A TELEGRAM
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 J I C 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
J I C. 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 J I C. 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!”