“Don’t feel as if any skulking Door-imps or Barrel-tops would be likely to pester you? Reckon mebbe Daniels and his men has scared away all that sort of cattle—hey?”
Hilda laughed a little nervously, yet relieved—why what a world away was the girl who had been afraid of such things!
“I’ll be all right,” she declared. “I’ve got something—I’ve got a—”
“—A story to read,” supplied Hank, out of ample experience. And, with a sense of guilt upon her, Hilda let the matter go at that.
And it turned out to be a story after all, only she heard it instead of reading it.
CHAPTER XIV
SOME ONE RIDES AWAY
Pearse came on Sunday. That was great luck. Great luck, too, that Uncle Hank should have happened to be at the house when the sheriff rode in with his posse. He might just as likely have been out somewhere on the range; for though he tried to keep Sunday on the Three Sorrows, where the business of life deals with living creatures—cattle—there will be acts of necessity and mercy—the ox to be gotten out of the ditch, and that sort of thing. But he’d been there, and he’d saved the day, for her and for Pearse—though he didn’t know it himself. Then, as soon as he’d done so, Hilda did wish he’d go off to the Spring Creek pasture and leave her the place clear. Yes, she’d heartily wished that—and never noticed that it was the first time in all her life that Uncle Hank’s presence had, for any reason, been unwelcome. She had finally to take her chance, while he was in the house, to steal down to Pearse to tell him all about the sheriff and set his mind at rest.
“Well,” he said quietly, “if they’re thrown off the track for a little while, that ought to be enough. I didn’t do what they think I did. They’ll find the right man. It was this way, Hilda: I camped Friday night out toward Wild Horse canyon, with three men. I didn’t very much like their looks and they weren’t giving any names.”
“How did they look, Pearse? Describe them,” Hilda interrupted; and when he’d done so, they were identified in her mind as Fayte Marchbanks’s three Romero cousins. Some time during the night Pearse’s horse got away. He felt sure now that one of those three men must have taken off the hobbles and turned it loose, or more probably led it to some near-by place of hiding and picketed it on a short rope, for in the morning they all got out and helped him hunt for it, and that hadn’t been the way they acted the night before, by any means. Also they talked a great deal about feeling to blame for the loss of his mount and wanting to help him out. So they gave him a led pony that they had with them, explaining that it had a broken shoe and he’d better ride easy, turn in at the first ranch he came to which had a blacksmith’s outfit and get the pony re-shod. He did this, but fortunately before he’d told that ranchman his errand, the man offered him the information that a sheriff’s posse was out after cattle thieves and that, in lifting the cattle, these thieves had killed a man and stolen a pony with a broken shoe.
He saw the plot then, but it was too late to turn back. He rode all day Saturday, trying to push on to the Three Sorrows. Finally, Saturday night, he abandoned the pony whose broken shoe left a trail that the officers would follow, and in the morning had drifted in, across pastures, to the bank by the spring at the asequia, when he looked up and saw two black eyes staring at him right out of the side of a hill.