bing into the wagon and
lying on the sacks, with bright, unwinking eyes fastened on Daddy
John's back. But she did not rest stunned under an unexpected blow as
they thought. She was acutely alive, bewildered, but with senses keen,
as if the world had taken a dizzying revolution and she had come up
panting and clutching among the fragments of what had been her life.

If there had been some one to whom she could have turned, relieving
herself by confession, she might have found solace and set her feet in
safer ways. But among the three men she was virtually alone, guarding
her secret with that most stubborn of all silences, a girl's in the
first wakening of sex. She had a superstitious hope that she could
regain peace and self-respect by an act of reparation, and at such
moments turned with expiatory passion to the thought of David. She
would go to California, live as her father had wished, marry her
betrothed, and be as good a wife to him as man could have. And for a
space these thoughts brought her ease, consoled her as a compensating
act of martyrdom.

She shunned Courant, rarely addressing him, keeping her horse to the
rear of the train where the wagon hood hid him from her. But when his
foot fell on the dust beside her, or he dropped back for a word with
Daddy John, a stealthy, observant quietude held her frame. She turned
her eyes from him as from an unholy sight, but it was useless, for her
mental vision called up his figure, painted in yellow and red upon the
background of the sage. She knew the expression of the lithe body as
it leaned from the saddle, the gnarled hand from which the rein hung
loose, the eyes, diamond hard and clear, living sparks set in leathery
skin wrinkled against the glare of the waste. She did not lie to
herself any more. No delusions could live in this land stripped of all
conciliatory deception.

The night before they left the Fort the men had had a consultation.
Sitting apart by the tent she had watched them, David and Daddy John
between her and the fire, Courant beyond it. His face, red lit between
the hanging locks of hair, his quick eyes, shifting from one man to the
other, was keen with a furtive anxiety. At a point in the murmured
interview, he had looked beyond them to the darkened spot where she
sat. Then Daddy John and David had come to her and told her that if
she wished they would turn back, take her home to Rochester, and stay
there with her always. There was