CHAPTER XIX

HILDA AND THE FLYING M’S

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 elders. She was glad to get home, yet it was hard to turn her back on a world in which Pearse might appear at one’s camp-fire of an evening, and to take up a permanent residence in the one house it seemed impossible he should ever visit.

Burch came thumping down the drive on his pony, full of talk about his new lathe that had just come from Fort Worth and was a dandy!

“Show it to you as soon as we get to the house,” he said. “Aunt Val let me set it up in the office. That makes a good place to work.”

“Buddy—go see the live things we brought up from Sandoval County,” Hilda laughed at him, “things that don’t have to be turned out on a lathe—nearly three thousand of them. Uncle Hank and I counted—or, rather, Uncle Hank counted and I tallied; but the count stands on my tally. What do you think of that?”

Sam Kee stood grinning in the doorway to welcome her. Miss Valeria got up from her rocking chair and fluttered forward to the sitting-room door to give her grand-niece a ladylike kiss.

“My dear, how brown you are!” she exclaimed, holding the girl off a moment to look her over. “You’re burnt like an Indian!”

And that was all that Miss Valeria Van Brunt could see of any change in Hilda.

With the coming in of the Jacox cattle, existence at the Three Sorrows took on a richer note. The price of beef could never rule this mortal life there quite so cruelly again.

Summer followed spring; ripened to the tan of autumn; the snow fell; it melted in the sun of spring; and so on, around the circle of the year four times, while their indiscreet owner paid his debt to justice between stone walls. On the good feed of the Sorrows, and under Hank’s management, the herd increased much in value. “The third calf,” which belonged to the Sorrows for their pasturage, represented a very handsome profit indeed.

In spite of his niggardliness in the matter of “language,” old Hank Pearsall held his men as no other ranch manager in the neighborhood was able to do. The Texas Panhandle of that day was a frontier of drifting personalities. When you said “neighborhood,” you meant several counties. The Capadine ranch, the McGregor place, the big Matador—a hacienda that had Spanish proprietors—in eleven years every one of these had shifted the personnel of its working household entirely; but on the Sorrows payroll were still old Snake Thompson, Shorty O’Meara, and Buster. Thompson, taciturn and unrelated to his kind, a sort of fragment of a human character, who seemed to show the marks of some early shipwreck of the emotions, put forward that he had “had enough wives,” whatever that might mean. He had been away from the ranch only three or four times, and then briefly. It was understood among the other cowpunchers that Snake, on these excursions, prosecuted some sort of spree of his own; but no resident of Lame Jones County had ever participated in these relaxations of the old man’s.

Shorty, four years married to a young niece of Mrs. MacGregor who came out from Scotland to visit at the Cross K, had a bunch of cattle of his own and some land that adjoined both the Sorrows and the Cross K. His cattle ran with the Three S brand, and Shorty himself was as near a foreman at the Sorrows as could well have been under so active a manager as Pearsall.

Buster, a lad of eighteen when the Van Brunts arrived, had several times collected the wages due him and gone ambling away, singing, to some other job. But he had always returned. “Sumpin’ about the old Sorrers that sorter draws a feller,” was his explanation. He had had a number of highly interesting love affairs. Finally, by the way of answering an advertisement, he had entered upon a long, carefully concealed correspondence with a young lady somewhere in the east. When he had pursued this exciting courtship for some months, forbearing to draw a dollar of wages beyond such as went for cigarettes, he again rode away,—money in pocket. He wrote once to Hilda, who had been his only confidante, saying that he was married, that She was the loveliest, the best and the most charming being in the world, and he the happiest. When he came back, which he did nearly a year later, Buster looked much older than the lapse of time alone warranted, and he laughed less frequently and was heard, on occasion, to give utterance to some cynical opinions.

The general view of the matter came to be that Buster also had “had wives enough.”

“’Cause one’s a-plenty to do the trick, if she’s the right sort,” was old Snake’s bitter comment.

Burch was a stocky boy who would never be tall, but well built. He got what he could out of the little school near the Three Sorrows. Once there was a young fellow at the MacGregor ranch, a civil engineer, who taught him mathematics and said the boy was a wonder at it. He went no more to the doctor in Fort Worth.

