“Thank God. I’m all right, then.”
“Yes,” said Hilda. “I’ll take care of you.”
“Is your father in the house? Can you bring him down here?”
They were sitting on opposite sides of the box table, the candle between them sending up its flame very tall and straight and steady. When the boy said this Hilda’s little peaked face looked suddenly white, because the eyes became bigger and darker with the dilation of their pupils. She locked her hands hard together in her lap to keep from sobbing outright in her excitement. She reminded herself of the dust on his clothes, the feeling of his hand when she had taken it to drag him past Sam Kee. There was nothing to be so dreadfully frightened about. After a long time—the boy watching her, puzzled and uneasy—she got her voice under control.
“Didn’t you know my father was dead?” she asked, very low. “He was killed in a roundup seven years ago, and there’s nobody to look after my brother and me and the ranch—and even Aunt Val—but Uncle Hank.”
The newcomer sat perfectly still a moment, staring blankly. Slowly the bright head went down on his arms, his shoulders began to heave.
Hilda gazed with an agony of repressed pity at that prone, boyish head. The young fellow seemed to her a man, and his grief a thing to shake the foundations. Her hand longed to steal out and touch him, but she drew it back. She looked about the dark little plank-walled chamber, lit by its one candle. With a start of something so alien that it was almost distaste, her eye encountered Rose Marie’s saucy, smiling beauty over among the shadows of one corner. Yet the big, somber burden of Hilda’s yearning sympathy was played upon, shot through and through and lightened by delectable, rosy shafts. It was so very real; it was so very dear to be of use—to be of great use. With instinctive tact she took no notice of her guest’s outburst, but crept away to take the dishes to Sam Kee. Returning, she gave considerate warning with a little fumble at the inner door, and when she entered caught up Rose Marie and thrust her out of sight (a gesture as significant in its way as, in an earlier day, was the investing of the Roman lad with the toga virilis) this was no affair for dolls. She edged into the seat across from the fugitive. Presently he raised his head and spoke:
“Hilda” (somehow his use of her name startled her), “those men are after me—if they get their hands on me—I guess they’ll hang me.”
“Oh,” breathed Hilda, and the dream began to draw away.
“I remembered that Three Sorrows was right over here in Lame Jones County”—yes, that’s just what he said: “I remembered that the Three Sorrows was right over here in Lame Jones County,” and Hilda’s eyes grew bigger as she gazed at him. Her breath began to come short.