AN AFFAIR OF THE HEART
Southwestward again, all that day—beautifully long for the little
girl, wearily lengthened for Miss Valeria who alternately complained
of the speed and urged the driver to hurry a little. Pearsall always
gave her the same good-humored answer, as though it had been a child
fretting at him: “Ponies got forty-odd miles to go, ma’am; have to
just hold this same good road pace.”
At noon they stopped and got out for a rest; a “dry camp” he called
it, with only water from the canteens to make their coffee. Through
the afternoon, the thud-thud of hoofs, the creak and swish of wheels
on dry turf, like a monotonous old tune, almost sent Hilda to sleep
where she sat beside Uncle Hank on the high seat. Then, when the sky
flamed once more red with sunset, suddenly there was living green in
front of them, the ambulance swung through an open gate, up a long
avenue of young box-elders and black locusts, at the end of which
they could see a low stone house, broad, sheltering, hospitable,
with its dooryard of Bermuda grass, at the edge of which Pearsall
pulled up, got out and helped the others down. Van Brunt, who had
sat silent and uncomplaining for hours of heat and weariness,
exclaimed:
“This the ranch? Why, Pearsall, I didn’t suppose there was such a
green place in all the Panhandle.”
“Well, there’s not another like the Three Sorrows, I can tell you,”
answered the old man, busy with bags and valises; and as they moved
toward the house Miss Valeria murmured that it was better than could
have been expected.
Hilda, hanging back, saying nothing, gazed about at the new home
with eyes that loved every stone in its walls. Its pleasant rustle
of leaves and lisp of water, after all those miles of splendid, arid
plain, made her eyes smart with happy tears. The beautiful
wing-like, curving sweep in which the line of young cottonwoods,
following the happy course of a tiny irrigating ditch, flung away
around one corner of the building—here was a world where
anything—lovely—might happen. Those willows over yonder by the
little lake (the old man called it a watering tank), they looked
just like Nixies crouching down in their long green hair. There was
mystery in the very appearance of the plain about them. When a
Chinaman came to the door she could have shouted with delight.
He was a strange, limp effigy of a Chinaman, like a badly made rag
doll, his slant eyes and pigtail giving the impression that he had
lately been hung up on a line with other such toys. Apparently he
was young, though the Oriental never looks to our eyes either
exactly young or old, and certainly he was morose. The queue on his
head, the dull blue blouse he wore, his funny black-and-white
boat-shaped shoes, all charmed Hilda.
The first thing she saw that looked like the old home back in New
York was a familiar rug spread out at the foot of the stairs in the
hall.
“I s’pose your full-sized carpets ain’t come yet,” Pearsall
explained, as he showed his employer the living-room on one side,
the ranch office on the other. “These mats looked a good deal worn,”
he indicated the dull bloom of Turkish rugs disposed here and there,
“but of course they’ll be nice and soft for the children to play
on.”
Van Brunt assented kindly, and neither he nor Miss Valeria offered
any explanation. It was near supper time. The open door at the end
of the hall showed a shouldering group of masculine forms, ranch
riders, heretofore familiar to the eyes of the newcomers only in
pictures. The foremost of these detached himself, came forward, and
was presented as O’Meara—“One of your boys, Mr. Van Brunt.” Hilda
liked the look of him, and was more pleased when he spoke.
“We didn’t know where you’d want your things,” he said modestly. “We
took everybody’s opinion—even the Chink’s—but at that we couldn’t
make out what some of ’em was intended for. We just put the trunks
around here and there to make it seem home-like.”
Hilda wondered that her aunt’s response to this should be so faint.
Shorty O’Meara’s ideas on furnishing and interior decoration had
immediate success with her. The open door of the office room showed
a big desk, some chairs, and a pile or two of books on the floor.
The little girl left that without further inquiry, and went into the
living-room where a spindle-legged, inlaid dressing table, with its
sweep of mirror, neighbored a trunk and several dining-room chairs.
There were more books here, on the floor, the chairs, the
window-sills. These latter were very deep. They might well have been
specially designed for sitting in of rainy afternoons to look at
picture books or play with dolls. The grown-ups walked about and
looked somewhat unhappy. She had forgotten them almost in her survey
of her new home. She presently got Burch and lugged him about,
talking to him, since he was the only individual present sensible
enough to really appreciate the attractiveness of the place. The
roughcast plastered walls looked so sheltering and strong. The open
doorway into the dining-room showed a great long table. All of those
men were going to eat there. She groped vaguely for a line in a
ballad with which her mother used to sing her to sleep—something
about the baron sitting in his hall and his retainers being blithe
and gay. The table wasn’t in the hall, of course, but otherwise it
was just the same.
