A pale Hilda, still plainly on nervous strain, sat at the breakfast table next morning. Uncle Hank—up and out an hour or two earlier—had ridden in for the meal. Aunt Valeria’s whole attention went to the new waitress she was training. At a signal from her, the girl brought a yellow envelope on a tray and offered it to Hilda—from the wrong side.

Miss Valeria frowned, signaled again sharply; the telegram—it could be nothing else—was whisked away from her niece’s eager fingers and properly presented. Hilda snatched it up and opened it with hands that shook.

Aunt Val and Burch were looking at her with frank inquiry and interest; but Uncle Hank, after one quick glance, paid close attention to his food.

“Oh,” she said, the strain relaxing into tremulous smiles, “this is—it’s a friend of mine coming over from Encinal County. He—he says he’ll be here on the afternoon train.”

Burch returned to his oatmeal; Aunt Valeria’s expression invited further details; so Hilda went on,

“His name is Pearse Masters, Aunt Val, maybe you’d remember that the Masterses were people we met coming out to Texas; and when Mamma got sick, they stopped off in Denver with us and stayed till—stayed there through it all. They were gone before you got there—but perhaps you remember the name.”

“Oh, yes, I remember very well,” said Miss Valeria. “Does Mrs. Masters come with him? Are they living in New Mexico now?”

“Mr. and Mrs. Masters are both dead; this”—the color deepened in Hilda’s cheeks; her voice wavered a little—“this is their son.”

“Oh—a young man?” Miss Valeria went on with her breakfast, murmuring vaguely, “The afternoon train? He’ll be here in time for dinner, then; that’s very nice.”

The talk went quite buoyantly after that, Hilda asking questions about things on the ranch—and hardly hearing the answers, Miss Valeria explaining new arrangements in the household matters. Now that there were plenty of servants, this small lady—who had never ceased to be a resident of New York merely sojourning on a Texas Panhandle ranch—took a great deal more interest in the Three Sorrows domestic machinery. It was after breakfast, in the hall, that Uncle Hank and Hilda came together alone.

“I’m so glad—” she began, oh, how unnecessarily! One look at her flushed cheeks and glowing eyes would have been enough. “I’m sure Aunt Val’s going to like him. Burch already knows him—though, of course, I don’t suppose he can remember—and now, if you—”

“If me,” Hank said gently. “I can’t see why you’re uneasy about me, Pettie. No special reason for it, is there?”

“No—yes—Uncle Hank.”

Hilda moved on with him to the office, where they could speak together without fear of interruption. “There is a reason; that’s why I’m so glad he’s coming over here—again.”

“Again?” Quickly. “Has he ever been at the Sorrers before? Not that I’ve known of.”

Hilda’s eyes never left the anxious face that confronted her as she told, at last, the whole story of her hiding Pearse Masters in the cyclone cellar, of the snatched interview during the drive up with the trail-herd. That was easy. She was glad now to share that with Uncle Hank. But when she came to the part over in New Mexico, the dance at Grainger’s, the picnic on Caliente Creek, she found it harder going. Yet, the bare facts of these things too she got before him, tried to express something of what they meant to her, broke off blushing, and finally finished,

“So you see, he’s The Boy-On-The-Train that I was always telling you about when I was a little girl, Uncle Hank. And when I hid him here on the Three Sorrows—he wasn’t a cattle thief—but if the sheriff had got him that—”

“I see. I see, Pettie.” Hank stood looking down, sorting out this new information. Finally he went on without looking at her:

“What you said in there at the breakfast table, and what you’ve said here to me, does make a good deal of difference. If that’s all so—and, of course, I know it is so, when you tell me it is—what makes you keep on talking like you thought this young man and me might not take to each other? That he should have persuaded you into hiding him here in the Sorrers unbeknownst to me—I ain’t holding that up against him. Must have been but a boy at the time. You was only a little girl, Reckon he was scared. Didn’t know me, and had knowed you and your folks before. I reckon that was all there was to it, wasn’t it?”

“Not—not quite all, Uncle Hank.” Hilda was trembling. Her face burned, her eyes wavered and fell away from his. “He—he did seem to know about you, and—there seemed to be something—something—” her voice failed her. After a moment, she was able to finish, in a husky whisper, “He didn’t feel friendly—to you.”

