Colonel Jack Peyton smiled and pranced away on his gold-dust sorrel, without the least suspicion that he had just made an appearance and uttered a speech that would, by comparison, leave all after efforts of his life vain and useless.
Meantime, the surprise and approval which The-Boy-On-The-Train’s understudy had bespoken, had answered the announcement. Uncle Hank, quietly leading in Buckskin, was met and hailed and pounded on the back, as he made his way toward the grand stand, where a small girl with very large dark eyes stood up on the seat and unconsciously cried aloud her inmost heart, mopping the tears from her face with a rag-doll’s gamboge hair.
CHAPTER XII
THE FUGITIVE
After that roping match, on the ranch of the Three Sorrows—a small island of human life and interests, surrounded on every side by a sea of grass whose fishes were cattle—year followed year until five had been added to the number of them, and Hilda was thirteen.
The carriage, now a sober, elderly vehicle, had carried Miss Val and Burchie many times as far as Mesquite on their journeyings to Fort Worth, for Miss Val—who was now frankly the invalid—found there at the sanitarium a system of baths and massage which she said helped her neuralgia very much. But it never helped it enough to let her live at the ranch more than a month or so at a time, and Burch she must have with her. She put him in a Fort Worth school and said she’d keep him under the doctor’s observation till he should be perfectly sound.
To anybody else’s notion but hers, he had been that for a long time. It appeared there had never been anything the matter with his hearing; anyhow, he was now a particularly well-grown boy for his years, still silent, and with that air he might have inherited from his father, or caught from Aunt Val, of being just a visitor at the ranch. He never seemed to belong to it—or it to him. Hardly any of the things Hilda cared most for were of interest to Burch.
Of course, he was off there in Fort Worth during the “Winter of the Big Snow,” that heart-breaking season which followed the blizzard that marooned Uncle Hank and Hilda on the Bar Thirteen. The Three Sorrows had been provided, as well as Uncle Hank could provide, against such a happening with stacks of the coarse laguna hay; but Hilda would never forget that time when, kept home from school by the weather, she tried to help with the poor weak cows that pawed at the frozen snow without being able to get through to anything they could eat, or licked it without being able to get anything they could drink. Uncle Hank said she worked like a little Trojan, and from that year she felt herself more and more increasingly his right hand.
So the brother to whom she wrote dutiful letters, whenever she wrote to Aunt Val, and who soon began to send her back short answers that were rather better written and spelled than her own, came to cut little figure in her life of work and play. At school there were companions of her own age to contend against, confide in—boys and girls who lived the ranch life. And there was always The-Boy-On-The-Train to remember. In all this time, Hilda had never forgotten him. He seemed more real in some ways than Burch or Aunt Val or any one or anything that had belonged to the old life. All else that concerned that time got dim and changed; he remained the one who was always just right—the one who could do no wrong.
But when there is a live boy, like Kenny Tazewell or Clarke Capadine, at hand to ride races with, how then? Does one forget the absent—at least while the hot blood is drumming in one’s ears, and every trick that Uncle Hank has taught is needed to keep the pony going straight, to stay on him and avoid dog-holes? We-ell, maybe so. But when the there-present boy wins, and isn’t very nice about it, and there might be some suspicion that he didn’t ride fairly, ah, then one recalls with pride and joy The-Boy-On-The-Train, the being without fault, the dweller in the fair mirage-land of memory, who could be nothing less than noble and generous!
He would never have ridden the faster pony. He would be incapable of crowding one in so close to the fence that it was pull up or be scraped off—and that, too, after treacherously offering that side of the road in all appearance of good faith. No, no! Far otherwise. He would have brought the proud-crested barb, or the milk-white palfrey swifter than the steeds of dawn, or the coal-black stallion eagle-winged, for his lady to ride. He would have helped her on, resigned the best place, and smiled when her mount outran his’n—oh, well, then, his.