Читать книгу A Girl of the Plains Country - MacGowan Alice - Страница 4

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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 a little. Pearsall always gave her the same good-humored answer, as though it had been a child fretting at him: “Ponies got forty-odd miles to go, ma’am; have to just hold this same good road pace.”

At noon they stopped and got out for a rest; a “dry camp” he called it, with only water from the canteens to make their coffee. Through the afternoon, the thud-thud of hoofs, the creak and swish of wheels on dry turf, like a monotonous old tune, almost sent Hilda to sleep where she sat beside Uncle Hank on the high seat. Then, when the sky flamed once more red with sunset, suddenly there was living green in front of them, the ambulance swung through an open gate, up a long avenue of young box-elders and black locusts, at the end of which they could see a low stone house, broad, sheltering, hospitable, with its dooryard of Bermuda grass, at the edge of which Pearsall pulled up, got out and helped the others down. Van Brunt, who had sat silent and uncomplaining for hours of heat and weariness, exclaimed:

“This the ranch? Why, Pearsall, I didn’t suppose there was such a green place in all the Panhandle.”

“Well, there’s not another like the Three Sorrows, I can tell you,” answered the old man, busy with bags and valises; and as they moved toward the house Miss Valeria murmured that it was better than could have been expected.

Hilda, hanging back, saying nothing, gazed about at the new home with eyes that loved every stone in its walls. Its pleasant rustle of leaves and lisp of water, after all those miles of splendid, arid plain, made her eyes smart with happy tears. The beautiful wing-like, curving sweep in which the line of young cottonwoods, following the happy course of a tiny irrigating ditch, flung away around one corner of the building—here was a world where anything—lovely—might happen. Those willows over yonder by the little lake (the old man called it a watering tank), they looked just like Nixies crouching down in their long green hair. There was mystery in the very appearance of the plain about them. When a Chinaman came to the door she could have shouted with delight.

He was a strange, limp effigy of a Chinaman, like a badly made rag doll, his slant eyes and pigtail giving the impression that he had lately been hung up on a line with other such toys. Apparently he was young, though the Oriental never looks to our eyes either exactly young or old, and certainly he was morose. The queue on his head, the dull blue blouse he wore, his funny black-and-white boat-shaped shoes, all charmed Hilda.

The first thing she saw that looked like the old home back in New York was a familiar rug spread out at the foot of the stairs in the hall.

“I s’pose your full-sized carpets ain’t come yet,” Pearsall explained, as he showed his employer the living-room on one side, the ranch office on the other. “These mats looked a good deal worn,” he indicated the dull bloom of Turkish rugs disposed here and there, “but of course they’ll be nice and soft for the children to play on.”

Van Brunt assented kindly, and neither he nor Miss Valeria offered any explanation. It was near supper time. The open door at the end of the hall showed a shouldering group of masculine forms, ranch riders, heretofore familiar to the eyes of the newcomers only in pictures. The foremost of these detached himself, came forward, and was presented as O’Meara—“One of your boys, Mr. Van Brunt.” Hilda liked the look of him, and was more pleased when he spoke.

“We didn’t know where you’d want your things,” he said modestly. “We took everybody’s opinion—even the Chink’s—but at that we couldn’t make out what some of ’em was intended for. We just put the trunks around here and there to make it seem home-like.”

Hilda wondered that her aunt’s response to this should be so faint. Shorty O’Meara’s ideas on furnishing and interior decoration had immediate success with her. The open door of the office room showed a big desk, some chairs, and a pile or two of books on the floor. The little girl left that without further inquiry, and went into the living-room where a spindle-legged, inlaid dressing table, with its sweep of mirror, neighbored a trunk and several dining-room chairs. There were more books here, on the floor, the chairs, the window-sills. These latter were very deep. They might well have been specially designed for sitting in of rainy afternoons to look at picture books or play with dolls. The grown-ups walked about and looked somewhat unhappy. She had forgotten them almost in her survey of her new home. She presently got Burch and lugged him about, talking to him, since he was the only individual present sensible enough to really appreciate the attractiveness of the place. The roughcast plastered walls looked so sheltering and strong. The open doorway into the dining-room showed a great long table. All of those men were going to eat there. She groped vaguely for a line in a ballad with which her mother used to sing her to sleep—something about the baron sitting in his hall and his retainers being blithe and gay. The table wasn’t in the hall, of course, but otherwise it was just the same.

