es, too late. We shall have time." Her voice did not waver; it heartened
with its vengeful, determined mien.

Occasionally a warrior invoked us by brandishing arm or weapon in surety
of hate and in promise of fancied reprisal. What fools they were! Now and
again a warrior galloped upon the back trail; returned gleefully, perhaps
to flourish an army canteen at us.

"There probably is water where we heard the frogs last night," she
remarked.

"I'm glad we didn't try to reach it, for camp," said I.

"So am I," said she. "We might have run right into them. We are better
here. At least, I am."

"And I," I confirmed.

Strangely enough we seemed to have little to say, now in this precious
doldrums where we were becalmed, between the distant past and the unlogged
future. We had not a particle of shade, not a trace of coolness: the sun
was high, all our rocky recess was a furnace, fairly reverberant with the
heat; the flies (and I vaguely pondered upon how they had existed,
previously, and whence they had gathered) buzzed briskly, attracted by the
dead mule, unseen, and captiously diverted to us also. We lay tolerably
bolstered, without much movement; and as the Sioux were not firing upon
us, we might wax careless of their espionage.

Her eyes, untroubled, scarcely left my face; I feared to let mine leave
hers. Of what she was thinking I might not know, and I did not seek to
know--was oddly yielding and content, for our decisions had been made. And
still it was unreal, impossible: we, in this guise; the Sioux, watching;
the desert, waiting; death hovering--a sudden death, a violent death, the
end of that which had barely begun; an end suspended in sight like the
Dionysian sword, with the single hair already frayed by the greedy shears
of the Fate. A snap, at our own signal; then presto, change!

It simply could not be true. Why, somewhere my father and mother busied,
mindless; somewhere Benton roared, mindless; somewhere the wagon train
toiled on, mindless; the stage road missed us not, nor wondered; the
railroad graders shoveled and scraped and picked as blithely as if the
same desert did not contain them, and us; cities throbbed, people worked
and played, and we were of as little concern to them now as we would be a
year hence.

Then it all pridefully resolved to this, like the warming tune of a fine
battle chant: That I was here, with my woman, my partner woman, the much
desirable woman whom I had won; which was mor