Then came Aunt Valeria’s voice calling to her from upstairs; she
followed that weary lady, and she and Burch were washed and made
seemly for the table.
That first supper was a wonderful meal to her, too, with a lot of
tall men trooping in to sit at the board. Their bronzed faces, their
keen, forth-looking eyes, used to search great levels, the air of
individuality, of independence, laid powerful hold on the child’s
fancy. Every time a spur jingled beneath the table, or one of those
big voices boomed out suddenly, her heart leaped in swift though
uncomprehending response.
Afterward, in the living-room, she heard with some anxiety, Pearsall
doubtfully suggest to her father that they might want to build a
separate mess house for the men. Her father said no, he didn’t mind
the men at the table; and Hilda heaved a great sigh of relief. She
had already struck up quite a friendship with blond, talkative
Shorty O’Meara; she had even made some timid overtures to a lank,
elderly cynic who lived up to the name of Old Snake Thompson. To
have her social adventures in this direction curtailed would have
been trying.
The days that followed the arrival were strange, interesting ones.
Her father was wrapped in an obscurity of dejection and grief; Miss
Van Brunt was a victim of neuralgia which she declared the plains
wind had developed. The child had only the baby brother, with the
occasional companionship of Uncle Hank and some of the younger
cowboys; yet she made eager acquaintance with this new life; and it
was to the old man she came for information or to share with him her
joys.
“All the horses you ride are yellow ones, Uncle Hank, aren’t they?”
she asked him one evening when he came in from the range.
“Yes, honey, I’ve rode a buckskin pony for a good many years. I
reckon the folks wouldn’t hardly know me on any other color of hoss.
I sort of think they’re becoming to me—don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, very,” Hilda assured him gravely. “What’s this one’s
name?”
“Why, you see, I just call ’em all ‘Buckskin.’ It’s easiest.”
Sometimes he took her out for short rides, of an evening, holding
her before him on the saddle of the tall buckskin horse with a blaze
face, or the little dark buckskin pony that had a brown mane and
tail. Traveling in this fashion one evening across pastures she
pointed to a queer, humped object, sway-backed, with a ewe-neck, and
a rough coat of brindled hair that stuck up like the nap on a
half-worn rug.
“What’s that, Uncle Hank? It looks something like a calf.”
“’S a dogie, honey,” he explained, absently.
“A dogie,” the child repeated. “Dogies are a kind of animal I don’t
know. Is it wild, or tame?”
Pearsall laughed.
“You was right in the first place, sister,” he said. “That pore
little skeesicks is a calf. It lost its mother when it was too young
to eat grass rightly; so it sort of starves along, and gets stunted
and runted. We call ’em dogies. You’ll see one every once in a
while, round over the range. They’re no good to nobody—nor to
theirselves.”
“Oh,” said Hilda, under her breath.
A day or so later, finding her a bit drooping, Pearsall questioned:
“What’s the matter, sister? Is something worrying you?”
“Uncle Hank,” she explained, with some diffidence, “my heart is sad
about dogies. I saw two of them to-day, and my heart is sad about
them, ever since.”
(She had wanted to say, in the language of one of her favorite
ballads, “My heart is wae”; but judged that that might be a little
too much for her companion, and tried him with a simpler literary
form.)
“Is it, honey?” inquired the old man, easily. “Oh, I guess I
wouldn’t worry about ’em. Remember that we don’t ever butcher ’em,
nor even brand ’em.”
“That’s part of the sadness,” Hilda maintained, shaking her head.
“It’s just like I used to want to cry when I saw the little dwarfed
people in the shows, that aren’t children, and never will be grown
up.”
Into the long talks which the two held together of an evening, Hilda
often introduced that hero who never had any other name than
The-Boy-On-The-Train.
“He knew most everything, Uncle Hank,” she once declared.
“I reckon so, honey,” assented Pearsall; but he seemed to Hilda not
sufficiently impressed. She sought in her recollection for definite
marvels to attribute to this favorite, and came hard up against that
trying fact we all meet, that you cannot communicate to another the
fascination you have experienced. It is something to be felt, not
put into words. Pressed thus, Hilda stated one day to Uncle Hank
that her hero could understand the language of birds. He accepted it
with much too great facility, reconciled thereto by the fact that a
person in Hilda’s book of fairy tales, which she had shown him
earlier in the evening, could do the same. But the statement kept
its author awake the greater part of the night, and a penitent,
small Hilda climbed up into his arms as soon as he sat down after
supper next evening and explained:
“Why, Uncle Hank, you know The-Boy-On-The-Train, he couldn’t
quite—what I said—understand all that the birds were talking about.”
