A Girl of the Plains Country

								

Marchbanks, they call him, now—is a rich man, I hear, over in New
Mexico. Jest leaving the kids with Mrs. Capadine while he brings out
his second wife from the east somewheres. I expect they’ll have a
fine lady for a mother when they go back.”
“Yes,” said Hilda, turning this information over slowly and
curiously in her mind. “I didn’t know that.” She stole a look over
her shoulder, through the open door, to where Miss Van Brunt,
dressed exactly as she had been used to dress back in her New York
home, sat reading a magazine. “Of course I have Aunt Valeria,” she
remarked hesitantly.
Hank’s glance followed hers; he crinkled up his eyes in a look that
was half smiling, half pitiful. Poor Miss Valeria always looked
somehow like a person who had come to stay for only a day or two.
The wind that whooped up over those great levels from the Gulf, and
brought life and refreshment with it on the hottest summer noon, the
wind that Hilda loved and made a playmate of, was to Miss Van Brunt
a terrible bugbear—a sort of standing accusation against the whole
west Texas country. When it blew three days on end, she went to bed
with a nervous headache. When the domestic affairs of the household
grew too puzzling, she went to bed with a headache, anyhow; one day
Hilda heard Buster say to Missouri in the kitchen, “This here
ranching proposition’s got the New York lady plumb buffaloed. Yet
she’s sort of game, too—so game she won’t holler. I like to watch
her not knowin’ what the mischief’s a-comin’ next, nor whichaway to
turn, and pretendin’ she’s plumb wise to the rules.”
“It would be impossible. We never did so in New York. The Van Brunts
do not do things that way.” These were Miss Valeria’s weapons of
defense, the statements with which she met and repelled clamorous
demands.
“Just a ladylike way of yellin’ ‘scat’ to the whole business,” said
Buster.
As for the outside affairs, a mere change of ownership was a small
matter, so long as Hank Pearsall’s experienced hand still guided
them, and they seemed to run smoothly enough. Charley Van Brunt,
too, lived at the ranch of the Three Sorrows, a guest—a quiet,
graceful guest—whose incompetence was a shield against
responsibility. He endeared himself at once to his men by the
unvarying courtesy and sweetness of his bearing and the boyish
recklessness he displayed when he chose and rode a horse, selecting
always for looks and style, without regard to the beast’s
disposition. It was plain that he drank heavily in the long evenings
when he sat alone in the library, his manager, looking on, hoping
that as the first keenness of his grief wore away, this matter would
be bettered.
But it was the other way. When Charley began to rouse from the
stupor of bereavement, he began also to leave the ranch, on trips to
Mesquite, and beyond to El Centro; whence the news came back to Hank