While she sat there turning over these recollections in her mind, the warm gold had faded to delicate ashes-of-roses. The light waned with infinite gentleness and tenderness. A great spirit of quietness sighed across the open land, enfolding the few tiny evening sounds that began to make themselves heard. Her mind wandered from the questions she was going to ask Uncle Hank. It was funny about those little brown owls that sit up at the mouths of prairie-dog holes; how they will turn their heads to watch you as you walk around them, and keep right on turning, until, if you’d walk around them often enough, they would wring their little heads right off. Oh, yes, they will. Indeed and truly. Shorty had seen ’em, mor’n once. A cooler air blew in from the southwest. The shine had gone from the window panes. A cricket chirped close at hand, and, without having consciously heard it, the child momentarily glanced that way. Then back to her vigil and her reflections. It was funny about a dogie. It was funny, and it was sad, too, that a dogie— Suddenly in the growing dimness, far out on the Ojo Bravo trail, a tiny speck began to vibrate. To the untutored gaze, it might well have been a jack-rabbit or a coyote, or even an idly cruising tumbleweed, but to the eyes that were watching it now, full of eager love, already deeply versed in plainscraft, that speck was instantly recognized as Uncle Hank on Buckskin. Aunt Val and the ladies who had been visiting her; the little brown owls who twisted off their own heads; the dogies, those forlorn orphans of the range, whose affairs had barely swum over the verge of her mental horizon—all were thrust headlong into the rag-bag of oblivion. The little feet struck the ground with a sharp spat; lightly as a blown feather Hilda was off, running down the trail. That was approaching toward which the twenty-four hours so inevitably swung. The vibrating speck came nearer and nearer and resolved itself into a most knowing-looking buckskin pony carrying a tall man clad in the usual dress of the cowpuncher. Galloping horseman and running child continued to approach each other. They hailed simultaneously. “Hi, Pettie!” “Oh, Uncle Hank!” Buckskin was checked; the grizzled head leaned far forward; one foot in its cowboy boot was lowered from the stirrup; Hilda’s was planted on it; the small brown hand caught firmly in the big, strong one; and the child swung up in front of the old man. The pony, as he felt the additional weight settle into place, always started soberly on toward the ranch house. The regular thing after that was for the two on Buckskin to bring forward the record of history from the point where it had been dropped—when they separated in the morning—to the present moment.