“Sho!” Uncle Hank looked at her blankly. “Seemed to know me? I’ve been figgerin’ he was a son of the Masters that was part owner of the JIC company out there in Encinal. Rich eastern man, as I recollect it. Them the people?”

“Yes,” said Hilda faintly. “Mr. Masters died just before Pearse came out West—you know—the time I hid him here.”

“Left his share in the company to the boy,” Hank nodded. “Well, it ain’t anything against him to be a rich man’s son. Some of ’em are some account.” He spoke heavily. Hilda felt that he was making an effort. She hurried to help out.

“Oh—he isn’t quite that. They had other children, grown up, that got most of what was left. They’d given Pearse a fine education—but he’s really sort of poor. He says it’s just a little share he has in the JIC. He wasn’t even sure he’d get that. But he loves this western country just the same as you and I do.” An appealing glance. “So that’s what brought him out here when Mr. Masters died—he came to get a job with the JIC. And he got it. And he worked awfully hard. He was promoted three times in the first year. And now he’s doing splendidly. He—”

She stopped, looking entreatingly in his face. He said very quietly:

“You think a heap of him, don’t you, Pettie?”

“Oh, I do. And you will, too, Uncle Hank, when you know him.”

“Well, dear,” he said slowly, “I’m bound to warn you that it sorta puts my bristles up—the idea of a young feller that’s a friend of yourn, and that I hain’t never seen, coming all set to be unfriendly with me—your guardian. It—Hilda”—when had he ever used her full name like that!—“it don’t look so good to me. Well—what is it, Buster?” as a head was poked in at the door. “Want me over at the north pasture, this morning? All right,” with apparent relief; then to Hilda, “Run tell Sam Kee to put me up a snack, Pettie. Have to make a day of it up there, I reckon. But if I ain’t on hand when your company first gets here, you and Miss Valery can make him welcome. Reckon I won’t be missed.”

He seemed to become aware that he’d spoken disconcertingly, smiled and patted her shoulder.

Hilda wanted to say that he would be missed—very much—but she had a habit of truth-telling that interfered. She got the lunch for him, ran out to the corral with it, and stood looking rather blankly after the two men as they rode away. The thought that Uncle Hank and Pearse might never like each other at all, might actually quarrel, that the thing which Pearse seemed to hold against the older man might turn out to be something that couldn’t be explained away— Well, only a few hours now. She flew to the kitchen, borrowed broom, cloths, dustpan, from Sam Kee, rolled her sleeves high, tied a towel over her hair, and slipped down to the cyclone cellar to make it beautiful for Pearse’s first view of it. Here—nowhere else—they two alone—he would tell her. She would know at last.

Captain Snow had followed down; while she worked he dozed on the foot of the couch where Pearse had slept, on the blanket which he had sent to her as a gift. But her noisy cleaning work annoyed the old cat. He was getting to an age when he disliked excitement. He finally jumped down, ambled gravely across and mewed to be let out, swishing his fluffy tail and pawing delicately at the door edge. Hilda let him go, an unusual frown between her brows. She worked on, periods of absolute rigidity alternating with moments of fiercely energetic action, till Sam Kee’s gong sounded above stairs—and she wasn’t decent for the table, let alone dressed to go over and meet Pearse.

Hilda started for the station very soon after lunch. When the buckboard came around, Burch jeered that she’d be fully an hour early for the train. But once she had seen her little retreat all spick and span, the checkerboard she and Pearse had played so many games on laid out, the books they had read together on the shelf, she was too restless to wait longer.

At the station the agent came out as she rode up; looked very hard at her and called the time. Indifferently, it flitted through her mind; oh, yes, all those telegrams had come through his hands. Of course, he knew. He understood who this was she was meeting. She tied her ponies to the rack and began walking up and down.

She couldn’t be still. She looked at her watch every few minutes, tried to make a game counting her steps. Some men rode up, dismounted, and went into the office; people she’d never seen before. There were a lot of new folks around now. The railroad brought them, maybe. The clicking of the instrument in there, sound of voices; she made her path a little farther away, so that she shouldn’t hear, so that it might not interfere with her thoughts, then, in a panic, was afraid she might be too far off when the train arrived, came back and found a box a little way up the track, where she could sit down and wait.