“Couldn’t he, Pettie?” inquired Hank placidly.
“No,” said Hilda with solemnity. “He might just as well have, but he
couldn’t. He could just understand what people said; but—” The small
face flushed deeply; word forms rushed fluidly about in the stress
and flux of her emotion—“but he understanded that awful good.”
If Hilda had come to a group of children, The-Boy-On-The-Train
must have grown dim behind the stirring realities of actual
companionship. But in the lonely life that began for her now, he
filled in many an hour which might be otherwise forlorn. He did not
lose vividness. She saw him at that ranch he had spoken of, riding
the marvelous pony which would shake hands, perfecting himself in
those manly sports upon which he had casually touched, and which her
lively fancy was liberally providing for him. As time went on, he
grew of course; yet he remained delightfully a boy, her champion and
hero in the dream world which was always so real to the imaginative
child.
Meanwhile Pearsall, who had been for some time manager for a
non-resident owner, had only remained to go over tallies, count of
stock, and deliver to the purchaser the ranch and its appurtenances.
This work was done now, the details all complete, and upon an
evening Hank had brought his tally sheets and the mass of statements
and figures to young Van Brunt in the ranch office, where he sat
explaining the situation patiently to the other man.
It was past the children’s bedtime; Burch was asleep upstairs; but
the little girl had twice been sent from the room with an admonition
of increasing sharpness from her father. And still Pearsall could
see from the tail of his eye that she hung just outside the door.
“But, Pearsall,” Van Brunt, helpless city man, repeated in a sort of
blank dismay, “you don’t mean to say you’re leaving me—right
now—when I need you worst? Why, what on earth will I do?”
“You know,” said Hank mildly. “I explained it to you last week, Mr.
Van Brunt. When the ranch was sold, back three months ago, I looked
out for another job. I got one, with the Quita Que, over in New
Mexico, and they put me on forfeit—”
“No business man,” broke in Van Brunt. “I suppose I didn’t
understand. The fault is mine, Pearsall. But this—I—I’m about as
competent to run a ranch as Burch would be. I somehow took it for
granted that you were to be manager. Can’t we—I will gladly pay that
forfeit, if you are willing to stay—long enough at least to get me
started.”
Hank raised a warning hand as Hilda’s face again showed at the door.
The child did not edge in, as she had edged before! She made
straight for Pearsall—though she winced at her father’s impatient
exclamation—climbed to the old man’s lap, and looked searchingly
into his face.
“Uncle Hank—you—going away?” She choked on the last word, then added
half desperately, “Not—to stay? You’ll come back—won’t you?”
Van Brunt’s strained attitude relaxed a little; he sat back vaguely
in his chair, glancing from one to the other, the dismay in his face
gradually giving way to a half doubtful gleam of hope. Hank was
silent a moment, Hilda watching him, openly restraining tears. The
manager had seen more than one Easterner launch himself and
everything he possessed in this cattle ranching game, and, ill
prepared, inexperienced, lose all. Before him was another candidate
for just such another calamitous failure. But it was the warm little
body trembling on his lap, the big dark eyes searching his, that he
was most conscious of.
“That’s all right, Pettie—about me going away,” he began hesitantly.
Then with more certainty, and setting her gently down, “You run
along to bed, honey.”
She moved a little, with childhood’s tragic reluctance, in the
direction of the door, then turned with just a mute look into his
face. Hank gave her a reassuring smile.
“Time them big black peepers was shut, Pettie,” he said easily. “And
it’s all right. If I do have to go away, I’ll come straight back.
Don’t you worry. I’m not goin’ to quit the Sorrers. Reckon I’ll stay
as long as you do.”
“Then—” began Hilda. But her throat swelled so that she couldn’t
finish it. It was going to be, “Then, if you will never forsake me,
I will never forsake you,”—a line from one of her best loved fairy
stories—all of that, even here before papa. But the best she could
do was, “Then—I’ll go—Uncle Hank.” And she crept out.
When they heard her feet pattering on the stairs, Van Brunt began to
speak, but Hank stopped him with a shake of the head.
“No, Mr. Van Brunt; I’ll pay the forfeit. It’s me that’s ruing back
on a contract with the Matador, not you. I’ll stay.” Then, after a
pause, “I thought likely I’d have to—that is, if you wanted me—that
first day driving down from Mesquite. I’m all set to stay. That’s
settled. We’ll say no more about it.”