LITMIR.BIZ

      Chapter 3

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      CHAPTER III

      Hilma Ring was not emotional. The petty reflexes of thought and action that come to women of finer fiber, of more pampered lives—to your idle beauty of the flowered boudoir—were unknown to her. Impulse and emotion were with her primitive, direct, unaffected by any reaction of sensitive nerves. The springs of her life were elemental as that secret force which each year covers the face of the Big Country with lusty verdure. When, after that last shot and that derisive farewell by the one coolly daring it, Hilma turned to ride back to her house she was conscious of but a single response to the events of the past few moments, cold anger. Anger at the impudent stranger who had driven off the yearlings in the face of her fire; anger more particularly at herself. Why had her hand tipped up the head on the barrel's end that instant her finger pulled the ​trigger? Why, when she had every intention of shooting to kill when the smiling face of that cowman looked at her between the prongs of the buckhorn—why had she let him live? Hilma did not find an answer to this question. Her anger but fed itself on answer denied.

      She rode her sorry pony into the corral, unsaddled him and threw him an armful of hay, for the beast was her sole companion in much lonesomeness and there was love between them. Then she carried her rifle to the doorstep and, sitting there, fired many shots at the rusty butt of a tomato can a hundred paces away. Every shot missed and at each miss her anger increased—that curious double anger linking the smiling stranger and her own self for its object. Hilma only stopped her savage practice shooting when the growing clutter of empty shells at her feet suddenly aroused her to the waste. Rifle cartridges cost money; her father would fly into one of his rages when he discovered what she had done. Then they would quarrel; perhaps he would strike her, as he sometimes did, and she would strike back. All that would not be worth while.

      Hilma carefully cleaned the rifle, reloaded the chamber; then gathered the empty shells ​into her apron and carried them far away from the house to spill them down the steep gorge of the coulee. She returned to her lonesomeness, and her still-gnawing anger.

      Lonesomeness had been this girl's portion almost since she could remember. There had been a time—away back there in Minnesota—when there was a mother; but that time was all in the dim forgotten land. Almost the only fact Hilma remembered about her mother was that she was American, and for that the girl was devoutly thankful. That this shadow figure of child memory should have been American instead of Danish had always been to Hilma a sort of investiture of sainthood. Hilma hated the Danish blood in her; she remembered how children had called her "Scowegian." When the mother went—Hilma was six then—the lonesomeness had come. First the lonesomeness of the scrubby farm in the flat lands but with neighbors so near one could see their windmills. Then the greater and more terrible lonesomeness of this vast country, where one looked a hundred miles from the Broken Horns across and across to the Black Hills, where it was a day's ride to a neighbor's house.

      ​Four years now this lonesomeness of the wilderness had been hers, had grown to be the most intimate thing in life. It had stamped an indelible mark on her mind. Hilma Ring, at nineteen, lived solely within herself. She sought sympathy, communion in thought and understanding with no one. Her father was the only person who came near invading this hard barrier of self-sufficiency. Perhaps she loved him; Hilma did not know. More often than not she considered him merely a shrunken little man with a bad temper with whom she must work in order to live. His Danish burr of speech was a dull irritation.

      So it was into the selfish sphere of this narrow life that the smiling and impudent stranger had shot, comet-like. Reason enough for Hilma's disliking him. But because he had taunted her with her poor shooting, defied her to kill him if she could, she hated him. Because, too, he was of the cattle clan—that caste deeming itself superior and demanding for itself subservience of all others—she hated him. Hated him, also, because he had run off with four misbranded yearlings which Zang Whistler had left in their secret corral under a working agreement with her father.

      ​The day wore to a purple and carnelian close. Hilma sat in the doorway and watched the riot of the sunset play all along the saw edge of the Broken Horns—the thin blue rim was like the lip of a volcano confining fires of creation. Billows of cathedral light streamed down the flanks of the mountains and out over the great range. The crystal air was a lens focusing into sharp relief dots of pines on the higher ridges, clumps of squatting sage fringing the nearer divides. Heavens paled from rose to lemon yellow and to green.

      Against this eerie light the figure of a horseman, at a great distance, appeared black as charcoal.

      Just this figure of a horseman visible for a minute against the sky line, then disappearing. Hilma saw it; she watched it with intentness until it was swallowed by the black shadow of a butte. Long she sat, waiting for the tiny silhouette to reappear. The dark came, but the specter of the afterglow did not show itself again. The girl found herself idly wondering about it. That would be on the road to Two Moons where the horseman appeared—on the road over which her father would be traveling homeward. No ranches lay over there; no ​cow outfits were located between Teapot and town. It must be her father, returning.

      The girl cooked supper and laid out two plates on the oilcloth-covered table. Supper grew cold; a smell of stale grease and cooling tea filled the long room. The clock with the picture of the Minnesota state capitol on its pendulum case banged out ten. Hilma ate alone.

      When she had dried her hands of steaming dishwater she went out to

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