"Is it--is the girl"--
"Yes; it's our poor little Rose--that's the little one, in the gray hat.
She'll give herself away if I don't. She don't care for nothin' nor
nobody. She was runnin' away with that fellow--that dish-washin' Swede
what I found in the mountings eatin' roots like a ground-hog, with the
ends of his feet froze off. Now you know all I know--and more than she
knows, for she thinks she was fond of him. She wa'n't, never--for I
watched 'em, and I know. She was crazy to git away, and she took him for
the chance."
His excitement passed, and we sat apart and watched the pair at a
distance. She--the little one--sat as passively by her dead as Maverick
pondering his cruel deed; but with both it was a hopeless quiet.
"Come," he said at length, "I've got to bury him. You look after her,
and keep her with you till I git through. I'm givin' you the hardest
part," he added wistfully, as if he fully realized how he had cut
himself off from all such duties, henceforth, to the girl he was
consigning to a stranger's care.
I told him I thought that the funeral had more need of me than the
mourner, and I shrank from intruding myself.
"I dassent leave her by herself--see? I don't know what notion she may
take next, and she won't let me come within a rope's len'th of her."
I will not go over again that miserable hour in the willows, where I
made her stay with me, out of sight of what Maverick was doing. Ours
were the tender mercies of the wicked, I fear; but she must have felt
that sympathy at least was near her, if not help. I will not say that
her youth and distressful loveliness did not sharpen my perception of a
sweet life wasted, gone utterly astray, which might have brought God's
blessing into some man's home--perhaps Maverick's, had he not been so
hardly dealt with. She was not of that great disposition of heart which
can love best that which has sorest need of love; but she was all woman,
and helpless and distraught with her tangle of grief and despair, the
nature of which I could only half comprehend.
We sat there by the sunken stream, on the hot gravel where the sun had
lain, the willows sifting their inconstant shadows over us; and I
thought how other things as precious as "God's water" go astray on the
Jericho road, or are captured and sold for a price, while dry hearts
ache with the thirst that asks a "draught divine."
The man's felt hat she wore, pulled down over her face, was pinned to
her coil of braids which had slipped from the crown of her head. The hat
was no longer even a protection; she cast it off, and the blond braids,
that had not been smoothed for a day and night, fell like ropes down her
back. The sun had burned her cheeks and neck to a clear crimson; her
blue eyes were as wild with weeping as a child's. She was a rose, but a
rose that had been trampled in the dust; and her prayer was to be left
there, rather than that we should take her home.
I suppose I must have had some influence over her, for she allowed me to
help her to arrange her forlorn disguise, and put her on her horse,
which was more than could have been expected from the way she had
received me. And so, about four o'clock, we started back.
There was a scene when we headed the horses to the west; she protesting
with wild sobs that she would not, could not, go home, that she would
rather die, that we should never get her back alive, and so on. Maverick
stood aside bitterly, and left her to me, and I was aware of a grotesque
touch of jealousy--which, after all, was perhaps natural--in his dour
face whenever he looked back at us. He kept some distance ahead, and
waited for us when we fell too far in the rear.
This would happen when from time to time her situation seemed to
overpower her, and she would stop in the road, and wring her hands, and
try to throw herself out of the saddle, and pray me to let her go.
"Go where?" I would ask. "Where do you wish to go? Have you any plan, or
suggestion, that I could help you to carry out?" But I said it only to
show her how hopeless her resistance was. This she would own piteously,
and say: "Nobody can help me. There ain't nowhere for me to go. But I
can't go back. You won't let him make me, will you?"
"Why cannot you go back to your father and your brothers?"
This would usually silence her, and, setting her teeth upon her trouble,
she would ride on, while I reproached myself, I knew not why.
After one of these struggles--when she had given in to the force of
circumstances, but still unconsenting and rebellious--Maverick fell
back, and ranged his horse by her other side.
"I know partly what's troubling you, and I'd rid you of that part quick
enough," he said, with a kind of dogged patience in his hard voice;
"but you can't get on there without me. You know that, don't you? You
don't blame me for staying?"
"I don't blame you for anything but what you've done to-day. You've
broke my heart, and ruined me, and took away my last chance, and I don't
care what becomes of me, so I don't have to go back."
"You don't have to any more than you have to live. Dyin' is a good deal
easier, but we can't always die when we want to. Suppose I found a
little lost child on the road, and it cried to go home, and I didn't
know where 'home' was, would I leave it there just because it cried and
hung back? I'd take you to a better home if I knew of one; but I don't.
And there's the old man. I suppose we could get some doctor to certify
that he's out of his mind, and get him sent up to Blackfoot; but I guess
we'd have to buy the doctor first."
"Oh, hush, do, and leave me alone," she said.
Maverick dug his spurs into his horse, and plunged ahead.
"There," she cried, "now you know part of it; but it's the least
part--the least, the least! Poor father, he's awful queer. He don't more
than half the time know who I am," she whispered. "But it ain't him I'm
running away from. It's myself--my own life."
"What is it--can't you tell me?"
She shook her head, but she kept on telling, as if she were talking to
herself.
"Father he's like I told you, and the boys--oh, that's worse! I can't
get a decent woman to come there and live, and the women at Arco won't
speak to me because I'm livin' there alone. They say--they think I ought
to get married--to Maverick or somebody. I'll die first. I _will_ die,
if there's any way to, before I'll marry him!"
This may not sound like tragedy as I tell it, but I think it was tragedy
to her. I tried to persuade her that it must be her imagination about
the women at Arco; or, if some of them did talk,--as indeed I myself had
heard, to my shame and disgust,--I told her I had never known that place
where there was not one woman, at least, who could understand and help
another in her trouble.
"_I_ don't know of any," she said simply.