At the station the agent came out as she rode up; looked very hard at her and called the time. Indifferently, it flitted through her mind; oh, yes, all those telegrams had come through his hands. Of course, he knew. He understood who this was she was meeting. She tied her ponies to the rack and began walking up and down.
She couldn’t be still. She looked at her watch every few minutes, tried to make a game counting her steps. Some men rode up, dismounted, and went into the office; people she’d never seen before. There were a lot of new folks around now. The railroad brought them, maybe. The clicking of the instrument in there, sound of voices; she made her path a little farther away, so that she shouldn’t hear, so that it might not interfere with her thoughts, then, in a panic, was afraid she might be too far off when the train arrived, came back and found a box a little way up the track, where she could sit down and wait.
All at once she knew she was tired. There by the track, the sky a great blue span above her, she dropped into a musing so deep that time went swiftly by; it seemed but a moment when there was a little speck far off on the horizon, coming nearer. Suddenly, and strangely, she was the little girl Hilda, waiting for Uncle Hank on the door-stone. No—that little moving speck, far off and coming nearer, wasn’t Uncle Hank on Buckskin. That was Pearse’s train. Swiftly it grew; there was a humming now, a puff of smoke, the diminished hoot of the whistle.
“She’s going to stop. Some one to get off.” The station agent had come out with those other men. He was hanging a mail bag on the crane. The train was pulling in. Pearse was here!
Under three pairs of curious eyes—those that might look from the train didn’t count—they shook hands. Nothing really said till they got over to the buckboard, and then Hilda, as he helped her in, the happiness of it all looking out of her shining eyes, glowing on her cheeks, whispered:
“It was awfully good of you, Pearse, to come so soon. I was afraid, when I wrote you, that you wouldn’t—”
“Did you write me a letter?” Pearse stopped, looking up at her. “What did it say?”
“Oh—just explained that I couldn’t stay any longer at the Marchbankses’ and asked you to come over here instead. Why, Pearse—if you didn’t get it, how did you know to come?”
Pearse laughed a little, circled the buckboard, and got in on the other side, taking up the lines she offered him, and starting the ponies.
“You seem to think I need a good deal of bringing, Hilda,” still smiling. Then, after a quick, sidelong glance at her face, where the lowered lashes made a sweeping dusk against flaming cheeks, “I don’t. But I wish I’d had your letter too.”