and try and get news of
him. We need supplies and we'll be gone only two or three days. We
can inquire at the Fort and maybe go on to Sacramento, and if he's been
there we'll hear of it. If we could only hear, just hear, he was safe,
it would be such a relief. It would take away this dreary feeling of
anxiety, and guilt too, Low. For I feel guilty when I think of how we
left him."

"Where was the guilt? You've no right to say that. You understood we
had to go. I could take no risks with you and the old man."

"Yes," she said, slowly, tempering her agreement with a self-soothing
reluctance, "but even so, it seemed terrible. I often tell myself we
couldn't have done anything else, but----"

Her voice dropped to silence and she sat staring out at the quiet
night, her head blurred with the filaments of loosened hair.

He did not speak, gripped by his internal torment, aggravated now by
torment from without. He wondered, if he told her the truth, would she
understand and help him to peace. But he knew that such knowledge
would set her in a new attitude toward him, an attitude of secret
judgment, of distracted pity, of an agonized partisanship built on
loyalty and the despairing passion of the disillusioned. He could
never tell her, for he could never support the loss of her devoted
belief, which was now the food of his life.

"Can I go?" she said, turning to look at him, smiling confidently as
one who knows the formal demand unnecessary.

"If you want," he answered.

"Then we'll start to-morrow," she said, and, leaning down, kissed him.

He was unresponsive to the touch of her lips, lay inert as she nestled
down into soft-breathing, child-like sleep. He watched the tent
opening pale into a glimmering triangle wondering what their life would
be with the specter of David standing in the path, an angel with a
flaming sword barring the way to Paradise.

Two days later she and Daddy John, sitting on the front seat of the
wagon, saw the low drab outlines of the Fort rising from the plain.
Under their tree was a new encampment, one tent with the hood of a
wagon behind it, and oxen grazing in the sun. As they drew near they
could see the crouched forms of two children, the light filtering
through the leafage on the silky flax of their heads. They were
occupied over a game, evidently a serious business, its floor of
operations the smooth ground worn bare about the camp fire. One of
them lay flat with a care