mpse of a naked Indian boy flinging loose his
blanket, a bronze statue glistening in a leap of flame. Nearer by a
woman's figure bent over a kettle black on a bed of embers, then a
girl's fire-touched form, with raised arms, shaking down a snake of
hair, which broke and grew cloudy under her disturbing hands. A
resounding smack sounded on a horse's flank, a low ripple of laughter
came tangled with a child's querulous crying, and through the walls of
tents and the thickness of smoke the notes of a flute filtered.

Her ear caught the pad of a footstep on the grass, and her eyes seized
on a shadow that grew from dusky uncertainty to a small, bent shape.
She waited, suffocated with heartbeats, then made a noiseless pounce on
it.

"Daddy John," she gasped, clutching at him.

The old man staggered, almost taken off his feet.

"Is he worse?" he said.

"He's told me. Did you find anyone?"

"Yes--two. One's Episcopal--in a train from St. Louis."

A sound came from her that he did not understand. She gripped at his
shoulders as if she were drowning. He thought she was about to swoon
and put his arm around her saying:

"Come back to the tent. You're all on a shake as if you had ague."

"I can't go back. Don't bring him. Don't bring him. Don't tell
father. Not now. I will later, some other time. When we get to
California, but not now--not to-night."

The sentences were cut apart by breaths that broke from her as if she
had been running. He was frightened and tried to draw her to the light
and see her face.

"Why, Missy!" he said with scared helplessness, "Why, Missy! What's
got you?"

"Don't get the clergyman. Tell him there isn't any. Tell him you've
looked all over. Tell him a lie."

He guessed the trouble was something more than the grief of the moment,
and urged in a whisper:

"What's the matter now? Go ahead and tell me. I'll stick by you."

She bent her head back to look into his face.

"I don't want to marry him now. I can't. I can't. I _can't_."

Her hands on his shoulders shook him with each repetition. The force
of the words was heightened by the suppressed tone. They should have
been screamed. In these whispered breaths they burst from her like
blood from a wound. With the last one her head bowed forward on his
shoulder with a movement of burrowing as though she would have crawled
up and hidden under his skin, and tears, the most violent he had ever
seen her shed, broke fr