Then came Aunt Valeria’s voice calling to her from upstairs; she followed that weary lady, and she and Burch were washed and made seemly for the table.

That first supper was a wonderful meal to her, too, with a lot of tall men trooping in to sit at the board. Their bronzed faces, their keen, forth-looking eyes, used to search great levels, the air of individuality, of independence, laid powerful hold on the child’s fancy. Every time a spur jingled beneath the table, or one of those big voices boomed out suddenly, her heart leaped in swift though uncomprehending response.

Afterward, in the living-room, she heard with some anxiety, Pearsall doubtfully suggest to her father that they might want to build a separate mess house for the men. Her father said no, he didn’t mind the men at the table; and Hilda heaved a great sigh of relief. She had already struck up quite a friendship with blond, talkative Shorty O’Meara; she had even made some timid overtures to a lank, elderly cynic who lived up to the name of Old Snake Thompson. To have her social adventures in this direction curtailed would have been trying.

The days that followed the arrival were strange, interesting ones. Her father was wrapped in an obscurity of dejection and grief; Miss Van Brunt was a victim of neuralgia which she declared the plains wind had developed. The child had only the baby brother, with the occasional companionship of Uncle Hank and some of the younger cowboys; yet she made eager acquaintance with this new life; and it was to the old man she came for information or to share with him her joys.

“All the horses you ride are yellow ones, Uncle Hank, aren’t they?” she asked him one evening when he came in from the range.

“Yes, honey, I’ve rode a buckskin pony for a good many years. I reckon the folks wouldn’t hardly know me on any other color of hoss. I sort of think they’re becoming to me—don’t you?”

“Oh, yes, very,” Hilda assured him gravely. “What’s this one’s name?”

“Why, you see, I just call ’em all ‘Buckskin.’ It’s easiest.”

Sometimes he took her out for short rides, of an evening, holding her before him on the saddle of the tall buckskin horse with a blaze face, or the little dark buckskin pony that had a brown mane and tail. Traveling in this fashion one evening across pastures she pointed to a queer, humped object, sway-backed, with a ewe-neck, and a rough coat of brindled hair that stuck up like the nap on a half-worn rug.

“What’s that, Uncle Hank? It looks something like a calf.”

“’S a dogie, honey,” he explained, absently.

“A dogie,” the child repeated. “Dogies are a kind of animal I don’t know. Is it wild, or tame?”

Pearsall laughed.

“You was right in the first place, sister,” he said. “That pore little skeesicks is a calf. It lost its mother when it was too young to eat grass rightly; so it sort of starves along, and gets stunted and runted. We call ’em dogies. You’ll see one every once in a while, round over the range. They’re no good to nobody—nor to theirselves.”

“Oh,” said Hilda, under her breath.

A day or so later, finding her a bit drooping, Pearsall questioned:

“What’s the matter, sister? Is something worrying you?”

“Uncle Hank,” she explained, with some diffidence, “my heart is sad about dogies. I saw two of them to-day, and my heart is sad about them, ever since.”

(She had wanted to say, in the language of one of her favorite ballads, “My heart is wae”; but judged that that might be a little too much for her companion, and tried him with a simpler literary form.)

“Is it, honey?” inquired the old man, easily. “Oh, I guess I wouldn’t worry about ’em. Remember that we don’t ever butcher ’em, nor even brand ’em.”

“That’s part of the sadness,” Hilda maintained, shaking her head. “It’s just like I used to want to cry when I saw the little dwarfed people in the shows, that aren’t children, and never will be grown up.”

Into the long talks which the two held together of an evening, Hilda often introduced that hero who never had any other name than The-Boy-On-The-Train.

“He knew most everything, Uncle Hank,” she once declared.

“I reckon so, honey,” assented Pearsall; but he seemed to Hilda not sufficiently impressed. She sought in her recollection for definite marvels to attribute to this favorite, and came hard up against that trying fact we all meet, that you cannot communicate to another the fascination you have experienced. It is something to be felt, not put into words. Pressed thus, Hilda stated one day to Uncle Hank that her hero could understand the language of birds. He accepted it with much too great facility, reconciled thereto by the fact that a person in Hilda’s book of fairy tales, which she had shown him earlier in the evening, could do the same. But the statement kept its author awake the greater part of the night, and a penitent, small Hilda climbed up into his arms as soon as he sat down after supper next evening and explained:

“Why, Uncle Hank, you know The-Boy-On-The-Train, he couldn’t quite—what I said—understand all that the birds were talking about.”