Miss Valeria, whose hair was all white now above her dark eyes and brows, had tried once or twice to insist that he was ailing—and got laughed at for her pains, by the boy himself and by Hank. Hank, quick to note every change in his boy and girl as they grew up, had already met the new look in young Burchie’s eyes. He watched for it in the countenance of his unconscious girl.

“Parents has got to face it,” he sighed, unaware that he spoke aloud, one rainy day when he and Shorty and Snake were mending harness.

“Face what?” demanded Snake testily. “What in the old cat are you talking about?”

“About children,” Pearsall explained. “These growing children, you don’t never know where you lose ’em. Some day or other, you come up and slap your youngster on the back and commence talking free—like you’ve been used to—giving orders or making fun; and suddenly a lady or gentleman that you’ve never seen before turns around on you, with a polite look, as much as to say, ‘I reckon you’ve got the advantage of me, sir!’”

“Well—then what?” demanded the solicitous Shorty, whose three-year-old bandit of a red-headed daughter held him in shameful subjection.

“Only one thing, as I figger it,” said Hank. “Don’t waste no time whining about duty, and what’s due you for past care and labor. Just whirl in and court and make much of that stranger. If it’s a boy, my observation is that he mostly wants to lick you; and if it’s a girl, she’s keen to hide everything from you.” Again he sighed. “You’re a stranger to the stranger, and the circumstances is all against you. Any confidence you get you’ll earn hard.”

And Hilda? Hilda was seventeen now, of fair height for her years, but slim and undeveloped. The great dark eyes, with their heavy fringing and the level brows above them, were still her only marked beauty. She studied hard and was apt to stand high with her teacher; released to the playground, she ran rampant. Shorty said she was a good mixer. She rode with the unconscious courage and freedom of the cowpunchers. It never seemed to occur to her that she could not do with her pony anything that they could do with theirs. She and Uncle Hank had had some little difference of opinion from time to time in the matter of what horses she should ride, and what ones she should let strictly alone. The letting strictly alone went strongly against Hilda’s grain.

About this time Uncle Hank brought home a steel blue roan—a snorting, up-headed, four-year-old whose neck had never felt a rope, whom Buster and Shorty, between them, with the genial irony of the cowpuncher, re-named Creeping Mose, because he could run like a streak of blue lightning.

“He’s been let go so long that it’s a question whether he’ll ever be plumb gentled now,” said Hank, “But he’s a powerful good animal, and I took a chance on him.”

Hilda, who had ridden out to meet the herd and was having dinner at the wagon, could not keep her eyes off the new horse. A smile passed between her and Uncle Hank, but nothing was said at that time, beyond Hilda’s declaration that she was coming down to the corral next day to watch the breaking.

Uncle Hank let her accompany him the next morning. At sight of the horse, head up, ears pricked, snuffing the air suspiciously, Hilda could not restrain her enthusiasm.

“Oh, Uncle Hank, I would love to have him for mine!” she whispered. “I never have had a horse that was really fast. He’s not vicious—only just spirited and unbroken. I know I could ride him after the boys have topped him a few times.”

“There ain’t a thing on earth about a hoss that you don’t think you can do,” grumbled old Snake, fastening the gate behind them. “You’re fixin’ to get yourself killed. Pearsall ought to keep you out of the corral.”

Hank had passed on to talk to Buster. It was Shorty who jeered the pessimist.

“G’wan, Thompson—whose corral is it? If you don’t know, let me introduce you to Miss Van Brunt, owner of the Three Sorrows. Hilda, you just shin up on the fence if you want to see the fun. Buster’s going to top him first. Bet a nickel the blue sends him to grass.”

The roan was roped, thrown, blinded and saddled, Buster was up at last and with the cry, “Turn loose!” they were off, the horse traveling in a series of bucks straight around the corral. But he attempted no murderous tactics; he was only for shaking off the man on his back; and he moved with such swiftness and beauty of action as is not often seen in a range-bred horse.

“Can’t I have him for mine—oh, can’t I, Uncle Hank?” Hilda shouted unrestrainably from the top of the fence, where she clung watching.

“Looks like it,” chuckled the old man, as the blue roan finally made his point and sent Buster over his head, then ran snorting in circles. “In about—well, about a year, Pettie, when this feller’s had plenty of cutting work and range riding—he’ll be fit for a lady’s use. Whoa, there—Buck!” as his rope circled the horse’s neck. “Let me try him. Now, Pettie, you’ll see your Uncle Hank get a fall.”

The boys held the roan; Hank eased quickly into the saddle, where he brought to bear a strange skilled gentleness he had with horses which had often calmed even an outlaw, and which saw him safely through this time, though more than once the boys whooped that he was “pulling leather.”

Hilda watched enviously, until he dismounted after half an hour’s struggle, horse and man dripping with sweat and trembling with exhaustion, but the first stage of Creeping Mose’s education fairly completed.

For a lady’s use! She would have liked to shout to him that she was not a lady—that she never expected or intended to be one, if it meant that she had to ride only horses that a baby would be safe on. A year, indeed! But she said nothing. She still had that habit of dreaming things—dramatizing what she would have liked to say in her own mind, instead of saying it.

In the old days it would have been The Boy-On-The-Train who tamed Creeping Mose, with a turn of the wrist. But now, all the time she sat on the corral fence watching Uncle Hank handle the wild, courageous thing, she was thinking of Pearse as she’d known him in the days of the cyclone cellar, in that snatched visit on the trail coming back with the Jacox cattle. Pearse was on a ranch. He was the kind to do whatever he did better than those about him did it. As usual, she just put Pearse in Uncle Hank’s place on the blue roan’s back, had him take rather more risks, and couldn’t keep from clapping her hands when he came through gloriously.

Uncle Hank glanced up, caught her glowing eyes fixed on him, and looked a little startled. She climbed down and walked soberly away. After all, the cyclone cellar was the place to indulge in dreams of Pearse. She was glad now that she’d never shared the secret of her retreat with Burch—or with any one.

It was Sam Kee who helped her carry down the old desk that she put in there, and she even made the Chinaman leave it in the outer cellar, not removing the shielding boxes she kept piled over its door till he was back in the kitchen, tugging the heavy piece of furniture along the narrow passage by herself. Book after book had drifted down from the shelves upstairs to be added to those she kept in a row on the desk top; pictures that took her fancy were tacked up all around; she used to slip away to this retreat at certain times to read a little, write less and dream much. Stolen hours, these, when Burch or Aunt Val or Uncle Hank may have thought she was out for a ride or gone to one of the neighbors.

And these dreams of Pearse, in the dim, brown-walled, dusky, shut-away, little chamber, were about all she had left of him. Not quite, for though he’d never written, as he promised he would, neither had he forgotten her. Every Christmas and every birthday brought some gift to her from him. The first Christmas after the drive there came to her, by the hand of a freighter, a splendid Navajo blanket. Everybody but Uncle Hank wondered over it. The old man asked no questions. He knew it must have come from that one to whom she had lent the Sunday pony, with Charley’s bridle and saddle.

When the beautiful thing disappeared from Miss Val’s couch, where it had been spread, and noisy inquiries stirred up the entire household, Uncle Hank again expressed no surprise. Hilda had carried the blanket down to the cyclone cellar. It covered the lounge which had been Pearse’s bed. Captain Snow slept on it and filled it with white cat hairs that Hilda carefully brushed off. When the next Christmas brought a quirt and Mexican hackamore of gayly colored and braided horsehair, she refused to put them to sordid use and, after a time, they followed the blanket, hanging on the wall over the lounge. She had a great delight in them. Was not their presence there, their color and beauty, so lovingly, painstakingly wrought, visible evidence that he had not forgotten, any more than she had?

The third year of Jacox’s imprisonment saw his release by an indulgent governor. When Tracey came forth a free man, more than four thousand cattle of his brand would trail out of the Three Sorrows pastures—for the herd had prospered greatly. Hank had bought a few cows, here and there, judiciously, where he heard of a bargain; but despite this fact, the departure of the Jacox herd unexpectedly soon would leave the ranch greatly understocked. The manager realized that he would need to find other cattle to take on the shares in order to fill up, and he was glad to receive a proposition from Colonel Lee Marchbanks of Encinal County, New Mexico, who wrote to say that the range out there had failed badly from drouth, and he would like to pasture a herd of probably two thousand of his Flying M stock cattle on the Sorrows, where he knew the grass was unfailing. Sitting in the office, Uncle Hank showed that letter to Hilda; the old man kept to his idea of making her as full a partner in the running of the ranch as a girl of her age could be.

“Seems kind of funny, doesn’t it, Uncle Hank,” she said, “to think of Marchbanks cattle on our pastures? Do you remember Fayte Marchbanks telling me when we first came here, and I didn’t know anything about such things, that this was his ranch?”

The old man nodded, smiling a little, and turned to the letter he was writing, to arrange terms. The herd was brought over by Marchbanks’ range boss in October and left at the Sorrows, to remain six months.

They arrived, gaunt and sorry-looking from the long trail and the months of poor grass that had gone before. But to at least one person on the ranch they possessed a secret interest and charm. They had come all the way from Encinal County, in which lies the J I C ranch, where Pearse Masters lived. Why, any one of those sad-faced brindle cows might have seen Pearse himself—in the flesh! In some indefinite way, Pearse seemed nearer to her while the Marchbanks cattle were on the ranch.

Late in the following March, Hank announced, one evening at the supper table, that all hands would be needed next day for rounding up the Flying M’s.

Hilda’s head was lifted; her glance fixed eagerly on the old man’s face.

“Who’s coming for them, Uncle Hank?” Burch asked, and saved her the necessity of doing so.

“The Colonel himself, this time,” rejoined Hank, taking a letter from his pocket and running over its lines. “He’s liable to be here to-morrow or next day; going to camp at _Tres Piños_ the last night and get in here fresh to help us work the cattle and road-brand.” Hilda had come and leaned over his shoulder to look at the letter. “Even so,” he told her, as she rubbed her cheek against the grizzled curls, “it’s going to take every hand we’ve got. You children can both help.” He glanced across to where Burch, close under the lamp, had gone back to his figuring and diagrams. “Son, I’ll need even you.”

The men were out by daybreak. Hilda was not much behind them. As she hurried down to the corral, after a snatched breakfast, to get her horse, she was trying to picture Colonel Marchbanks to herself; she was carrying on some light, easy conversation with him, in which there always came up a careless question, variously phrased, as to whether or not he knew a young man employed on the J I C ranch by the name of Masters. Buster, the last man out, checked his pony to point to the mail bag, hanging on the corral wall, and shout:

“I brought it in so late last night that I hated to wake you all. Take it up to the house, won’t you, Hilda?”

She saddled up swiftly, curbed an impulse to leave the bag till she got back, reached it from its nail, when she was in the saddle, and rode around toward the back to throw it in on the sacred precincts of Sam Kee’s porch. Nobody but Hilda dared to do a thing like that.

As she got through the corral gate, she saw Burch half-way out toward the main trail. He turned and yelled at her—a brother’s yell—but she had drawn from among the other mail in the bag a letter, addressed in a dashing, clerkly hand, to Miss Hilda Van Brunt, The Three Sorrows, Dawn, Lame Jones County, Texas. In that hand had come addressed all her anonymous gifts. She neither heard nor saw anything about her.

Burch whooped long and derisively, while she sat her pony and read, over and over, the brief letter the envelope contained:

Dear Hilda,

I wonder if this will get to Lame Jones County before I do. Hope it will, for I’m certainly not going to ride up to the Three Sorrows and call, and I do want to see you. I’m making a quick trip through for my company, and I think I’ll be somewhere in your neighborhood about March 28th. That sounds pretty uncertain to you, maybe, but if you should happen to be on the main trail any time that day—why, then you’d happen to see

Your friend, Pearse Masters.

March twenty-eighth! That was to-day! What luck, that they were going to work Flying M cattle in the small pasture lying beside the Ojo Bravo trail! That was what Pearse must mean. She sent one last shout after the departing Burch, rode her pony along the garden walk and deftly shot the mail bag in, while Sam Kee grumbled at her, then loped off to join the working force. Had the small pasture not commanded the Ojo Bravo trail, Uncle Hank would have lacked her help that day—in which case, many things might have been different.

As it was, her eyes, continually turned to the westward way, were first to see a light outfit coming in on the lower trail. She waved and shouted to Uncle Hank to call his attention. There were only six riders and a chuck wagon. Hank joined brother and sister at the fence and studied the newcomers in the distance with some surprise. The work of getting ready was well under way. All the Marchbanks cattle were in one enclosure. It was barely ten o’clock, yet the sun was beginning to be unpleasantly warm, and Hank pushed back his hat to rub his forehead dubiously and say:

“If there was anybody else for that to be, I’d say it wasn’t them. They’re flyin’ mighty light and goin’ might fast for an outfit that expects to pick up two-thousand-and-some cows.”

On they came, the riders at a thundering gallop, the chuck wagon bumping behind. There was something dashing, arresting, inconsequent about their approach. Hank rode slowly down the fence line, Hilda and Burch after him, and greeted the men half doubtfully.

The leader raised a hand in salute. Here was the father of Maybelle and Fayte. Here was that Lee Marchbanks, the Virginian whom Guadalupe Romero had run away to marry. Somehow he was disappointing to Hilda. Dressed about as any cattleman would be, well mounted, and unusually well armed, he was still very different from the mental picture she had of him. In this open-range country it was customary for an outfit to carry weapons, yet the rifle swung under every rider’s right leg, the handle of the bowie knife protruding here and there from a casual boot-leg, in addition to the familiar pair of six-shooters at each belt, made the group look positively warlike. Naturally Hilda’s attention centered most on a young fellow, slim, dark, but with odd, long, slate-gray eyes, who rode next to the leader and regarded everybody about him with an air of authority and a little half smile that lifted a small dark mustache.

“I reckon them are my cattle,” said the leader, abruptly, and without a greeting. “I’ve come for ’em.”

“Colonel Marchbanks?” Hank spoke with his usual politeness. The man across the barbed-wire fence shot him a quick glance of surprise—or was it suspicion? Then, with a bare nod, repeated:

“We’ve come for the cattle.”

“I see,” said Hank.

The others sat their ponies, alert, looking about them as men who have never been in a country before may do. Hilda saw the young fellow nearest to the Colonel say something to him in a low tone, and Marchbanks spoke again, on a somewhat different note:

“Sorry to hurry you, Pearsall. We’re taking the cattle right out.”

“What!” ejaculated Hank, startled into the mild indiscretion of questioning. “This afternoon? Turn right around and take the trail without waiting to rest?”

The colonel reddened angrily.

“The _cattle’s_ fresh, ain’t they?” he snapped. “_They_ don’t need to rest. I aim to take em out—and that as damned quick as I can get ’em out!”

Speech and manner were sufficiently surprising. Hilda looked anxiously at Uncle Hank. But the manager had caught his breath now. His steady eyes studied the outfit unhurriedly. The horses were good, they and the men well accoutered. But the letter in Hank’s pocket mentioned things that couldn’t be done and get the cattle out in one day.

“Well,” he allowed, “I don’t know but by pressing all hands in to help, we might get ’em out and worked and tallied over for ye. But what about the road-branding?”

The colonel shook his head. It might have meant anything. The slim dark young fellow who held Hilda’s rather unwilling attention, and got her grudging admiration, in spite of lingering doubts, turned and spoke to the four others in so low a tone that Hilda thought Uncle Hank could hardly hear him. What he said was:

“We’ll go through here, boys—cut the fence. Gid, you’ve got the nippers—cut here.”

Gid was instantly off his horse and at work.

The angry blood flew to Hilda’s face.

“Hold on!” cried Pearsall. “Hold on! There’s a gate up yonder a piece. It won’t take you fifteen minutes longer, I—” He hesitated to characterize so wanton an outrage. “Don’t cut my fence.”

The wires had already sprung, jangling and quivering, to the ground.

“The boys’ll mend it. I’ll pay you,” Marchbanks said briefly, putting his horse through the gap. “Come on.”

The seven men rode to the herd, from whose edges Burch and the Three S cowboys were watching the maneuvers of the newcomers.

