The counsels of night and silence finally prevailed, and she slept. The cool wind came from a thousand miles of wandering over dim levels to ruffle her dark hair. Coyotes whimpered off on the edge of the world. Hilda slept soundly. But over near the fire a head of grizzled black-and-silver crinkles was lifted quietly from the blankets; Uncle Hank’s eyes gazed across to Hilda’s sleeping place long, with a puzzled, half-bewildered expression. 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.