The letter was sent. She could not put it into the general mail. The secrecy she felt obliged to maintain brought some small twinges of conscience; yet it contributed an added thrill, too. She gave the missive to Sam Kee and asked him to post it when he went in to Dawn the next day.
There followed a time of anxious waiting. It seemed to Hilda that discovery would be certain if the letter came after she was gone and had to be forwarded. It worried her all the time she was getting ready, but the day before Colonel Marchbanks was due from Amarillo an envelope, addressed to Hilda in the fine, bold hand, arrived. As Uncle Hank sorted the letters over and apportioned them, she felt that the appearance of this one must shout aloud to him the name and all the marvelous, romantic history of its writer. She snatched it so swiftly that she had to be called back to get a magazine and picture postal card which completed her portion. It was only in her own room, with the door locked, that she dared open and read. It began abruptly:
“Well, Hilda, I’m afraid you and I can see very little of each other while you’re in Encinal County. So far as I am concerned, you might almost as well be at the Three Sorrows.”
Hilda stopped there. She wasn’t going to cry. Nothing to cry about. Her glance came back to the letter. There was one more sheet. She turned the page and read:
“I probably didn’t make it clear to you about how I stand with the Marchbanks family. I get along without the people at the Alamositas, and they worry along without me; I couldn’t go to see you there, Hilda, or take rides with you, and I think you will stand better with them if you don’t tell them that you and I are friends—or acquainted at all, for that matter.”
At about this point of the reading, Hilda raised her head and looked around. Her eyes were bright and dry, and her cheeks glowed like fire. This was Pearse’s answer to her childish, impulsive letter, to the reminders of the time she sheltered him in the cyclone cellar. Hilda was as generous as an Arab. She didn’t want his gratitude—but, oh, she burned with an intolerable humiliation at this lack of return for her friendship! And yet the letter was not unfriendly. In conclusion, he spoke earnestly, urgently, of the value of a good education; said how sorry he was that his own had been broken off early, and how it delighted him to know that she was to have better opportunities than his had been. This was the closing paragraph:
“I was awfully sorry to learn from your letter that you were so lonely, and had no young friends. But your coming over to the Alamositas will make that all right. They say Maybelle’s a very nice girl, and I hear they have a great deal of young company at the ranch; only, little girl as you are, I’m glad Fayte Marchbanks isn’t at home now, or likely to be back, it seems, while you are there. He’s not the sort of fellow for you to make a friend of.”
That was about all. He hadn’t thought worth while to say anything about the books she wanted to discuss with him. He might have written about them. They could have corresponded while she was at the Alamositas, anyhow. She drew her wounded girl’s pride about her with the declaration that she would never mention Pearse again to any one, never write to him again nor make any effort to see him. Then she thought miserably that this was what he had advised her to do in the letter. Her heart sank to the ultimate zero.
Meantime Hank had his own worries. A year’s stay on a big, prosperous ranch like the Alamositas, within easy distance of more than one small New Mexican town—and he knew well how it went with young folks in a ranching community, where it is out of the question to draw any hard-and-fast social line. Quick courtships—even the ill-considered marriages of boys and girls who were scarcely more than children—those were the things that came about under such an arrangement. He was full of anxiety for his girl; she must not be sent unwarned into that sort of thing. He finally mustered up courage to go to Miss Valeria and say that, under the circumstances, he felt she ought to talk to Hilda about “goin’ with the boys” and such things before they let her leave for New Mexico.
The little lady listened to him with a bewildered air, which finally gave way to an embarrassed laugh. When he’d said his say, she dismissed the whole matter airily with: