people talk too much. Anyhow, she didn’t ask me if any one had taught me how to fix a clock. I told her I could do it. After she whipped me, she cried and let me show her. She doesn’t hit very hard. It didn’t hurt very much.”

“And you see, Burch,” Uncle Hank put in, “you shouldn’t never have touched the clock without permission. Long as you done that, I’m glad to see you are willing to take a licking for it.”

This was Hilda’s brother, very dear to her, yet caring for almost none of the things she cared for. He wasn’t interested in ponies—because they were live creatures, not machines.

“But you’re going to live on a ranch when you grow up,” Hilda argued.

“No, I’m not. I think I’ll be an engineer of some kind. I’d like building bridges. You can stay here and be the ranchman.”

And so it was only Hilda who, drifting about the house or garden, lingering at the corral, like a little woebegone shadow, took no part in the joy. She followed Hank as though she could not let him from her sight, hastening to bring what he needed before he asked for it, stooping to pick up a thing he dropped, anticipating his wish with a low-spoken word. He was used to having Hilda hang about him—but not this Hilda. Also she was getting to be of a size and age when she very commonly had some more or less important concerns of her own which took her apologetically from him at intervals. Now, whatever he was doing, he knew she was there; he was aware of just the look he would meet in those dark eyes if he glanced up. If the old man wheeled suddenly and faced it, this haunter of his trail would turn aside hastily and at once be occupied with other business. But Hank knew that he was watched.

The start was to be made in the morning. After supper Hilda sat down on the side-door stone, where so many of her interviews with Uncle Hank took place, waiting for him and trying hard not to weep. He came out noisily, man-fashion, calling back some last remark over his shoulder to Shorty O’Meara, and dropping suddenly beside her with a great sigh, mingled of weariness, relief, content.

“Well, it was short notice, but we’re sure ready, and we’re ready good. Pettie,”—he spoke aloud and cheerfully—“I don’t know as I ever in my life looked forward to anything with more pleasure than I do to going down to El Capitan and bringing back them cows.”

Slowly it was borne in upon him that he was getting no response. In the silence came a choking sound. There was no need of words. He sat awhile, mute. It’d occur to him that he might say, “You don’t want to go—a little lady like you—on a long, hard, lonesome, messy trip with nobody but a lot of rough boys that can’t talk a lick of grammar.” But the uselessness of it, as well as the hollow insincerity, held him silent. The old man acted a mother’s part by his orphans, but he possessed none of the age-honored mothers’ tricks. Now he got up suddenly and went into the house, where Miss Valeria sat reading, and blurted out to that lady:

“I reckon I’m the most forsaken old fool that ever trod shoe-leather. But I can’t stand it any longer. Pettie’ll have to go with me down the trail.”

Following close behind, as she had been following all day, Hilda heard those last words. She dared not explode into a joyous whoop, for her aunt’s bewildered face promised resistance. Miss Van Brunt took off her delicate, gold-rimmed glasses nervously and rubbed her eyes, as though, perhaps, looked at without their medium, Hank might change his mind.

“I—why, really, Mr. Pearsall,” she began, with her small bustle of feminine authority, “you are very kind to think of bothering yourself with the child. If it were Burch, now—but I’m afraid it’s rather a long trip for a little girl—and—”

“Aw, let her go,” mumbled Burch, looking up from the table, where he was busy over a book and some diagrams. “I don’t want to. It suits her. She likes it.”

“—and certainly not a proper sort of a trip—for a little girl.”

“Burch!” Hilda exploded. “Why, Burch can’t ride.” Her aunt looked bewildered. “Oh, I know—he can sit up on a horse. But he wouldn’t be of the least bit of use to a trail outfit, would he, Uncle Hank? And I can help you lots—can’t I?”

“I didn’t understand from Mr. Pearsall that you were to help with the work,” Miss Valeria said severely. “I think the work must be a great deal more unsuitable for you than the trip itself.”

“Oh, please, Aunt Valeria—dear Aunt Valeria!” entreated Hilda, surging up to her aunt’s knee. “I’ll be so good. When we come back I’ll study anything you want me to, and not read so many stories.”

“Well, your music—but then we’ve no piano,” Miss Val sighed. “And I believe you said, Mr. Pearsall—”

She broke off, looking up with a slightly aggrieved expression at the tall ranch manager. She had announced to him that Hilda must have a piano, and for once Hank had been resolute in refusing to sell some ponies and purchase the instrument.

“We’ll get a piano all right, now, Miss Valeria,” he assured her. “Them horses, that I had the nerve to hang on to, gives us plenty for the drive. You see, it would take a hundred and twenty-five ponies to handle a trail herd of that size, and I don’t know where in Texas I’d ’a’ got the money to buy with right now. By next spring, if we have luck, I could set you a row of pianos plumb acrost the room.”

“I hardly think we’ll need more than one,” Miss Valeria said, somewhat hastily. “But about Hilda—”

“Run along upstairs and pack your war bag, Pettie. We’ll start soon as it’s light in the morning,” said Hank to the child; and Hilda flew to obey, leaving him to conclude the argument with Miss Van Brunt.