“They’d be women of no judgment, then,” she said, with conviction.
Jim’s head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain of Sioux blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman’s penalty and come into her woman’s kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.
These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for his hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected roughness, he asked:
“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been drinking like a beast of an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing.”
The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:
“Jim, I dreamed it last night—they came for you!”
“Did they get me?” he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He spoke as one who knew the answer.
“Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them.”
“You mustn’t let ’em see, when—they come. They’ve a right to a fair start; we didn’t get it, old girl.”
“The children gave it to us,” and she faced him.
“Yes, yes, but we want them to have it from the start, like good folks.”
They looked into each other’s eyes. The memory of dead and gone madness twinkled there a moment, then each remembered:
“You must hurry, Jim. You haven’t a moment to lose. I dreamed it was to be to-night—they’ll come to-night!”
“The game’s all up, old girl! If I had a month I couldn’t get away. Morrison’s been looking for me over to the Owl Creek Range; he’s back—Stevens told me yesterday. He’ll be heading here soon. The price on my head is a strain on friendship.”
“Yes, damn them! A thousand dollars is big money, and they’ve had hard luck!”
“They deserve it; I hope every herd in the State dies of scab.”
“There wasn’t a scabby sheep in our bunch. What a sight they were, loaded with tallow! There wasn’t one of them that couldn’t have weathered a blizzard; they could have lived on their own tallow for a month.”
She tried to divert his attention from his lost flock. When he began to talk about them the despair of his loss drove him to drink. She was ground between the millstones of his going or staying. If he stayed they would come for him; if he went, they would apprehend him before he was ten miles from the house.