"Will this do? If we go on we'll only be riding into the fog again."

I was conscious of the thin, apparently distant piping of frogs.

"There seems to be a marsh beyond," she uttered.

"Yes, we'd better stop where we are," I agreed. "Then in the morning we
can take stock."

"In the morning, surely. We may not be far astray." She swung off before I
had awkwardly dismounted to help her. Her limbs failed--my own were
clamped by stiffness--and she staggered and collapsed with a little
laugh.

"I'm tired," she confessed. "Wait just a moment."

"You stay where you are," I ordered, staggering also as I hastily landed.
"I'll make camp."

But she would have none of that; pleaded my one-handedness and insisted
upon cooperating at the mules. We seemed to be marooned upon a small rise
of gravel and coarsely matted dried grasses. The animals were staked out,
fell to nibbling. I sought a spot for our beds; laid down a buffalo robe
for her and placed her saddle as her pillow. She sank with a sigh, tucking
her skirt under her, and I folded the robe over.

Her face gazed up at me; she extended her hand.

"You are very kind, sir," she said, in a smile that pathetically curved
her lips. There, at my knees, she looked so worn, so slight, so childish,
so in need of encouragement that all was well and that she had a friend to
serve her, that with a rush of sudden sympathy I would--indeed I could
have kissed her, upon the forehead if not upon the lips themselves. It was
an impulse well-nigh overmastering; an impulse that must have dazed me so
that she saw or felt, for a tinge of pink swept into her skin; she
withdrew her hand and settled composedly.

"Good-night. Please sleep. In the morning we'll reach the stage road and
your troubles will be near the end."

Under my own robe I lay for a long time reviewing past and present and
discussing with myself the future. Strangely enough the present occupied
me the most; it incorporated with that future beyond the fog, and when I
put her out back she came as if she were part and parcel of my life. There
was a sense of balance; we had been associates, fellow tenants--in fact,
she was entwined with the warp and woof of all my memories dating far back
to my entrance, fresh and hopeful, into the new West. It rather
flabbergasted me to find myself thinking that the future was going to be
very tame; perhaps, as she had suggested, regretful. I had not apprehended
that the end should be so dra