ten.

"You would have had your comfortable supper five hours ago had you not
been playing cavalier to me all over the wilderness." And Peter yielded.

Judith busied herself about the kitchen. Her mood of racking apprehension
had disappeared. Indian stoicism had again the guiding hand. She waved
Peter from the fire that she was kindling, as if he were a blundering
incompetent. But she let him slice the bacon and grind the coffee as one
lets a child help. Alida came in, white-faced and anxious over the long
absence of her husband, but conscientiously hospitable nevertheless. Peter
noticed that Judith made a gallant pretence of eating, crumbling her bread
and talking the meanwhile. The pale wife, who had little to say at the
best of times, was put to the test to say anything at all. But, withal,
their intent was so genuinely hospitable that Peter himself could not
speak with the pity of it. Accustomed as he was to the roughness of these
frontier cabins, never had he seen a human habitation so desolate as this.
The mud plaster had fallen away from between the logs, showing cross
sections of the melancholy prospect. An atmosphere of tragedy brooded over
the place. Whether from its long period of emptiness, or from the vaguely
hinted murder of the woman who had died there, or whether it took its
character from the prevailing desolation, the cabin in the valley was an
unlovely thing. Nor did the cleanliness, the conscientious making the best
of things, soften the woful aspect of the place. Rather was the appeal the
more poignant to the seeing eye, as the brave makeshift of the
self-respecting poor strikes deeper than the beggar's whine. The house was
bare but for the few things that Alida could take in the wagon in which
they made their flight. And all through the pinch of poverty and grinning
emptiness there was visible the woman-touch, the brave making the best of
nothing, the pitiful preparation for the coming of the man. Wild roses
from the creek bloomed against the gnarled and weather-warped logs of the
walls. Sprays of clematis trailed their white bridal beauty from cans
rescued from the ashes of a camp-fire. But Alida was a strategist when it
came to adorning her home, and the rusty receptacle was hid beneath
trailing green leaves. There was at the window a muslin curtain that in
its starched and ruffled estate was strongly suggestive of a child's frock
hastily converted into a window drapery. The curtain was drawn aside