“This was a mighty long trip for a little girl like you—all the way from New York to Texas. Didn’t you get tired?”
“Oh, no,” said Hilda, earnestly drawing her towel between the tines of the iron fork she was wiping. “You see, there was a boy on the train that had blue eyes, like Burchie’s and mothers, and—and—” blushing furiously—“like yours, some. He was a big boy. At least he was a good deal bigger than me. His father and mother were there, too; they came all the way from New York to Denver in the train with us. And, oh, he was most interesting! When my mother got sick, the boy’s mother wouldn’t go on and leave us. They all stayed. And he—The-Boy-On-The-Train—he took care of Burchie and me when—when the funeral was. Aunt Val hadn’t got there, then.”
“That’s all, honey; we’re done, now,” said Pearsall. He saw that the child’s lips trembled as she stood fumblingly but determinedly rubbing dry the last cup. So he added, cheerfully, “We’ll set by the fire a spell before you go tuck yourself into bed.”
There was neither sound nor movement within the ambulance. Van Brunt did not return from his stroll downstream. These two, man and child, sat beside the camp-fire. Hilda’s big black eyes looked long into the great swallowing darkness of the plain, then she turned to her companion, who was filling his pipe.
“I don’t think I’d be afraid here,” she said, a little doubtfully.
“Sure not!” heartily. He skipped a coal lightly up in his bare fingers, made it light his pipe, and flipped it off again. “What would you be afraid of, sister?”
“Well,” slowly, and watching his face, “I don’t think there would be whiffenpoofs here.” He didn’t smile—she had been afraid he might. So she added the explanation, “You see, they mostly stay in dark halls and on stairways, whiffenpoofs do, and they grab you from behind.”
“No,” Uncle Hank shook his head decisively, “no whiffenpoofs here—if there is anywhere—which I doubt.”
“Oh, yes, they’re in houses.” Hilda was pretty firm about it. “And—” She hesitated, looked away from him, then shot him one of her shy glances before she went on haltingly—“And another reason I thought I wouldn’t be afraid here is that there aren’t any doors.”
He took the pipe out of his mouth, looked at it, then at her, and asked blankly: