have seen only her eyes, and into them and beyond them to a soul that
somehow made his heart tremble.

What she said, what he answered, was of no moment. He could not have
told afterwards what it was. He stooped and filled his arms with wood,
and walked ahead of her up the pathway to the kitchen door, and stopped
when she flitted past him to show him where the wood-box stood. He was
conscious then of her slenderness and of the lightness of her steps.
He dropped the wood into the box behind the stove on which kettles
were steaming. There was the smell of chicken stewing, and the odor of
fresh-baked pies.

She smiled up at him and offered him a crisp, warn cookie with sugared
top, and he saw her eyes again and felt the same tremor at his heart.
He pulled himself together and smiled back at her, thanked her and went
out, stumbling a little on the doorstep, the cookie untasted in his
fingers.

He walked down to the corral and began fumbling at his pack, his
thoughts hushed before the revelation that had come to him.

"Her hands--her poor, little, red hands!" he said in a whisper as the
memory of them came suddenly. But it was her eyes that he was seeing
with his mind; her eyes, and what lay deep within. They troubled him,
shook him, made him want to use his man-strength against something that
was hurting her. He did not know what it could be; he did not know that
there was anything--but oddly the memory of his mother's white face back
in the long ago, and of her tone when she said, "Oh, God, please!" came
back and fitted themselves to the look in this woman's eyes.

Bud sat down on his canvas-wrapped bed and lifted his hat to rumple his
hair and then smooth it again, as was his habit when worried. He looked
at the cookie, and because he was hungry he ate it with a foolish
feeling that he was being sentimental as the very devil, thinking how
her hands had touched it. He rolled and smoked a cigarette afterwards,
and wondered who she was and whether she was married, and what her first
name was.

A quiet smoke will bring a fellow to his senses sometimes when
nothing else will, and Bud managed, by smoking two cigarettes in rapid
succession, to restore himself to some degree of sanity.

"Funny how she made me think of mother, back when I was a kid coming up
from Texas," he mused. "Mother'd like her." It was the first time he had
ever thought just that about a girl. "She's no relation to Honey," he
added. "I'd bet a horse