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“Like the sea,” whispered Hilda, enraptured. “Just like the sea, only the water’s all grass—and you can drive over it. It jounces; but you and I—we can stand the jouncing.”

The fierce glare of mid-afternoon softened, grew milder and milder as the day waned. Hilda felt that she had never really seen the sun set before. It went down in a great glory of painted sky that rushed out over the floor of the plain so that everything—the ponies, the ambulance and its little cloud of dust—swam in it.

“It’s getting very late, Mr.—er—Pearsall—isn’t it?” Miss Valeria asked unhappily from the back seat. “Isn’t there danger of our being lost if we try to travel in the dark?”

“No, ma’am—not with me—you wouldn’t git lost, day or night,” Uncle Hank, as the little girl already called him in her own mind, turned a smiling face over his shoulder to answer. “But we’re most there now. See them willers where the moon’s a-risin’? That’s our camp.”

“Willers where the moon’s a-risin’.” It jingled in the little head like poetry; it still sang there as they swung in beside a small creek that was just a succession of water holes with dry rocks between, and she was lifted out. For, oh, the moon was rising, and so beautiful! It came up, a great shield of white in the pink that had somehow crept around from the sunset in the west; it looked over the willows and turned them black on one side and silver on the other; it shone on the little girl very knowingly, as if to say, “I’m not the same moon at all that I was back in New York—you and I know that.” And every bit of beauty, whether it was in the sky or on the earth, everything that was dear and lovely in this new life—and so much was—she attributed to the new friend whom she was going to call Uncle Hank forever and ever.