Meantime, the surprise and approval which The-Boy-On-The-Train’s understudy had bespoken, had answered the announcement. Uncle Hank, quietly leading in Buckskin, was met and hailed and pounded on the back, as he made his way toward the grand stand, where a small girl with very large dark eyes stood up on the seat and unconsciously cried aloud her inmost heart, mopping the tears from her face with a rag-doll’s gamboge hair. CHAPTER XII THE FUGITIVE After that roping match, on the ranch of the Three Sorrows—a small island of human life and interests, surrounded on every side by a sea of grass whose fishes were cattle—year followed year until five had been added to the number of them, and Hilda was thirteen. The carriage, now a sober, elderly vehicle, had carried Miss Val and Burchie many times as far as Mesquite on their journeyings to Fort Worth, for Miss Val—who was now frankly the invalid—found there at the sanitarium a system of baths and massage which she said helped her neuralgia very much. But it never helped it enough to let her live at the ranch more than a month or so at a time, and Burch she must have with her. She put him in a Fort Worth school and said she’d keep him under the doctor’s observation till he should be perfectly sound. To anybody else’s notion but hers, he had been that for a long time. It appeared there had never been anything the matter with his hearing; anyhow, he was now a particularly well-grown boy for his years, still silent, and with that air he might have inherited from his father, or caught from Aunt Val, of being just a visitor at the ranch. He never seemed to belong to it—or it to him. Hardly any of the things Hilda cared most for were of interest to Burch. Of course, he was off there in Fort Worth during the “Winter of the Big Snow,” that heart-breaking season which followed the blizzard that marooned Uncle Hank and Hilda on the Bar Thirteen. The Three Sorrows had been provided, as well as Uncle Hank could provide, against such a happening with stacks of the coarse laguna hay; but Hilda would never forget that time when, kept home from school by the weather, she tried to help with the poor weak cows that pawed at the frozen snow without being able to get through to anything they could eat, or licked it without being able to get anything they could drink. Uncle Hank said she worked like a little Trojan, and from that year she felt herself more and more increasingly his right hand.