“Looks like it,” chuckled the old man, as the blue roan finally made his point and sent Buster over his head, then ran snorting in circles. “In about—well, about a year, Pettie, when this feller’s had plenty of cutting work and range riding—he’ll be fit for a lady’s use. Whoa, there—Buck!” as his rope circled the horse’s neck. “Let me try him. Now, Pettie, you’ll see your Uncle Hank get a fall.”
The boys held the roan; Hank eased quickly into the saddle, where he brought to bear a strange skilled gentleness he had with horses which had often calmed even an outlaw, and which saw him safely through this time, though more than once the boys whooped that he was “pulling leather.”
Hilda watched enviously, until he dismounted after half an hour’s struggle, horse and man dripping with sweat and trembling with exhaustion, but the first stage of Creeping Mose’s education fairly completed.
For a lady’s use! She would have liked to shout to him that she was not a lady—that she never expected or intended to be one, if it meant that she had to ride only horses that a baby would be safe on. A year, indeed! But she said nothing. She still had that habit of dreaming things—dramatizing what she would have liked to say in her own mind, instead of saying it.
In the old days it would have been The Boy-On-The-Train who tamed Creeping Mose, with a turn of the wrist. But now, all the time she sat on the corral fence watching Uncle Hank handle the wild, courageous thing, she was thinking of Pearse as she’d known him in the days of the cyclone cellar, in that snatched visit on the trail coming back with the Jacox cattle. Pearse was on a ranch. He was the kind to do whatever he did better than those about him did it. As usual, she just put Pearse in Uncle Hank’s place on the blue roan’s back, had him take rather more risks, and couldn’t keep from clapping her hands when he came through gloriously.
Uncle Hank glanced up, caught her glowing eyes fixed on him, and looked a little startled. She climbed down and walked soberly away. After all, the cyclone cellar was the place to indulge in dreams of Pearse. She was glad now that she’d never shared the secret of her retreat with Burch—or with any one.
It was Sam Kee who helped her carry down the old desk that she put in there, and she even made the Chinaman leave it in the outer cellar, not removing the shielding boxes she kept piled over its door till he was back in the kitchen, tugging the heavy piece of furniture along the narrow passage by herself. Book after book had drifted down from the shelves upstairs to be added to those she kept in a row on the desk top; pictures that took her fancy were tacked up all around; she used to slip away to this retreat at certain times to read a little, write less and dream much. Stolen hours, these, when Burch or Aunt Val or Uncle Hank may have thought she was out for a ride or gone to one of the neighbors.
And these dreams of Pearse, in the dim, brown-walled, dusky, shut-away, little chamber, were about all she had left of him. Not quite, for though he’d never written, as he promised he would, neither had he forgotten her. Every Christmas and every birthday brought some gift to her from him. The first Christmas after the drive there came to her, by the hand of a freighter, a splendid Navajo blanket. Everybody but Uncle Hank wondered over it. The old man asked no questions. He knew it must have come from that one to whom she had lent the Sunday pony, with Charley’s bridle and saddle.
When the beautiful thing disappeared from Miss Val’s couch, where it had been spread, and noisy inquiries stirred up the entire household, Uncle Hank again expressed no surprise. Hilda had carried the blanket down to the cyclone cellar. It covered the lounge which had been Pearse’s bed. Captain Snow slept on it and filled it with white cat hairs that Hilda carefully brushed off. When the next Christmas brought a quirt and Mexican hackamore of gayly colored and braided horsehair, she refused to put them to sordid use and, after a time, they followed the blanket, hanging on the wall over the lounge. She had a great delight in them. Was not their presence there, their color and beauty, so lovingly, painstakingly wrought, visible evidence that he had not forgotten, any more than she had?
The third year of Jacox’s imprisonment saw his release by an indulgent governor. When Tracey came forth a free man, more than four thousand cattle of his brand would trail out of the Three Sorrows pastures—for the herd had prospered greatly. Hank had bought a few cows, here and there, judiciously, where he heard of a bargain; but despite this fact, the departure of the Jacox herd unexpectedly soon would leave the ranch greatly understocked. The manager realized that he would need to find other cattle to take on the shares in order to fill up, and he was glad to receive a proposition from Colonel Lee Marchbanks of Encinal County, New Mexico, who wrote to say that the range out there had failed badly from drouth, and he would like to pasture a herd of probably two thousand of his Flying M stock cattle on the Sorrows, where he knew the grass was unfailing. Sitting in the office, Uncle Hank showed that letter to Hilda; the old man kept to his idea of making her as full a partner in the running of the ranch as a girl of her age could be.