“Get to work, men,” said Marchbanks, and the cutting out of calves was soon in full swing.

Hilda and her brother were set to hold the “cut.” Burch wasn’t skillful, but Hilda made up for it. She could keep her eye on the cattle and still have plenty of attention to give to the young man she thought was Fayte Marchbanks, riding close to his father, acting as though he really directed every move the colonel made. If it was Fayte, he paid no attention whatever to her; didn’t seem to remember her at all. When he did lift a glance her way, she had a queer little thrill, not entirely pleasant, at the flashing out of his odd, slate-gray eyes under the black brows; eyes whose reckless light matched the bravo slant of his sombrero and went well with the general air of the heavily armed Marchbanks party. She had half a mind to leave Burch holding the cut a moment while she rode over and said “Hello” to him and asked about Maybelle. There was even a daring thought that she’d inquire of him, instead of his father, if he’d met Pearse Masters over in New Mexico. She did start to do it, but Uncle Hank waved her back. Then she noticed how funny Uncle Hank was acting—so heavy and slow-witted.

“Careful about cutting out them calves,” he cautioned his men, again and again. “I don’t want to rob the owner, nor have the owner rob the Sorrows. We’re all young. Ain’t such an awful haste.”

“The hell they ain’t!” broke out Marchbanks, in whose hearing this was said. “Who told you?”

There was an instant of dubious silence. Old Snake bristled for all the world like a faithful dog who suspects that his master is affronted. Shorty sat up suddenly in the saddle, his blue eyes fairly blazing in his brick-red face. Then Pearsall spoke, with mild civility:

“Didn’t camp at _Tres Piños_—did you?”

Marchbanks, hustling an unruly calf toward the cut, ejaculated:

“At _Tres Piños_—no! Who said I was camping there?”

Pearsall pulled up his buckskin pony and let a cow get past him unnoticed. The Flying M man’s active young lieutenant yelled a protest in vain. Hilda edged in toward Uncle Hank. She had read that letter, too; yet it was characteristic of the western cattle country—of which she was growing to be a well-seasoned citizen—that not a word, not a glance, passed between them. They both knew that this _might_ be Marchbanks, and his behavior merely a matter of temperament or eccentricity; but he might be a rustler. Such high-handed robbery was not unknown. She knew that there was more than fifty thousand dollars’ worth of stock concerned. The outsiders were seven, all suspiciously well armed. Presently Uncle Hank drifted himself to her side, dismounted and, under pretext of tightening her cinch, spoke to her:

“Listen sharp, Pettie. Mind, I ain’t sure—you never can tell—there ain’t one of us here, as it chances, that’s ever seen Lee Marchbanks. You heard these fellers over there at the fence. What I’m thinking is that if Shorty, or me, or Thompson—or even Burch—was to try to leave this pasture, we’d have war on our hands. But you can go, I reckon. You can make it this-away: talk around free about being hungry, and ask me to let you go up to the house and get your dinner. Then, the minute you’re out of sight, you put spurs to that pony and ride all you know, straight for _Tres Piños_. If there’s nobody there, come back easy, for I reckon it’ll be all right. If you find the Flying M outfit camped at the spring, fetch ’em on the jump, honey.” He raised his voice. “There, I reckon that’ll hold—but it needs mending with a new one.”

They sheered apart. Hilda whirled her pony to help Marchbanks with a calf he was heading.

“Thank you, little lady,” he said, with an admiring glance for her horsemanship and skill. “You’re the girl for my money.”

“I could work better if I wasn’t so hungry,” laughed Hilda. “Oh, Uncle Hank,” as Pearsall came past, “can’t I, please, go up to the house and get something to eat? I’m starving.”

“Aw—you’re shirking, Hilda!” cried Burch, overhearing. “No fair! Uncle Hank, make her stay, and we’ll all go up together.”

This accidental detail made Hilda’s exit very plausible. Marchbanks himself, pleased by the girl’s apparent liking, put in:

“This work’s not fit for young ladies, anyhow. Let Miss Hilda go.”

Hilda wheeled her pony and gave him the spur. “I’ll bring you all some of Sam Kee’s pi-i-ie!” she called back, as she galloped away toward the gate.

