Spring came along while Aunt Val and Burchie were in Fort Worth.
Think of it—think of being away when that happened! Hilda wouldn’t have missed it for anything. For she knew that this country of the Staked Plain played a yearly prank. Throughout the long, dry summer it hid beneath the soft green-brown that clothes its mighty levels, dreaming delicate mist of dream, that showed to mortal eyes as mirage. In winter, it lay under the great reaches of snow. But on some magically determined day in spring, when you were not thinking of anything in particular, it suddenly burst out upon you and shouted, “Booh!”
“Booh!” cried the Texas plains of Lame Jones County (a place supposed by the foolishly learned to be a dry, windswept, featureless waste, almost desert) in a great voice that had no sound, and seemed to come from everywhere at once. And you looked about and said, “Why, you almost scared me!” You looked a long time and then you said, “How beautiful you are—oh, how beautiful! Where have you been all year?”
“Right here!” laughed the Texas plain. Its laugh was green, oh, green with pure joy, radiant with incredible stretches of blue and rose and gold—wild hollyhocks, cactus blooms, phlox—nodding, dancing in the April breeze.
Hilda was getting along without any knowledge of cities, except the London or New York of romance, or the Bagdad that came into a fairy tale. She’d never even been to Mesquite, for she and Uncle Hank turned back from the Bar Thirteen after that Christmas blizzard, and the old man found plenty of work on the Sorrows to keep him there. But who would ask for more? Her world was bounded by the great pastures that stretched out and away to the horizon; the foreground of existence was made up of the daily small happenings at school or around headquarters, as the low, rambling stone house was called. Visitors here were few and far between; the people of her home world were Sam Kee in the kitchen, the cowpunchers over at the bunk house, with Shorty O’Meara, Buster, Missou’ and Old Snake Thompson for prominent citizens and Uncle Hank for kindly ruler.
Sam Kee let her mix up things sometimes in his big clean kitchen. She propped Rose Marie beside her in a chair and read to the doll; or she drifted about the house murmuring verses or speeches from her favorite stories. Oh, she was happy at the ranch, with Uncle Hank—she sometimes felt guilty that she didn’t miss Aunt Val, or Burchie—or even her father—at all. Her mother’s memory was getting to be a dim thing, like a beautiful sweet dream that you tried to call back in the morning—and couldn’t.
When Uncle Hank shook his head a little once or twice and said he was afraid she was sort of running wild, she knew what he meant, but she didn’t tell him. It was her “personal appearance,” as Miss Belle had called it when she spoke to her on the matter. The truth is, it was getting harder and harder for Hilda to make herself neat for school. She looked at the great acres of hollyhock, phlox and daisies and wished that a little girl could just grow dresses as they did. There had been a big supply of clothing provided by her mother: so many linens, such a number of ginghams, and the heavier frocks in proportion. In Aunt Val’s time Hilda just picked out whatever she thought she’d like to wear and put it on. There was never any trouble about it then, only sometimes if she went down stairs in the morning wearing a little lace frock with ribbons and the open-work stockings and slippers that belonged to it, Aunt Val would send her back to her room again to put on something “more suitable.” But now, even Aunt Val was gone, and pretty much everything that had traveled to Texas in the big trunk was worn out, soiled, torn or getting too small for her.
She was growing to be a tall girl—“leggy” Shorty said, and Uncle Hank shook his head at him for the word. But there couldn’t be any doubt about it—her legs were getting longer. Sam Kee said the same thing when she complained that he must have shrunk the skirts of her dresses in the wash.
“No! No slink in wash.” He looked at her severely out of his slant black eyes. “Skirt no slunk. You stletch. You legs stletch fas’ now.”
“Well; I can’t help it.” Hilda had been on the point of tears.