A Girl of the Plains Country

								

Hilda was silent for a few moments. This new friend was plainly
somewhat given to humor. He might be jesting with her. Presently she
spoke:
“But when—when my mother died in Denver, and there wasn’t anybody to
take care of Burchie and me, papa telegraphed to Aunt Val and she
came. It was very good of her. She doesn’t like the country—nor
children, very much.” After a pause, she added, in a diminished
voice, “Do you?”
“Do I what, honey?” asked Pearsall, starting a bit, for his mind had
wandered from her prattle.
“Like children very much—and the country; this,” and her looks
indicated the big world about them.
“Why, yes—yes, sure,” he protested. “I like this country, sister.
And I certainly git a-plenty of it. But I’m a mighty lonesome
person, sometimes—I’m a plumb lonesome old feller. You see there’s
no child that belongs to me.”
“Haven’t you got any little girl?”
“No. No, not any little girl—” Quite a long pause, then,—“or boy
either.”
Hilda moved uneasily, and her eyes went to his face and back again,
plainly under the stress of acute compassion.
“Well,” she hesitated, “I’ll be your little girl, too, if—if you
want me. You see, papa’s got two of us.”
The noises of the big vehicle had often made it necessary for the
child to stretch up and put her rosy mouth close to her companion’s
ear in speaking. Now these last words were forwarded very carefully,
and with a swift, backward glance toward the rear seat. Miss Van
Brunt was engaged with a smelling bottle; Van Brunt held his son on
his knee and stared across the baby’s head toward a future which
plainly daunted.
“That’s a bargain, sister,” said the driver. “From now on you’re my
little girl, too. And I’m your Uncle Hank. There’s a few youngsters
in the neighborhood, and that’s what they call me.”
That was a memorable drive, and it decided some important issues in
the lives of those who made it. Sixty miles southward of Mesquite,
in Lame Jones county, lay the ranch of the Three Sorrows which poor
Katharine Van Brunt had bought with the remnant of her big fortune
that Charley’s dissipation had left—the haven to which she had
thought to bring her weak husband and her two children. Now she
slept in her grave in beautiful, far-away Denver, and the husband
and children were going alone toward the home she would have made
possible for them, but which, without her, looked doubtful indeed.
An hour—another hour—the team of cow ponies loped steadily across
that high upland floor of brown plain.
“Like the sea,” whispered Hilda, enraptured. “Just like the sea,
only the water’s all grass—and you can drive over it. It jounces;
but you and I—we can stand the jouncing.”
The fierce glare of mid-afternoon softened, grew milder and milder
as the day waned. Hilda felt that she had never really seen the sun