A Girl of the Plains Country

They came home next day at evening, everybody dog-tired, but happy. Out to the south, the men were working the cattle into the pastures. Hilda rode along up the avenue of box el...

Hilda sat on the floor in the hall, Burchie beside her. She was still a thin little thing; and though she had now come into the growing age—that period so called out of all the...

Pearse came on Sunday. That was great luck. Great luck, too, that Uncle Hank should have happened to be at the house when the sheriff rode in with his posse. He might just as li...

In two weeks after that Hilda’s father went to Fort Worth. Hank drove Charley to Mesquite. His last words, as he handed the valise up to his employer in the El Centro stage, were:

There was no going to bed for Hilda now. Once out of Uncle Hank’s sight, she turned and ran noiselessly through the dim, empty, clean-smelling kitchen to the cyclone cellar, lig...

After that roping match, on the ranch of the Three Sorrows—a small island of human life and interests, surrounded on every side by a sea of grass whose fishes were cattle—year f...

From the first, Fayte Marchbanks’s presence at the Alamositas affected the whole atmosphere there—and quite differently from anything Hilda could have imagined. Maybelle had sai...

The big room they went into was a roil of confusion; two large beds covered with great cocoons—each one a baby, wrapped in its own quilt or shawl; several mothers of somewhat ol...

The little girl on the back seat of the stage clung to one of the uprights of the vehicle as though she feared that when it stopped she would, in her enthusiasm, hurl herself bo...

After all, going away from home for the first time when you’re nearly seventeen is a thrilling business. Hilda was the sort to get joy even out of small things—and the change fr...

A pale Hilda, still plainly on nervous strain, sat at the breakfast table next morning. Uncle Hank—up and out an hour or two earlier—had ridden in for the meal. Aunt Valeria’s w...

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 bo...

Hilda’s dilated eyes were questing wildly for Uncle Hank among the group of horsemen. He was gone. If she asked Aunt Val she would never be allowed to leave; so without a word s...

That night Hilda slept soundly in big Frosty MacQueen’s bed. And all through the dark hours snow came down on that long slant from the north, so that it coated that side of the...

Hank Pearsall, used enough to the drinking that belongs with life in the western cattle country, the town outbreaks of hard-muscled cowpunchers who live under the open sky, watc...

Sheriff Daniels clung resolutely to the trail of that broken-shoed pony. He discovered, finally, who the man was that had ridden it away from the ranch where it was stolen. The...

It was strange to Hilda to be going home to Lame Jones County by railroad. Not once before, since that journey from New York that brought the Van Brunts to Texas, had she travel...

After that visit to Mesquite there was never any reason for complaint of Hilda’s neatness at school. The Mrs. Johnnie, that Uncle Hank had thought might be classed as a “local s...

Think of it—think of being away when that happened! Hilda wouldn’t have missed it for anything. For she knew that this country of the Staked Plain played a yearly prank. Through...

As the afternoon wore on, Hilda, helping to gather strays, watching always the westward trail for Pearse, began to lose hope. The colonel had not come back from his chase of the...

Southwestward again, all that day—beautifully long for the little girl, wearily lengthened for Miss Valeria who alternately complained of the speed and urged the driver to hurry...

The Flying M crowd and the Burketts had agreed on a place all to themselves in the willows along Caliente creek. The colonel said he intended to try for some plover up there. Hi...

In the first gray of morning, a caravan swung out from the corral at the Three Sorrows. They were making a start at dawn. You can go almost anywhere if you start at dawn. Indeed...

“H-s-s-sh!” The boy’s anxious eyes were on her. “I—I thought you knew me, Hilda. I’d never have come into this place to hide—if I hadn’t thought you knew me. I knew you, the min...

The first four miles were covered at terrific speed, though three times Creeping Mose stopped with a plunge and declared his intention of fighting it out then and there. But Hil...

So Hilda, alone at the ranch with Uncle Hank, Sam Kee in the kitchen, the cowboys out in their own place, came up to the first Christmas since her father’s death. There’d been C...

In her own room, the door slammed and locked, Hilda faced the situation. She fairly glowed and palpitated with the rage that ran like fire in her veins and seemed to burn out ti...

The six young people on their ponies came stragglingly together at Alamositas headquarters. They checked there a little awkwardly, as though waiting for the big family carriage...

Hilda sat alone and fed the fire until its flame rose tall and strong. Over her head, the blue-black sky was spangled and netted with the great white stars of the high plains co...

In the office Hank faced sharply around, and the tall men stood looking at each other; there was a moment of silence, in which the cooing of Sam Kee’s pigeons could be heard. Hi...

Hilda waked next morning after but an hour or two’s sleep. Last night she had been sure she couldn’t sleep at all. She’d lain for a long time, it seemed to her, going over and o...

Hilda stood there, chilled and shivering, and listened to the sound of his horse’s hoofs, cautious and slow at first, breaking into a canter further away and dying out in the ni...