“Couldn’t he, Pettie?” inquired Hank placidly.

“No,” said Hilda with solemnity. “He might just as well have, but he couldn’t. He could just understand what people said; but—” The small face flushed deeply; word forms rushed fluidly about in the stress and flux of her emotion—“but he understanded that awful good.”

If Hilda had come to a group of children, The-Boy-On-The-Train must have grown dim behind the stirring realities of actual companionship. But in the lonely life that began for her now, he filled in many an hour which might be otherwise forlorn. He did not lose vividness. She saw him at that ranch he had spoken of, riding the marvelous pony which would shake hands, perfecting himself in those manly sports upon which he had casually touched, and which her lively fancy was liberally providing for him. As time went on, he grew of course; yet he remained delightfully a boy, her champion and hero in the dream world which was always so real to the imaginative child.

Meanwhile Pearsall, who had been for some time manager for a non-resident owner, had only remained to go over tallies, count of stock, and deliver to the purchaser the ranch and its appurtenances. This work was done now, the details all complete, and upon an evening Hank had brought his tally sheets and the mass of statements and figures to young Van Brunt in the ranch office, where he sat explaining the situation patiently to the other man.

It was past the children’s bedtime; Burch was asleep upstairs; but the little girl had twice been sent from the room with an admonition of increasing sharpness from her father. And still Pearsall could see from the tail of his eye that she hung just outside the door.

“But, Pearsall,” Van Brunt, helpless city man, repeated in a sort of blank dismay, “you don’t mean to say you’re leaving me—right now—when I need you worst? Why, what on earth will I do?”

“You know,” said Hank mildly. “I explained it to you last week, Mr. Van Brunt. When the ranch was sold, back three months ago, I looked out for another job. I got one, with the Quita Que, over in New Mexico, and they put me on forfeit—”

“No business man,” broke in Van Brunt. “I suppose I didn’t understand. The fault is mine, Pearsall. But this—I—I’m about as competent to run a ranch as Burch would be. I somehow took it for granted that you were to be manager. Can’t we—I will gladly pay that forfeit, if you are willing to stay—long enough at least to get me started.”

Hank raised a warning hand as Hilda’s face again showed at the door. The child did not edge in, as she had edged before! She made straight for Pearsall—though she winced at her father’s impatient exclamation—climbed to the old man’s lap, and looked searchingly into his face.

“Uncle Hank—you—going away?” She choked on the last word, then added half desperately, “Not—to stay? You’ll come back—won’t you?”

Van Brunt’s strained attitude relaxed a little; he sat back vaguely in his chair, glancing from one to the other, the dismay in his face gradually giving way to a half doubtful gleam of hope. Hank was silent a moment, Hilda watching him, openly restraining tears. The manager had seen more than one Easterner launch himself and everything he possessed in this cattle ranching game, and, ill prepared, inexperienced, lose all. Before him was another candidate for just such another calamitous failure. But it was the warm little body trembling on his lap, the big dark eyes searching his, that he was most conscious of.

“That’s all right, Pettie—about me going away,” he began hesitantly. Then with more certainty, and setting her gently down, “You run along to bed, honey.”

She moved a little, with childhood’s tragic reluctance, in the direction of the door, then turned with just a mute look into his face. Hank gave her a reassuring smile.

“Time them big black peepers was shut, Pettie,” he said easily. “And it’s all right. If I do have to go away, I’ll come straight back. Don’t you worry. I’m not goin’ to quit the Sorrers. Reckon I’ll stay as long as you do.”

“Then—” began Hilda. But her throat swelled so that she couldn’t finish it. It was going to be, “Then, if you will never forsake me, I will never forsake you,”—a line from one of her best loved fairy stories—all of that, even here before papa. But the best she could do was, “Then—I’ll go—Uncle Hank.” And she crept out.

When they heard her feet pattering on the stairs, Van Brunt began to speak, but Hank stopped him with a shake of the head.

“No, Mr. Van Brunt; I’ll pay the forfeit. It’s me that’s ruing back on a contract with the Matador, not you. I’ll stay.” Then, after a pause, “I thought likely I’d have to—that is, if you wanted me—that first day driving down from Mesquite. I’m all set to stay. That’s settled. We’ll say no more about it.”