All at once she knew she was tired. There by the track, the sky a great blue span above her, she dropped into a musing so deep that time went swiftly by; it seemed but a moment when there was a little speck far off on the horizon, coming nearer. Suddenly, and strangely, she was the little girl Hilda, waiting for Uncle Hank on the door-stone. No—that little moving speck, far off and coming nearer, wasn’t Uncle Hank on Buckskin. That was Pearse’s train. Swiftly it grew; there was a humming now, a puff of smoke, the diminished hoot of the whistle.

“She’s going to stop. Some one to get off.” The station agent had come out with those other men. He was hanging a mail bag on the crane. The train was pulling in. Pearse was here!

Under three pairs of curious eyes—those that might look from the train didn’t count—they shook hands. Nothing really said till they got over to the buckboard, and then Hilda, as he helped her in, the happiness of it all looking out of her shining eyes, glowing on her cheeks, whispered:

“It was awfully good of you, Pearse, to come so soon. I was afraid, when I wrote you, that you wouldn’t—”

“Did you write me a letter?” Pearse stopped, looking up at her. “What did it say?”

“Oh—just explained that I couldn’t stay any longer at the Marchbankses’ and asked you to come over here instead. Why, Pearse—if you didn’t get it, how did you know to come?”

Pearse laughed a little, circled the buckboard, and got in on the other side, taking up the lines she offered him, and starting the ponies.

“You seem to think I need a good deal of bringing, Hilda,” still smiling. Then, after a quick, sidelong glance at her face, where the lowered lashes made a sweeping dusk against flaming cheeks, “I don’t. But I wish I’d had your letter too.”

“I wonder why you didn’t get it.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t have got it. You say you posted it at the station? It wouldn’t have gone out to the ranch till night; one of the boys always rides in and fetches the mail in the evening; and when evening came I was in Juan Chico. You know what a little town like that is—everybody’d heard of your having gone home. Fayte had talked, too, when he came in to send that telegram, about how I’d been at the Alamositas in the small hours, with a led horse, to steal you.”

Hilda’s heart leaped guiltily at the words.

“But,” she began hastily, “but the colonel knows better than that, now. He knows who it was came to the ranch that night. It was by mistake the man got my window instead of Maybelle’s. It”—she stared down at her fingers, speaking in a very small voice—“it was awfully silly of me to think you’d come back and throw gravel on my window; but I’d been asleep, and—before that—I’d just finished writing my letter to you; and you know how confused everything is when you’re waked up suddenly that way. I heard it, and—I ran down—and never realized till he spoke that it wasn’t you—that it couldn’t have been you, of course.”

“Oh—it couldn’t have been me, of course—eh?” Pearse echoed, his voice a little unsteady. And then, for a long moment, there was no sound but the quick, soft thud of the horses’ hoofs.

“We”—Hilda tried to speak in a nice, practical tone—“we’re sensible, aren’t we, Pearse?”

“I suppose we are,” Pearse conceded, a bit grudgingly. “And I’ve got to see your people, and—”

“Yes, of course,” Hilda broke in nervously. “That’s what I said in my letter. I asked you to come over and have the little talk you spoke of—and make friends with Uncle Hank.”

“You’re still thinking that it will be making friends?” Pearse stiffened a bit, and pulled the horses down to a slower pace. “More likely that Pearsall and I will never have anything to do with each other, Hilda; that it’ll have to be you and me—or you and him.” Then, slackening the lines so that the horses went forward faster, “Colonel Marchbanks and Gene Denner fought all over the station platform. Everybody knows now who was at the Alamositas that night, and what girl he was after—everybody but the Marchbankses did know already about Maybelle’s affair with that fellow.”

“Oh, but it’s different with us,” Hilda’s voice failed at the end of that statement. She had no words to answer as Pearse asked softly, looking straight ahead,

“Are you sure it’s so different?”

