In the office Hank faced sharply around, and the tall men stood looking at each other; there was a moment of silence, in which the cooing of Sam Kee’s pigeons could be heard. Hilda was breathing short.

“I—I thought maybe you’d know him,” she faltered at last, and Uncle Hank looked from one of them to the other in astonishment.

“I reckon this is young Mr. Masters, ain’t it, Pettie?”

“Henry Pearsall Moseley,” Pearse made the statement he had made to Hilda in other words as they crossed the cellar down there. “Masters is the name of my adopted parents. I just told Hilda. But she didn’t want to wait for details. She hurried me right up here to you. I—I had thought, myself, that it would be better to speak to you alone, at first. You would rather not have her hear—”

He made a significant pause. Hank wasn’t listening; all his soul seemed to be in the gaze he set on this young man. When he spoke, it was to say, huskily, wonderingly,

“Harry!” Then slowly, “It is you. Yes—seems I must have knowed you, even without the name. You’ve got the look of your mother, boy.”

At that mention of his mother, Hilda saw an angry gleam come into Pearse’s eyes.

“See here!” he burst out. “I’ve not told Hilda anything but my name—and that I’m your stepson. She’d never have known from me that you and my mother were separated, and that you turned your back on me, as though I’d been a stray dog. But if you want her to hear it—”

“No! Oh, no!” Hilda broke in before Hank could find words. “That wasn’t the way of it, Pearse. Uncle Hank told me long ago about the little son he loved so, and— Oh, tell him, Uncle Hank! Tell him quick!”

“Come over here. Set down. Both of you,” said Hank’s quiet voice. “We got to get the rights of this.” He took his place in the desk chair. As they were getting settled so that they faced him, Pearse said more mildly,

“I’m sorry I spoke as I did just then. I don’t want to make Hilda feel bad. I’m willing to let bygones be bygones—if you will, sir.”

“So, my boy’s come back to me, after a-many year—come back with a grudge against me, has he, Harry? Of all the things I thought to expect—that wasn’t, somehow, one. And what you said just now about me and your mother having parted? She never told you such a word. Where did you get it?”

“From Uncle Jeff Aiken,” said Pearse bitterly. “The man you shoved me off on—that you had shoved her off on.”

“Jeff Aiken ain’t no uncle of yours.” Hank’s tone was patient. “He’s but the man who married your father’s sister. Shoved you off on him? When you and Mattie went there to visit—at her wish, son—you was well furnished with money, and I sent money regular. After the Lord took her, I sent money for your keep with Aiken for two years— And by that time—well—well—”

He searched in the desk drawer, found a packet of letters, laid them beside him. “Them’s Mattie’s, son. I’ll leave you read them later. You’ll find in them if she thought she was cast off. Here’s some of Aiken’s, receipting for the money I sent for your board and schooling, telling me that you was doing well and wished to stay where you was at. And I’ve got another here, the one you wrote before you took and run away from him.... Poor little feller.”

The yellowed sheet Pearse and Hilda read, sitting there side by side, was a child’s appeal to the father he still trusted to come and take him away from a home that had become intolerable. As Pearse looked from it into Hank’s face and back again, his own face went through many changes of emotion.

“I felt pretty bad when I wrote that,” he said doubtfully. “I had no idea there was any money being sent for me. Uncle Jeff’s way was, when he’d come to a deadlock and licked me till he was afraid to lick any more, to start in on a tongue-lashing. He could hurt me worse that way than he could with a stick, and he knew it. He’d tell me that you and mother had separated when she left Texas, and that you said you never wanted to see my face again. Sometimes I didn’t believe him. After a while I did. I just wrote that letter on a chance, and because I was desperate.”

“Yes. I know.” Hank nodded. “When I went back there—as I did—at the news that you had run away, I found how things had been. Aiken thought he was justified—if such a man can be said to think a-tall. Told me that your mother had spoiled you, and some one had to take holt and straighten you out. Admitted that he set in to break your will. Man of his sort gets that idea into his head about a child—he’ll go to any lengths. He held out my letters on you. Why, Harry, I wrote as regular as the time come, hoping all the while that you’d change your mind and want to come back to me. All I’d get in answer would be Jeff’s receipt for the money, and his statement that you was satisfied where you was and hadn’t seen fit to write. He still justifies himself—Aiken does—says he done it for your good.”

“If I had only known.” Pearse was back in the bitterness of his boyhood struggle.

“Or if I’d known,” said Hank. “But the first word I got was when you run away. It come to me late, by the hand of a rider that chanced to be passing and brought my mail. I was right in the middle of the fall roundup, but I dropped everything and struck straight for Missouri.”

Hilda’s hand found Uncle Hank’s; Pearse already held her other. The three of them drew together.

“I pretty near run through everything I had trying to hunt you up. Looked like I just couldn’t turn back to Texas without my child. Ranches and cattle and roundups and such”—he gestured helplessly with his free hand—“they looked like nothing but a pack of foolishness to me then. Didn’t seem nothing in the world of any real value at the side of a little tow-headed feller that had run away—that was lost to me—out in the world somewheres. I sold my ranch. Most that it brought went into the search for you. It was when I give up and thought that you must be dead that I took this job as manager of the Sorrers. And after I’d been here three or four years the company sold to Pettie’s mother, and Pettie herself come out here to sorta fill the place that you’d left so turrible vacant.”

“Father!” Hilda thought that word in Pearse’s voice must make up to Uncle Hank for a great deal. “Nobody on earth ever meant as much to me as you did. That’s why it hurt so when I had to believe you weren’t what I’d always thought you. A poor fool of a kid—are you going to forgive me?”

“Ah, law, son! If I could be forgiven my own sins as easy as I can overlook your being a little too ready to be suspicious of me, and sorta holding onto a bad view of me whether the evidence seemed sufficient or not—if I could do that, I’d sure have a clean record.”

In the deep silence that followed came again the velvety coo of Sam Kee’s pigeons. A belated bee from the hive out near the spring circled in through the window, hummed drowsily once around the room, and blundered out again. In the back hall the gong made its low-toned, persuasive announcement under the Chinaman’s hand. Steps came down the stairs, Miss Valeria’s little high-heeled slippers. A resounding bang from the living-room told that Burch had clapped-to the lid of his desk.

In the crimson and gold glories that streamed from the west, last of the sunset fires, the three rose and stood together a moment lingeringly. Hank’s eyes wandered out over the prospect in front, basking in that radiance, then took on a far-away, dreamy look.

“The evening’s a mighty sweet time, too,” he said low, as though speaking to himself.

“We’ll go and tell the others, now, won’t we?” Hilda suggested with tremulous eagerness, as Pearse’s hand holding hers closed tighter over it. And when Hank turned and looked from her face to his boy’s, he saw on them the morning.