“I wonder why you didn’t get it.”
“Oh, I wouldn’t have got it. You say you posted it at the station? It wouldn’t have gone out to the ranch till night; one of the boys always rides in and fetches the mail in the evening; and when evening came I was in Juan Chico. You know what a little town like that is—everybody’d heard of your having gone home. Fayte had talked, too, when he came in to send that telegram, about how I’d been at the Alamositas in the small hours, with a led horse, to steal you.”
Hilda’s heart leaped guiltily at the words.
“But,” she began hastily, “but the colonel knows better than that, now. He knows who it was came to the ranch that night. It was by mistake the man got my window instead of Maybelle’s. It”—she stared down at her fingers, speaking in a very small voice—“it was awfully silly of me to think you’d come back and throw gravel on my window; but I’d been asleep, and—before that—I’d just finished writing my letter to you; and you know how confused everything is when you’re waked up suddenly that way. I heard it, and—I ran down—and never realized till he spoke that it wasn’t you—that it couldn’t have been you, of course.”
“Oh—it couldn’t have been me, of course—eh?” Pearse echoed, his voice a little unsteady. And then, for a long moment, there was no sound but the quick, soft thud of the horses’ hoofs.
“We”—Hilda tried to speak in a nice, practical tone—“we’re sensible, aren’t we, Pearse?”
“I suppose we are,” Pearse conceded, a bit grudgingly. “And I’ve got to see your people, and—”
“Yes, of course,” Hilda broke in nervously. “That’s what I said in my letter. I asked you to come over and have the little talk you spoke of—and make friends with Uncle Hank.”
“You’re still thinking that it will be making friends?” Pearse stiffened a bit, and pulled the horses down to a slower pace. “More likely that Pearsall and I will never have anything to do with each other, Hilda; that it’ll have to be you and me—or you and him.” Then, slackening the lines so that the horses went forward faster, “Colonel Marchbanks and Gene Denner fought all over the station platform. Everybody knows now who was at the Alamositas that night, and what girl he was after—everybody but the Marchbankses did know already about Maybelle’s affair with that fellow.”
“Oh, but it’s different with us,” Hilda’s voice failed at the end of that statement. She had no words to answer as Pearse asked softly, looking straight ahead,