"Kit! my Kitty! Are you beside yourself? Where is your duty, if not to me and to our children?"
"Here, my husband, right here; in our beloved town, among the lonely strangers who have come to save it from destruction and have laid their lives at our feet."
"That is sheer nonsense. Your life is at stake."
"It is God's--and humanity's--first, Gaspar."
"Your children, then; if you scorn my wishes."
"Don't make it hard for me, beloved; harder than God Himself has made it. Do you take Mother Mercy and Abel and go to the place you have prepared. The children will be as safe with her as with me; safer, for she will watch them constantly, while I believe in leaving them to grow by themselves. Between them and us you may come and go--up to a certain point; but not to the peril of your taking the disease. The Indians are no less on the war-path because the cholera has come. _Your_ duty is afield, guarding, watching, preventing all the evil that a wise man can. Mine is here, using the skill I have learned from Wahneenah and faithfully at her side."
"Wahneenah? Does she wish to stay too; to nurse the pale-faces, the men who have come here to fight her own race?"
"Yes, Gaspar, she is just so noble. Can I do less? I, with my education, which the dear Doctor has given me, and my youth, my perfect health, my entire fearlessness. You forget, sweetheart; I am the Unafraid. Never more unafraid than now, never more sure that we will come out of this trouble as we have come out of every other. Why, dear, don't you remember old Katasha and her prophecy? I am to be great and rich and beneficent. I am to be the helper of many people. Well, then, since I am not great, and rich only through you, let me begin at the last end of the prophecy, and be beneficent. Wait; even now there is somebody coming toward us asking me for help."
"Kit, I can't have it. I won't. You are my wife. You shall obey me. You shall stop talking nonsense. You may as well understand. Pick together what duds you need and let's get off as soon as possible. Every hour here is fresh danger. Come. Please hurry."
But she did not hurry, not in the least. Indeed, had she followed her heart wholly, she would never have hastened one degree toward the end she had elected. But she followed it only in part; so she stole quietly up to where the man fumed and flustered and clasped her arms about his neck and laid her beautiful face against his own.