Hilda had brought down needles and thread and was doing her best to make a neat job of mending his coat while they talked.
“Where’s Burch?” Pearse asked suddenly, as they heard the thin, penetrating echo of Sam Kee’s gong from upstairs and Hilda got unwillingly to her feet. “He must be a good-sized boy by now. Think maybe you’d better tell him about me? He could help you, couldn’t he?”
“Burch is in Fort Worth with Aunt Val,” said Hilda, and was thrillingly glad it was so—that she, Hilda, alone, could do anything for the blessed Boy-On-The-Train. “Aunt Val’s the aunt I told you about, that came out after you people had left Denver. Papa sent for her to come to Texas with us. She doesn’t like it on the ranch. I must run now. Are you all right? I’ll bring you down some supper. Sam Kee will give it to me. Sam was splendid with the sheriff.”
As Hilda had expected, the Chinaman was willing enough to give her a good meal for her fugitive, but before she got it smuggled down to him she almost hated Uncle Hank for being so much in the way. There was the later adventure of stealing down with some bedding, and assuring Pearse that he’d be free of the house as soon as Uncle Hank left. He seemed deathly tired and almost careless of what might come if he could only rest.
That was Sunday night. And after Sunday—Monday comes. You can’t help it. It’s just that way. They string the days of the week together without any regard for people’s feelings—or even the necessities of the case. How could she go to school on Monday and leave Pearse there hidden in the cyclone cellar? Of course, Sam Kee would never tell; also, the Chinaman had furnished food enough to last through the day: But it was like parting soul from body to ride away from the Three Sorrows that morning, to turn her back on what might chance, to give up hours with her fugitive that might have been hers.
At school, Miss Belle found she had a strange Hilda in her classes. The banner pupil was inattentive; no statement seemed to get through to that mind, which her teacher knew to be usually so quick. A book before her, motionless, apparently scarcely breathing, Hilda sat at her desk, the image of a very studious little girl. But she did not use the slate and pencil that lay under her hand; she did not see the printed lines before her. What if the ranch house at the Three Sorrows should burn down while she was away? It was a stone house—but couldn’t stone houses burn? The things in them could, anyhow. What if Sam Kee fell suddenly ill and, in his extremity, “confessed all” to Uncle Hank? What if she, Hilda, were thrown from her pony on the way home and broke a leg—no, turned an ankle—that was more like the girls in stories—well, what if she turned an ankle and lay helpless and couldn’t get down to see after Pearse? What would become of him?
Her mind flew wildly to her aunt. If Miss Val had been at home would she have dared to trust her with Pearse’s secret? Aunt Val hadn’t met Mr. and Mrs. Masters, but they were her sort of people; she would think that a boy brought up as Pearse had been couldn’t be a cattle thief. Well—Uncle Hank would think so too if he knew Pearse. But there was that way Pearse had looked when he heard Uncle Hank’s name. She tried to forget it. It was too bad when people you were so fond of wouldn’t like each other.
And of course it had to be that afternoon that visitors came to the school. It was only Mrs. Capadine and the new Capadine foreman’s wife; but Miss Belle wanted to show off the school, so she called on Hilda Van Brunt, as she always did at such times. And Hilda disgraced herself. Worse—she disgraced Miss Belle and the school. Three times she said “I don’t know,” and one of those times the question was such that any baby would have known the answer. Miss Belle was asking it that way to make it easy.
As a last resort Hilda’s teacher called on her to recite—“speak a piece” they called it when they mentioned it on the playground. You’d think that was the thing she could do in her sleep. She loved Friday afternoons because of the speaking. She now, standing in front of them all, dashed nervously into:
“The stag at eve had drunk his fill—”