“Well,” the teacher stood in the door watching the streaking figure of a little girl on a pony vanishing down the trail toward the Three Sorrows, “well—if that was any one else but Hilda Van Brunt I’d say she was putting it all on to get sent home. Maybe I needn’t have said three days—but Mr. Pearsall will know when he sees her.”
Oh, the confidence of the grown-up world that the youngsters they care for and look after are so easily understood! Hank, peering over his spectacles from Miss Belle’s little note, in which she said she found Hilda nervous and overexcitable, was afraid she wasn’t well, and thought maybe she’d better be kept home from school for two or three days’ rest, saw before him a Hilda whose eyes were big and almost wildly bright, whose cheeks flamed with unusual color. He laid two fingers against the hot curve of one.
“Feverish, Pettie?” he suggested.
“Aunt Val would say I had a temperature.” Hilda laughed a little excitedly. She hadn’t had to tell any story. All she needed to do was to keep still and let them fool themselves. She wouldn’t have done it for her own sake—but for her fugitive down there in the cyclone cellar anything was fair.
For five days Hilda stayed at home from school; and the boy, Pearse Masters, lay hid in the cyclone cellar. Hilda heard through the boys that Sheriff Daniels was still searching for him. It seemed the trap the Romero boys—if it was they—had laid with that broken-shoed pony still deceived the officers of the law. And Hilda’s behavior these days was queer enough to make Uncle Hank feel that she needed to be at home rather than in school. Most of the time when she was upstairs her heart was in her mouth, as the saying is, or anyhow so close to her mouth that it jumped right into it if some one spoke suddenly to her. The feeding of her captive, planning for his comfort, scouting for his safety, kept her at a nervous tension.
Pearse wasn’t nervous; he stood being cooped up in that little dark hole all day wonderfully. Whenever the coast was clear, and all the men off the place, she hurried down to him. She had scoured the office for checker and chess board, packs of Authors, a puzzle game or two that ought to be lying about somewhere. But mostly she and Pearse would just talk. To the girl of thirteen, this Boy-On-The-Train was, of course, different from the one she remembered as so wonderful, from the figure that had lived in her recollection all those years, having added to him a great many things that hardly belonged to a real, flesh-and-blood boy. He was a more experienced person than Hilda might have expected; he was as tall as a man, and better-looking, Hilda decided, than any one she had ever seen. He had an awfully interesting disposition; he could be merry and full of fun—but as hard as flint, too. He got that hard look in his eyes whenever she mentioned Uncle Hank. Well, then, the best way was not to talk about Uncle Hank to him at all. So they played checkers and told stories, and Pearse sent her upstairs for books she’d told him were on the shelves up there, but she hadn’t thought she’d like. And he read aloud to her from some of them—and, oh, she did love them!
But the one thing that was always right between Hilda and Pearse was their feeling for this beautiful plains country of the West. They both loved it! Like her, Pearse would rather ride than anything in the world. She was crazy to have him see the Three Sorrows in daylight; for you couldn’t get any idea of things at night, which was the only time he had to get out and move about; and, of course, he couldn’t have got any real view of the place that day he came in over it, afoot, half starved, parched with thirst, thinking only of some place to hide.
Finally, she did get Sam Kee to keep watch, when everybody else was out of the way, and she took Pearse out through the front door, all the way down the box-elder avenue to the trail, back again, around by way of the asequia, past the spring and the kitchen garden, to the corrals and stables, and out into the home pasture, where some of the best horses were.
He praised it all, as she had been so eager to hear him do. And Hilda had been anxious, without saying a word of the sort, to show him how well Uncle Hank managed and took care of them all. She was the more urgent about this, since she felt, down deep in her heart, that she didn’t actually want Pearse to meet Uncle Hank—this time. He’d come back some day, when all the tangles had been straightened out, and then—it was breathless, exciting to have him all her own guest, her responsibility—but, oh, she loved it!
And the long talks in the cyclone cellar, when he told her how he came to be adrift here in the western cattle country, heading for a job over on a New Mexico ranch—they were like chapters out of a story—a much more fascinating story than any in the books.