Through all the excitement of the morning, she had not failed to keep an eye on the western trail. Suppose Pearse should be coming along now—just as she crossed it! Her nerves tautened to the thought.

Back at the herd, Uncle Hank, a most patient and skillful handler of cattle, began to make a series of strange blunders. Twice he nearly stampeded the Marchbanks cut. Once he put his pony so squarely across the colonel’s path that it was only by fine horsemanship that that gentleman missed a bad fall.

“For God’s sake, old man!” he snarled. “Get in the house and tend to your knitting, and let us work these cows. You needn’t be afraid I won’t leave you your share. If you stay out here and make many more passes like that, we’ll have men to bury.”

“I was thinking about something else.” Pearsall seemed to overlook the rebuke. “I ain’t generally so awkward. Maybe I’d better go down and mend fence.”

“Not till we’ve put our cattle through that gap!” cried Marchbanks.

“Oh—all right, all right,” agreed the manager.

Meanwhile, Hilda was pushing Sunday toward the house at his top speed—which wasn’t very much—Sunday had been faster when he was three years younger. As she went, there thrilled through her exultantly the thought of Creeping Mose in the home corral. His breaking had been interrupted for the gathering of the Flying M cattle. She shut her lips tight together, and gave Sunday the spur. She remembered Buster’s first proud introduction of the blue roan to her attention:

“Run! He can run like a scared wolf.”

Having crossed the trail and got no sight of a solitary rider whom she could identify as Pearse, Hilda was desperate. She must not refuse to ride to _Tres Piños_ to save the Marchbanks cattle; but Sunday would be all the rest of the day making such a trip. Pearse would pass by while she was gone. Creeping Mose was the only thing on the place that could get her there and back in time to have a chance of meeting Pearse. Again she spurred Sunday, and he went past the porch, where Miss Valeria dozed over a novel, with such a burst of speed that the lady waked up, looked after her niece, somewhat aggrieved, and called a remonstrance, settling down to a murmured: “Getting too big a girl for these hoyden tricks. I ought to speak to Mr. Pearsall. The man encourages her.”

Hilda took a short-cut through the kitchen garden, where Sam Kee, cutting delectable heads of lettuce from their stalks, rose in wrath as the pony’s hoofs plunged into the soft, brown, irrigated soil.

“You spoil ’um!” he squealed. “Unc’ Hank—he spoil ’um you.”

For only answer the girl glanced back over her shoulder to where, in his faded denim, he hopped about like an infuriated and oversized bluejay, his squawks inevitably suggesting the comparison, and called: “Come on—come on, Sam. Help me.”

“No help!” the Chinaman ejaculated, toddling after her. When he reached the corral and found her with the saddle off the sweating Sunday, her rope swinging, saw it settle over Creeping Mose and bring him up short, Sam stopped in the tall, door-like gateway and burst out in a splutter of dismay:

“You let ’um blue horse ’lone. Blue horse debbil. Unc’ Hankie say let ’um ’lone.”

Hilda had got the bridle on Mose.

“Come here and hold him for me,” she cried. “Come on—quick, Sam. He won’t try to stamp you—he never does. He’ll be all right when I’m up on him. Hurry. He’ll only buck and run.”

The Chinaman came. He took the reins in practiced yellow fingers.

“You die an’ be kill,” he said.

Up went the saddle, but the pony dodged it, lowering himself and flinching away just at the right instant. Again this maneuver was repeated, Hilda, panting, desperate over the loss of time.

“Take your apron off and flap it in his face. Go on, Sam Kee—flap your apron,” she commanded chokingly.

Protesting, refusing, “No! No take off ape’!” Sam Kee obeyed. Once more, Hilda swung the saddle; this time it landed. Almost in the instant of jerking tight the last cinch-strap, she was up.

Creeping Mose hung a moment, as in surprise, then humped his back for the first plunge. She whirled her heavy quirt and brought it down with all her might. Mose, with lowered head stuck out straight, shot through the gate in a series of long leaps.

Sam Kee sat down, legs rigid before him, black eyes blinking, listening to the thunder of the hoofs as Creeping Mose ran like a streak out along the __Tres Piños__ trail.