"Thank you for telling. In what way?"
"You were staring."
"N-o."
"You were."
"Beg your pardon. It takes two to make a stare. If I keep on looking
you in the eye--that's staring. If I'm looking when you ain't supposed
to know it--that's--that's--"
"Well?" she prompted.
"Mighty pleasant," he finished, rising.
As he moved off she looked curiously after. While he was talking, some
fleeting expression, trick of speech had recalled him as she first saw
him at Lone Tree--a young man, tall, sunburned, soft of speech,
ungrammatical, and the picture had awakened her to a change in herself.
In this her fourth month in the settlement she felt she had lost the
keen freshness of the stranger's point of view. She now scarcely
noticed his idiom, accent, grammatical lapses. Oddities of speech and
manner that at first would have provoked surprise or laughter no longer
challenged her attention. If the land's vast rawness still impressed,
she was losing the clarity of first perceptions.
She was being absorbed; her individuality was slowly undergoing the
inevitable process of addition and cancellation. How dim, indefinite
the past already seemed. Some other girl might have lived it, gone
through the round of parties, balls, associated with the well-groomed
men, refined girls of her acquaintance. How vivid, concrete was the
present! She contemplated her hands, roughened by dish-washing. Did it
foretell her future? Would this equilibration with environment end by
leaving her peer of the gaunt, labor-stricken women of the settlements?
She shuddered. The thought stamped her mood so that, returning on the
other round, Carter passed on, thinking her offended.
"Why so grave, sis?" Her brother smiled down upon her from the doorway.
Since her arrival he had had many ups and downs, alternating between
bed-fast and apparent convalescence. To-day the fires of life would
flare high, to flicker down to-morrow like a guttering candle that
wastes the quicker to its end. Not for the world would she increase his
anxiety with her foreboding. Hiding the dejection with a quick smile,
she turned his question with another.
"Bert, why does Mr. Carter dislike Captain Molyneux, the Leslies, and--"
"The English crowd in general?" he finished for her. "Does he? I never
heard him say much against them."
"No, he's one of your silent men. But actions count more than words.
When he drives me to or from Leslies' he invariably refuses the
invitation to come in, pleading hurry."
"Well, he has been pretty busy."
Morrill stated a fact. Carter had spent the haying months in the forest
sloughs, where they cut the bulk of their fodder. There, with the deep
woods smothering every errant breeze, mercury at a hundred, the fat
marsh sweating underfoot, he had moved, raked, or pitched while
sand-flies took toll of his flesh by day and mosquitoes converted his
homeward journey into a feast of blood. Eighty head of cattle, his and
Merrill's, had to be provided for, and he alone to do it. And it was
from these heavy labors that he had stolen time to drive Helen back and
forth.
"But he repels their every attempt at friendliness!" she protested.
"Positively snubbed Captain Molyneux the other day."
Morrill laughed. "Why do they persist in their overtures? Carter is
flesh and blood of the frontier, which makes no bones over its likes and
dislikes. With him a friend is a friend. He has no use for
civilization which calls upon its votaries to spread their friendship in
a thin veneer over a vast acquaintance. Having, courteously enough,
intimated that he doesn't desire closer acquaintance, he expects them to
heed the hint. Failing, they may expect to have it stated in stronger
terms. Molyneux has lived long enough in the north to know that." His
answer, however, simply completed the circle and brought them back to
the starting-point.