There was nothing now for him to do. He
had cooked the supper, and then to ease the pain of his unclaimed
sympathies, cleaned the pans, and from a neighboring camp brought a
piece of deer meat for Susan. It was the only way he could serve her,
and he sat disconsolately looking now at the meat on a tin plate, then
toward the tent where she and Daddy John were talking. He could hear
the murmur of their voices, see their silhouettes moving on the canvas,
gigantic and grotesque. Presently she appeared in the opening, paused
there for a last word, and then came toward him.

"He wants to speak to Daddy John for a moment," she said and dropping
on the ground beside him, stared at the fire.

David looked at her longingly, but he dared not intrude upon her somber
abstraction. The voices in the tent rose and fell. Once at a louder
phrase from Daddy John she turned her head quickly and listened, a
sheaf of strained nerves. The voices dropped again, her eye came back
to the light and touched the young man's face. It contained no
recognition of him, but he leaped at the chance, making stammering
proffer of such aid as he could give.

"I've got you some supper."

He lifted the plate, but she shook her head.

"Let me cook it for you," he pleaded. "You haven't eaten anything
since morning."

"I can't eat," she said, and fell back to her fire-gazing, slipping
away from him into the forbidding dumbness of her thoughts. He could
only watch her, hoping for a word, an expressed wish. When it came it
was, alas! outside his power to gratify:

"If there had only been a doctor here! That was what I was hoping for."

And so when she asked for the help he yearned to give, it was his fate
that he should meet her longing with a hopeless silence.

When Daddy John emerged from the tent she leaped to her feet.

"Well?" she said with low eagerness.

"Go back to him. He wants you," answered the old man. "I've got
something to do for him."

He made no attempt to touch her, his words and voice were brusque, yet
David saw that she responded, softened, showed the ragged wound of her
pain to him as she did to no one else. It was an understanding that
went beneath all externals. Words were unnecessary between them, heart
spoke to heart.

She returned to the tent and sunk on the skin beside her father. He
smiled faintly and stretched a hand for hers, and her fingers slipped
between his, cool and strong against the lifeless dryn