“Show it to you as soon as we get to the house,” he said. “Aunt Val let me set it up in the office. That makes a good place to work.”
“Buddy—go see the live things we brought up from Sandoval County,” Hilda laughed at him, “things that don’t have to be turned out on a lathe—nearly three thousand of them. Uncle Hank and I counted—or, rather, Uncle Hank counted and I tallied; but the count stands on my tally. What do you think of that?”
Sam Kee stood grinning in the doorway to welcome her. Miss Valeria got up from her rocking chair and fluttered forward to the sitting-room door to give her grand-niece a ladylike kiss.
“My dear, how brown you are!” she exclaimed, holding the girl off a moment to look her over. “You’re burnt like an Indian!”
And that was all that Miss Valeria Van Brunt could see of any change in Hilda.
With the coming in of the Jacox cattle, existence at the Three Sorrows took on a richer note. The price of beef could never rule this mortal life there quite so cruelly again.
Summer followed spring; ripened to the tan of autumn; the snow fell; it melted in the sun of spring; and so on, around the circle of the year four times, while their indiscreet owner paid his debt to justice between stone walls. On the good feed of the Sorrows, and under Hank’s management, the herd increased much in value. “The third calf,” which belonged to the Sorrows for their pasturage, represented a very handsome profit indeed.
In spite of his niggardliness in the matter of “language,” old Hank Pearsall held his men as no other ranch manager in the neighborhood was able to do. The Texas Panhandle of that day was a frontier of drifting personalities. When you said “neighborhood,” you meant several counties. The Capadine ranch, the McGregor place, the big Matador—a hacienda that had Spanish proprietors—in eleven years every one of these had shifted the personnel of its working household entirely; but on the Sorrows payroll were still old Snake Thompson, Shorty O’Meara, and Buster. Thompson, taciturn and unrelated to his kind, a sort of fragment of a human character, who seemed to show the marks of some early shipwreck of the emotions, put forward that he had “had enough wives,” whatever that might mean. He had been away from the ranch only three or four times, and then briefly. It was understood among the other cowpunchers that Snake, on these excursions, prosecuted some sort of spree of his own; but no resident of Lame Jones County had ever participated in these relaxations of the old man’s.
Shorty, four years married to a young niece of Mrs. MacGregor who came out from Scotland to visit at the Cross K, had a bunch of cattle of his own and some land that adjoined both the Sorrows and the Cross K. His cattle ran with the Three S brand, and Shorty himself was as near a foreman at the Sorrows as could well have been under so active a manager as Pearsall.
Buster, a lad of eighteen when the Van Brunts arrived, had several times collected the wages due him and gone ambling away, singing, to some other job. But he had always returned. “Sumpin’ about the old Sorrers that sorter draws a feller,” was his explanation. He had had a number of highly interesting love affairs. Finally, by the way of answering an advertisement, he had entered upon a long, carefully concealed correspondence with a young lady somewhere in the east. When he had pursued this exciting courtship for some months, forbearing to draw a dollar of wages beyond such as went for cigarettes, he again rode away,—money in pocket. He wrote once to Hilda, who had been his only confidante, saying that he was married, that She was the loveliest, the best and the most charming being in the world, and he the happiest. When he came back, which he did nearly a year later, Buster looked much older than the lapse of time alone warranted, and he laughed less frequently and was heard, on occasion, to give utterance to some cynical opinions.