"You are men, I am a woman. Help me."

They carried the doctor to the banks of the stream and laid him on a
spread robe. He protested that it was nothing, it had happened before,
several times. Missy would remember it, last winter in Rochester? Her
answering smile was pitiable, a grimace of the lips that went no
farther. She felt its failure and turned away plucking at a weed near
her. Courant saw the trembling of her hand and the swallowing movement
of her throat, bared of its sheltering kerchief. She glanced up with a
stealthy side look, fearful that her moment of weakness was spied upon,
and saw him, the pity surging from his heart shining on his face like a
softening light. She shrank from it, and, as he made an involuntary
step toward her, warned him off with a quick gesture. He turned to the
camp and set furiously to work, his hands shaking as he drove in the
picket pins, his throat dry. He did not dare to look at her again.
The desire to snatch her in his arms, to hold her close till he crushed
her in a passion of protecting tenderness, made him fear to look at
her, to hear her voice, to let the air of her moving body touch him.

The next morning, while lifting the doctor into the wagon, there was a
second hemorrhage. Even the sick man found it difficult to maintain
his cheery insouciance. Susan looked pinched, her tongue seemed
hardened to the consistency of leather that could not flex for the
ready utterance of words. The entire sum of her consciousness was
focused on her father. "Breakfast?"--with a blank glance at the
speaker--"is it breakfast time?" The men cooked for her and brought
her a cup of coffee and her plate of food. She set them on the
driver's seat, and when the doctor, keeping his head immovable, and
turning smiling eyes upon her, told her to eat she felt for them like a
blind woman. It was hard to swallow the coffee, took effort to force
it down a channel that was suddenly narrowed to a parched, resistent
tube. She would answer no one, seemed to have undergone an ossifying
of all faculties turned to the sounds and sights of life. David
remembered her state when the doctor had been ill on the Platte. But
the exclusion of the outer world was then an obsession of worry, a
jealous distraction, as if she resented the well-being of others when
hers were forced to suffer. This was different. She did not draw away
from him now. She did not seem to see or hear him. Her glance lit