"Just what I say;" and she enumerated her reasons for considering it her duty to return to her lonely sister and the six pining children; and it was a matter of doubt whether Johnny's lips quivered more during the recital, or Hetty's. But when the school-house was reached, Johnny was a man again; and if he did blubber out loud when he told his elder brother of it, late in the evening, down by the big gate, nobody but Frank heard him, and his lips were rather white when next he spoke.
"You asked me for that Mexican saddle of mine some time ago, Johnny. You are welcome to it."
"I don't want no Mexican saddle," replied Johnny, in a surly tone, and without grammar; but looking into his brother's face, he said, "Thank you, Frank. I'd say you're 'bully,' only Hetty said it wasn't a nice word."
In the course of the week Father Sutton, in his character as such, and as school director, was made acquainted with Hetty's intention. In both characters he protested at first, but yielded at last. He walked out with "the gal" one evening, as though to take her over the ranch for the last time, and then artfully dodged away when Frank—by the merest accident—came to join them. Left alone with this young man, Hetty trembled, as she had learned to tremble under his mother's scowling looks and half-spoken sentences. He spoke quietly, at first, of her going away; but her very quietness seemed after a while to set him all on fire.
"Hetty," he cried, "are you then so anxious to go—so unwilling to stay, even for a day, after the school closes? Is there nothing—is there no one here you regret to leave behind you?"
Poor little Hetty! How they had praised her for her heroism once. There was no praise due her then, as she had protested again and again. Now she was the heroine, when she answered, though with averted face and smothered voice, "Nothing—no one;" adding, quickly, "you have all been so kind to me that naturally I shall feel homesick for the Yedral Ranch, and shall be so glad to see any of you when you come to the city."
Frank had heard "the tears in her voice," and though he turned from her abruptly, it was not in anger, as she fancied.
"Father," he said, a day or two later, "I don't know but I'll take a run over the mountains, now harvesting is over, and there seems nothing particular for me to do."
"Please yourself and you'll please me, Frank," was the answer. "Got any money? You kin git it when you want it."
Then there was nothing more said about the journey, and Frank, making no further preparations, seemed to have forgotten all about it.