ou can't do it. It's a temporary thing. It's the desert
and the wildness and because he could ride and get water and find the
trail. In California it will be different. Out there it'll be the
same as it used to be back in the States. You'll think of this as
something unreal that never happened and your feeling for him--it'll
all go. When we get where it's civilized you'll be like you were when
we started. You couldn't have loved a savage like that then. Well,
you won't when you get where you belong. It's horrible. It's
unnatural."

She shook her head, glanced at him and glanced away. The sweat was
pouring off his face and his lips quivered like a weeping child's.

"Oh, David," she said with a deep breath like a groan, "_this_ is
natural for me. The other was not."

"You don't know what you're saying. And how about your promise? _You_
gave that of your own free will. Was it a thing you give and take back
whenever you please? What would your father think of your breaking
your word--throwing me off for a man no better than a half-blood
Indian? Is that your honor?" Then he was suddenly fearful that he had
said too much and hurt his case, and he dropped to a wild pleading:
"Oh, Susan, you can't, you can't. You haven't got the heart to treat
me so."

She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a
softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in
hopeless desperation.

"Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the
Fort."

"Where would we be now without him?" she said and smiled grimly at the
thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.

"We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say
yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We
can go on without him, there's no more danger."

She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The
dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.

"He'll go on with us," she said.

"It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If
he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I
can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and I _can_
get you back if he goes."

"You'll never get me back," she answered, and rising moved away from
him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to
the unloved and urgent suitor. He followed her and caught at her d