A Girl of the Plains Country

								

“No, Mr. Van Brunt; I’ll pay the forfeit. It’s me that’s ruing back
on a contract with the Matador, not you. I’ll stay.” Then, after a
pause, “I thought likely I’d have to—that is, if you wanted me—that
first day driving down from Mesquite. I’m all set to stay. That’s
settled. We’ll say no more about it.”

                            CHAPTER III



                          THE FIRING SQUAD

Domestic existence at the Three Sorrows was, in those days, a very
unsettled affair. Came the day that sullen Chinaman left. Charles
Van Brunt had ridden to Mesquite. All the boys were out on the range
and the baby was asleep upstairs. Hilda and Aunt Val were alone with
the problem. The little girl stood by, while to Miss Van Brunt’s
protests, which finally came to be almost hysterical, the yellow man
made brief response: “No can do. Velly lonesome.” And though the
lady pleaded with him for quite a distance down the long avenue of
box elder and black locust, he walked stolidly away in those
boat-shaped shoes of his. His lips were tightly shut, his blouse
tightly buttoned across a resolute bosom, and his queue tightly
coiled around a skull which housed the working machinery of a mind
with which poor Aunt Val had never been able to establish
communication, nor Hilda to get upon friendly terms.
Uncle Hank himself got supper that evening, but he remarked somewhat
humorously that he couldn’t spare himself to cook. He persuaded
Missouri into donning an apron and going to work in the kitchen.
“Why don’t they get another Chink?”, the cowboy grumbled.
“Well, as I understand it, they have wrote somewheres for one, but
they haven’t heard yet,” said Pearsall.
“No, nor they won’t,” was Missouri’s opinion. “A Chink’s plumb shy
of one of these here lonesome ranches. I bet I’m in for a life
sentence,” for a ranch rider hates to cook.
Nothing that really could have been called a neighborhood existed in
the cattle country of the Lame Jones County of that day, yet the Van
Brunts had not been at the Three Sorrows a week before there was an
invitation for Miss Valeria to bring Hilda and Burch to spend the
day at the Capadine ranch, six miles east of them, and enjoy the
company of Clark Capadine, Jr., and the ranch’s young guests, the
two Marchbanks children. Shorty drove them over in the buckboard—a
vehicle Hilda approved of far more than the shiny closed carriage at
home in New York.
To Hilda that visit was a first introduction into the life of her
peers as she was to find it from that time on. Clarkie Capadine was
a good-natured boy of ten, whom Hilda would have liked very much if
she had been capable that day of any natural or comfortable
sentiments. But the Marchbanks boy, an advanced person whose name
was Lafayette, shortened and pronounced in the Southern fashion,
“Fayte,” scorned her utterly. He scorned also his sister Maybelle,