All at once she knew she was tired. There by the track, the sky a great blue span above her, she dropped into a musing so deep that time went swiftly by; it seemed but a moment when there was a little speck far off on the horizon, coming nearer. Suddenly, and strangely, she was the little girl Hilda, waiting for Uncle Hank on the door-stone. No—that little moving speck, far off and coming nearer, wasn’t Uncle Hank on Buckskin. That was Pearse’s train. Swiftly it grew; there was a humming now, a puff of smoke, the diminished hoot of the whistle. “She’s going to stop. Some one to get off.” The station agent had come out with those other men. He was hanging a mail bag on the crane. The train was pulling in. Pearse was here! Under three pairs of curious eyes—those that might look from the train didn’t count—they shook hands. Nothing really said till they got over to the buckboard, and then Hilda, as he helped her in, the happiness of it all looking out of her shining eyes, glowing on her cheeks, whispered: “It was awfully good of you, Pearse, to come so soon. I was afraid, when I wrote you, that you wouldn’t—” “Did you write me a letter?” Pearse stopped, looking up at her. “What did it say?” “Oh—just explained that I couldn’t stay any longer at the Marchbankses’ and asked you to come over here instead. Why, Pearse—if you didn’t get it, how did you know to come?” Pearse laughed a little, circled the buckboard, and got in on the other side, taking up the lines she offered him, and starting the ponies. “You seem to think I need a good deal of bringing, Hilda,” still smiling. Then, after a quick, sidelong glance at her face, where the lowered lashes made a sweeping dusk against flaming cheeks, “I don’t. But I wish I’d had your letter too.” “I wonder why you didn’t get it.” “Oh, I wouldn’t have got it. You say you posted it at the station? It wouldn’t have gone out to the ranch till night; one of the boys always rides in and fetches the mail in the evening; and when evening came I was in Juan Chico. You know what a little town like that is—everybody’d heard of your having gone home. Fayte had talked, too, when he came in to send that telegram, about how I’d been at the Alamositas in the small hours, with a led horse, to steal you.” Hilda’s heart leaped guiltily at the words. “But,” she began hastily, “but the colonel knows better than that, now. He knows who it was came to the ranch that night. It was by mistake the man got my window instead of Maybelle’s. It”—she stared down at her fingers, speaking in a very small voice—“it was awfully silly of me to think you’d come back and throw gravel on my window; but I’d been asleep, and—before that—I’d just finished writing my letter to you; and you know how confused everything is when you’re waked up suddenly that way. I heard it, and—I ran down—and never realized till he spoke that it wasn’t you—that it couldn’t have been you, of course.”