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.