"You know," he said, quietly making his amends, "when I was a boy my father always told me I talked too much; and after mother died I--well, I didn't talk so much. I was intended for a soldier, you know, and good officers have to keep their own counsel. But--well, I guess the habit struck in--so if I don't always thank you, or tell you things, you will understand, won't you? I wasn't raised to please folks, you know, but just to fight Indians, and all that. How would you like to be a soldier's wife?"
"Not very well, I am afraid," she said. "All the fear and anxiety, and--well, I'm afraid I couldn't love my husband if he killed anybody." She paused and glanced up at him, but he was deep in thought.
"My mother was a soldier's wife," he said, at last; and Lucy, seeing where his thoughts had strayed, respected his silence. It was something she had learned long before, for while Rufus would sometimes mention his mother he would never talk about her, even to Lucy Ware. So they finished their housework, deep in their own thoughts. But when at last they stepped out into the sunshine Lucy touched him on the arm.
"Wouldn't you like to bring your poems with you?" she suggested. "We can read them when we have found the spring. Is it very beautiful up there?"
"Yes," answered Hardy, "I often go there to write, when nobody is around. You know Jeff and all these cowboys around here don't know that I write verse. They just think I'm a little fellow from somewhere up in California that can ride horses pretty good. But if I had handed it out to them that I was a poet, or even a college man, they would have gone to tucking snakes into my blankets and dropping _chili bravos_ into my beans until they got a rise out of me, sure. I learned that much before I ever came up here. But I've got a little place I call my garden--up in the cañon, above Hidden Water--and sometimes I sneak off up there, and write. Would you like to see a poem I wrote up there? All right, you can have the rest some other time." He stepped into the storeroom, extracted a little bundle from his war bag, and then they passed on up the valley together.
The cañon of the Alamo is like most Arizona stream beds, a strait-jacket of rocky walls, opening out at intervals into pocket-like valleys, such as the broad and fertile flat which lay below Hidden Water. On either side of the stream the banks rise in benches, each a little higher and broader and more heavily covered: the first pure sand, laid on by the last freshet; the next grown over with grass and weeds; the next bushed up with baby willows and arrow weed; and then, the high bench, studded with mesquite and _palo verdes_; and at the base of the solid rim perhaps a higher level, strewn with the rocks which time and the elements have hurled down from the cliff, and crested with ancient trees. Upon such a high bench stood the Dos S ranch house, with trails leading off up and down the flat or plunging down the bank, the striated cliff behind it and the water-torn valley below.