They were at the gate, turning in to the long avenue of box elders, and she caught at the first little commonplace thing to say, with,

“Look at our trees, Pearse. Aren’t they lovely? Haven’t they grown a lot since the last time you saw them? Right over there is the spring at the head of the asequia where you came in that day. You can’t quite see it from here for the mound—Burch used to call it the little mountain when he was a baby—that mound’s over the cyclone cellar.”

There wasn’t another word said till Pearse was lifting her down at the steps, and Aunt Val rose from a rocker on the porch to meet them. Miss Van Brunt seemed to like at once this tall, good looking young fellow who had known her brother and her brother’s wife and children. She felt that such a person had background, and background was the thing she was apt to miss in her western acquaintances. Burch came out and said “Hello,” amusingly certain that he perfectly remembered Pearse, and took the visitor up to the room which had been prepared for him. When they came downstairs again, Hilda was waiting for them.

“I’m going to show Pearse over the place a bit while it’s still light enough to see things,” she said easily, then in a half-whisper, “Quick, Pearse. Come this way. Around the house. We’ll have to go in by the back. Nobody knows about my cyclone cellar yet.”

They ran, hand in hand, like two children, ducking under the low-swung branches of trees, skirting shrubs. When they burst into the kitchen, old Sam Kee, straightening up from the range where he was sliding a pan of biscuits into the oven, looked at them with such twinkling eyes that Hilda was sure he had already watched Pearse’s arrival.

“You know who this is, don’t you, Sam?” she smiled.

“Sure, I know,” the Chinaman grinned back at her. “Plitty nice boy you got. Fine young man, now.”

“That was good coffee and chow you gave me,” Pearse offered diplomatically.

“This dinner-time more good chow.” Sam Kee’s yellow face was a pucker of amiability. “You stay here, I feed you all time good chow.”

“Well, that’s something to stay for,” Pearse said solemnly, and the Chinaman went off into long, silent chuckles. Hilda was already calling over her shoulder:

“Come on, Pearse. If dinner is as near ready as all this, we’ve got to hurry.”

With her leading, they crossed the big cellar and threaded the passage. But once in that little chamber of memories, how was either of them to remember that life presented any problems, that there might be breakers ahead? Pearse went from one thing to another admiring; Hilda had full reward for making the place so fine and festive.

“Why—you’ve kept every one of them!” Pearse looked around at his gifts, proudly displayed.

“Yes. I showed them to the folks. They were too lovely to keep entirely to myself; but after that I brought them down here.”

“I’ll get you a better serape than this.” Pearse fingered the blanket on the couch. “I know where I can pick up a Hanno Chaddie—that means ‘chief’s blanket’—ever see one?” And he went on to tell her of the pattern.

But it made no difference what either of them said, one thing lay under it all—Pearse had come back—as he said he would. He’d walked up the front steps this time; he’d met and made friends with Miss Valeria and Burch. Now there remained—Uncle Hank. After they’d talked a while, eagerly, of that former time of hiding here in the cyclone cellar, Pearse said suddenly:

“Shall you tell Pearsall about having hidden me here, that time?”

“I’ve already told him, Pearse. Was that wrong? Didn’t you want me to?”

“Doesn’t make any difference. I suppose I’d have told him myself when I saw him. I suppose I shall see him to-morrow, shan’t I? He’s on the ranch, isn’t he?”

“To-morrow? You’ll see him to-night, Pearse. At dinner—in a few minutes, now. He might come in any time.”

She hurried over to the little window and stood nervously pushing the vine lattice aside so that she saw the spring, the stream, the little bridge that led across to the bunk house. And at the instant she caught sight of a familiar figure crossing and whirled, crying:

“Pearse—there’s Uncle Hank, now! Come on.”

“All right—tell you all about it on the way up,” Pearse said almost desperately, and while they hurried stumblingly, through the dark cellar, he talked in hasty, broken sentences.

“What! What!” Hilda cried out. Then, “Oh, if I’d only known when you were here before—if you’d only told me then!”

She clutched his hand and pulled him close after her. Both of them flushed, excited, they ran across the kitchen and came in behind Uncle Hank in the hall, moving toward the open door of the office just ahead. As Hilda, still drawing Pearse with her, followed, and pulled the door shut behind them, her call rang out strangely:

“He’s here, Uncle Hank! He’s come!”