But, once settled in the car, sunk in her own thoughts, she found that the people in the other seats or passing in the aisles were almost like shadows. Even the Marchbankses out there at the ranch, in that queer breakfast at dawn, Mrs. Marchbanks and Maybelle stealing down for it in wrappers, sitting with her under the colonel’s watchful eye, hadn’t been real people. They all swung in a sort of dream. Mrs. Marchbanks’s little signals to her when the man at the end of the table wasn’t looking—that trying to get in a word alone with her before the final good-by. What did it matter? Maybelle’s anxious, apologetic whisper that she’d tried to find out what Pa said in his telegram—guessed it was just a notification to the folks at the Sorrows of Hilda’s unexpected return—got little attention. Fayte wasn’t at the table. Probably he hadn’t come back from Juan Chico.
But, when they’d driven the miles in to the station, the colonel hardly speaking a word to her on the way, they didn’t see anything of Fayte there, either—and Hilda felt sure that the colonel was both disappointed and angry at that. He was angrier still when she openly posted with her own hand the note she had written to Pearse. Then they were checking her trunk; the colonel was having it brought close to the track where it could be loaded as soon as the train pulled in. Some one came hastily around the corner of the building, speaking to her as Miss Van Brunt, lifting his hat—the marshmallow man—the man who had stolen the ride with Maybelle on the way to the dance—the person Maybelle called Gene. In the morning light he looked more hard and objectionable even than she’d thought. His air was furtive. She moved back a step; he followed up, saying hurriedly:
“I didn’t mean to be rough last night when you butted in on my game. Of course I took you for Maybelle. How about her? She send me any word? Have her folks found out anything? What’s my chance to see her now?”
“What—what’s all this?” Marchbanks pounced on them from around the pile of baggage—he had heard every word. “Stop—wait, Hilda!”
The train roared in; her trunk—the only one to go—was hustled aboard.
“Hold on!” But she went past him. It was the conductor who helped her up the step, while he shouted “All aboard!” As the train moved out, she looked back to see the two men confronted. The wheels gathered speed. Soon the station was a toy house, those two she’d left beside the track just little vibrating dots—and finally they were out of sight.
Thump-thump of the wheels—the swift-flying landscape outside of the windows.... Time—place—were things that wavered, dissolved. She was again the little girl Hilda of nearly twelve years ago, on that journey from New York to Texas; her mother lying ill in a berth the porter had made up; all the people trying to be kind to them, but the Masterses seeming like own folks; Pearse’s mother sitting beside her mother, fanning the sufferer’s pale face, and her Boy-On-The-Train making himself a little girl’s hero. With this came more sense of reality than anything about her held. She could see it and feel it more vividly than she saw the conductor when he came through for her ticket now, or these other people about her in the seats of this other train.
Through the long day’s journey, the stopping and starting, the getting on and getting off of passengers at stations, Hilda lived over and over the few short days that Pearse Masters—in the flesh—had occupied in her life; the many long hours that he had been with her mentally. Why he’d always been there. He was one of the fundamental facts of existence—like Uncle Hank.
He had asked her to stay in Encinal County so he could see her—once again, anyway. She’d failed him. She hadn’t stayed. Well—but—she’d told him in that note why she couldn’t stay. And she fairly begged him to come right over to the Three Sorrows as quick as he could. Would he do it? And if he did.... How would it be when he came?
At the lowest of her depression she had a sick, cold clammy feeling that what she’d done—hiding Pearse in the cyclone cellar, and never telling Uncle Hank all these years; keeping him out of sight when she met him that night at the camp-fire, and again when she saw him on the trail the day the rustlers were at the ranch; not admitting to Uncle Hank when he talked to her on the door-stone that there was such a person as Pearse in Encinal County, and that his presence was the greater part of the reason for her wanting to go to the Alamositas to school—sometimes all this arrayed itself against her and seemed unforgivable. Then she’d excuse herself—and Pearse—by remembering how long ago most of it was. He was different now. She was different. Yet it was a very pale, spent Hilda who saw, for the first time, the roof-lines of the little new station out on the western edge of the Three Sorrows, who got up and followed with dragging step when a porter jerked her valises together and started out with them.