them, too," she
said, after a pause, "for when she was sixteen she had to leave the
Reservation with her husband and hide him in the Everglades. She learned
a great deal, then."

"Why did she have to do that?"

"He'd fought and killed another Indian, and the officers were expected.
But in the fight he received a cut that made him blind. For ten years
Echochee fed and clothed him, hunting alligators and watching her chance
of slipping the skins to a market. By extreme stinting she finally saved
enough to 'buy him loose'--her optimistic way of saying 'pay a lawyer
for his defense.' Think, after being outcasts all that time, of leading
a blind husband through half a hundred miles of wilderness, with the
savings of ten years to wager on a chance of having him cleared!"

"I hope he was," I declared.

"In a sense he was, yes. He knew where she kept the money, and while she
was in the lawyer's office persuading him to take the case, her husband
stole it and sneaked away."

I uttered a cry at this hideous ingratitude, and she glanced at me,
gravely adding:

"Then he got drunk and was run over by a train; so, in a sense, Echochee
freed him, after all."

"Oh, the magnanimous courage of a woman's devotion!" I stopped and
looked at her. "It's always the same, irrespective of tribe and nation.
She's dauntless, world-defying, utterly self-sacrificing. I hope to
God, Doloria, that you won't be among those who squeeze their hearts
dry! You've lived away from the world and may not know how plentiful
these are; but no day passes without its toll of some woman being
silently crucified in her losing fight to save a besotted biped--the
lord of her earthly temple. It's only by a streak of luck when their
stage is cleared, as Echochee's was!"

"That may be all right for clearing the stage," she murmured, "but it
doesn't heal the hearts of those who were made to suffer."

I had not fathomed the penetration of her sympathy, being satisfied, man
like, to let a swift revenge wipe the slate. She seemed to be
contemplating what I had said, and when she again spoke her voice was
tender as though it had come unbidden from a wistful reverie.

"I suppose you're right, Jack. The world I've known, only through books,
must be full of such cruelties. I rather dread having to go into it. It
seems a pity that I can't always live in--in----" then, with a smile,
she asked: "Do you ever dream? I don't mean when you're asleep, but
awake--wide awake?