“Well, the friend that borrowed him sort of happened along to-night whilst we was out working with the cows, and fetched him.”
Shorty made no reply. He only whistled a little under his breath and glanced keenly toward where Hilda stood. Hank got the salve and did up Buster’s hand. He was a long time about it. If he intended to give Hilda a chance to get away without speaking to him, his pretext failed. She lingered, looking at him uneasily till he was free and turned to her.
“Well, Pettie?”
“Nothing, Uncle Hank.”
“You ought to be in your blankets and asleep. Run along, honey.”
He wasn’t going to ask any questions. He wouldn’t even look an inquiry. Oh, he was good—so good! And she had come short of loyalty to him. She had not defended him to Pearse. She crept to her blankets in the cedar thicket, hunched them about her mechanically and lay sleepless, staring up to where big, bright stars talked together of other matters than the affairs of mankind. She was disturbed, elated, unhappy—all in one.
The counsels of night and silence finally prevailed, and she slept. The cool wind came from a thousand miles of wandering over dim levels to ruffle her dark hair. Coyotes whimpered off on the edge of the world. Hilda slept soundly. But over near the fire a head of grizzled black-and-silver crinkles was lifted quietly from the blankets; Uncle Hank’s eyes gazed across to Hilda’s sleeping place long, with a puzzled, half-bewildered expression.
CHAPTER XIX
HILDA AND THE FLYING M’S
They came home next day at evening, everybody dog-tired, but happy. Out to the south, the men were working the cattle into the pastures. Hilda rode along up the avenue of box elders. She was glad to get home, yet it was hard to turn her back on a world in which Pearse might appear at one’s camp-fire of an evening, and to take up a permanent residence in the one house it seemed impossible he should ever visit.
Burch came thumping down the drive on his pony, full of talk about his new lathe that had just come from Fort Worth and was a dandy!