On Anna's return from the bathing pool she said softly to her mother, "Willie isn't at the creek. Perhaps he has run off."
"O child, don't bother me about Willie! He'll run back again fast enough, he's that scared of the mountains and the trees."
Anna was conscious of an undercurrent of sympathy with the forlorn waif her father had brought from the city some months before. The very love and awe with which the mountains filled her imaginative soul gave her comprehension of the fear with which they imbued the dull-witted offspring of San Francisco gutters.
Willie did not return all that long, August day. The captain and his American wife spread and dipped prunes busily on the hot south slope. The box-laden wagon rolled by at intervals. Household duties went helter-skelter under Anna's management. At six o'clock Mrs. Schulz, hot and tired, wakened her lazy little daughter, outstretched beneath the hollyhocks and poppies in the small front garden.
"For gracious sake, Anna! Hurry! You've not done the dinner dishes!"
"Have the cows come?" Anna asked, resourcefully.
"Land! If I hadn't forgotten about Willie! Come—hurry! You'll have to go for the cows. I'll wash the dishes."
Anna felt quite in the mood to go for the cows. It meant an hour or so of patting barefooted and bare headed along the soft dust of the road, or over the slippery brown grass of the mountain pastures, with tall pines on every hand and a gold-blue sky above.
She mused about the missing Willie. Had he carried out his occasional threat to run away?
"The road is open, go when you like," was her father's one reply to such futile outbursts. But they well knew the road was not open to Willie. The six mountain miles intervening between their ranch and the station formed an impassable barrier to his timorous soul.