A Girl of the Plains Country

								

have her social adventures in this direction curtailed would have
been trying.
The days that followed the arrival were strange, interesting ones.
Her father was wrapped in an obscurity of dejection and grief; Miss
Van Brunt was a victim of neuralgia which she declared the plains
wind had developed. The child had only the baby brother, with the
occasional companionship of Uncle Hank and some of the younger
cowboys; yet she made eager acquaintance with this new life; and it
was to the old man she came for information or to share with him her
joys.
“All the horses you ride are yellow ones, Uncle Hank, aren’t they?”
she asked him one evening when he came in from the range.
“Yes, honey, I’ve rode a buckskin pony for a good many years. I
reckon the folks wouldn’t hardly know me on any other color of hoss.
I sort of think they’re becoming to me—don’t you?”
“Oh, yes, very,” Hilda assured him gravely. “What’s this one’s
name?”
“Why, you see, I just call ’em all ‘Buckskin.’ It’s easiest.”
Sometimes he took her out for short rides, of an evening, holding
her before him on the saddle of the tall buckskin horse with a blaze
face, or the little dark buckskin pony that had a brown mane and
tail. Traveling in this fashion one evening across pastures she
pointed to a queer, humped object, sway-backed, with a ewe-neck, and
a rough coat of brindled hair that stuck up like the nap on a
half-worn rug.
“What’s that, Uncle Hank? It looks something like a calf.”
“’S a dogie, honey,” he explained, absently.
“A dogie,” the child repeated. “Dogies are a kind of animal I don’t
know. Is it wild, or tame?”
Pearsall laughed.
“You was right in the first place, sister,” he said. “That pore
little skeesicks is a calf. It lost its mother when it was too young
to eat grass rightly; so it sort of starves along, and gets stunted
and runted. We call ’em dogies. You’ll see one every once in a
while, round over the range. They’re no good to nobody—nor to
theirselves.”
“Oh,” said Hilda, under her breath.
A day or so later, finding her a bit drooping, Pearsall questioned:
“What’s the matter, sister? Is something worrying you?”
“Uncle Hank,” she explained, with some diffidence, “my heart is sad
about dogies. I saw two of them to-day, and my heart is sad about
them, ever since.”
(She had wanted to say, in the language of one of her favorite
ballads, “My heart is wae”; but judged that that might be a little
too much for her companion, and tried him with a simpler literary
form.)
“Is it, honey?” inquired the old man, easily. “Oh, I guess I
wouldn’t worry about ’em. Remember that we don’t ever butcher ’em,
nor even brand ’em.”
“That’s part of the sadness,” Hilda maintained, shaking her head.
“It’s just like I used to want to cry when I saw the little dwarfed