A Girl of the Plains Country

								

big, serious blue eyes and gazed about him. This gaze lit upon the
little girl, fastened there, and slowly grew into a smile. His
sister pressed in close to her father’s side and reached up to pat
the baby, then thrust her hand into Van Brunt’s free one, urging:
“Oh, yes, papa—please let’s go and have a picnic. It’ll be so
beautiful!” And Van Brunt said:
“Certainly, Pearsall. We’re in your hands now.”
The ranch boss got his passengers into the ambulance, Miss Van Brunt
and her nephew with the baby on the back seat, Hilda perched beside
him on the front. As he gathered up his lines he smiled down at the
tousled dark hair from which she had promptly pulled the
much-trimmed small hat.
“Now for our picnic, sister,” he said. “We’re a-goin’ to have a good
long one. Sixty miles long. And camp overnight on the plain. I’ve
got grub a-plenty, and everything fixed.”
Hilda just gave him a smile and a little bubbling, inarticulate
sound of delight in answer to this. Presently, when they went over a
bump in the trail, her short legs made it necessary that she grasp
his arm to keep from being shot forward over the dashboard.
“Why, here, this won’t never do!” said the old man as he stopped the
ponies, tied the lines to the brake-handle, and fished out from
among the supplies a box which he wedged securely beneath her feet.
When they started on once more, he said in a confidential tone: “Ye
see, I put you up here, because Auntie ain’t used to rough
traveling; and your father, he’s got little brother to look out for.
You and me can stand the jouncing, can’t we?”
With a sure instinct he had sounded the right note.
“Course we can!” the little girl echoed it with a sort of lyric
jubilance. She took a long, pleased look at him, and began:
“Auntie finds it very hard to bear this kind of life. The nurse we
had, she came as far as Amarillo; but she said she never in all her
days saw such a flat country—and she despised it—and she just
couldn’t put up with it—and there wasn’t any money ever made that
would pay her to. So she went back. She went back to New York.”
“I expect this does look considerable different from New York,” Hank
allowed mildly.
“Oh, it does!” Hilda glowed. “Beautifuller. I love the way it looks.
Aunt Val, she’s been a great many places. But this—she wasn’t ever
here before. She’s been to Europe, and to Egypt where the pyramids
are, and the Sphinx that’s all getting covered up with sand. I—”
Hilda sent a half-shy, questing look into the old man’s twinkling
eyes—“I know a good deal about Phœnicians, and Cæsar, myself—Thor
and his hammer, and Apollo, and the Holy Grail. My mother used to
read to me about them.”
“Yes,” assented the ranch manager easily. “I guess them’s mostly New
Yorkers and such. I haven’t the acquaintance of any of ’em.”