tty bad. Turning out as it has I'm glad you
done it."

She saw he thought she had taken it for herself, and experienced relief
in the consciousness of unjust punishment.

"You were asleep," she said, "and I came down and took it twice."

He did not look at her for he could not bear to see her humiliation.
It was his affair to lighten her self-reproach.

"Well, that was all right. You're the only woman among us, and you've
got to be kept up."

"I--I--couldn't stand it any longer," she faltered now, wanting to
justify herself. "It was too much to bear."

"Don't say no more," he said tenderly. "Ain't you only a little girl
put up against things that 'ud break the spirit of a strong man?"

The pathos of his efforts to excuse her shook her guarded self-control.
She suddenly put her face against his shoulder in a lonely dreariness.
He made a backward gesture with his head that he might toss off his hat
and lay his cheek on her hair.

"There, there," he muttered comfortingly. "Don't go worrying about
that. You ain't done no harm. It's just as natural for you to have
taken it as for you to go to sleep when you're tired. And there's not
a soul but you and me'll ever know it, and we'll forget by to-night."

His simple words, reminiscent of gentler days, when tragic problems lay
beyond the confines of imagination, loosed the tension of her mood, and
she clasped her arms about him, trembling and shaken. He patted her
with his free hand, the coffee-pot in the other, thinking her agitation
merely an expression of fatigue, with no more knowledge of its complex
provocation than he had of the mighty throes that had once shaken the
blighted land on which they stood.

David was better, much better, he declared, and proved it by helping
clear the camp and pack the wagon for the night march. He was kneeling
by Daddy John, who was folding the blankets, when he said suddenly:

"If I hadn't got water I think I'd have died last night."

The old man, stopped in his folding to turn a hardening face on him.

"Water?" he said. "How'd you get it?"

"Susan did. I told her I couldn't stand it, and she went down twice to
the wagon and brought it to me. I was at the end of my rope."

Daddy John said nothing. His ideas were readjusting themselves to a
new point of view. When they were established his Missy was back upon
her pedestal, a taller one than ever before, and David was once and for
all in the dust at its feet.