She did not move her head, but looked at the bluffs.

"I don't know," she answered, then hearing her--voice hoarse cleared
her throat. "It's all--so--so--sort of new. I--I--feel--I don't know
just how--I think it's homesick."

Her voice broke in a bursting sob. Her control gone, her pride fell
with it. Wheeling on the seat she cast upon him a look of despairing
appeal.

"Oh, Daddy John," was all she could gasp, and then bent her head so
that her hat might hide the shame of her tears.

He looked at her for a nonplused moment, at her brown arms bent over
her shaken bosom, at the shield of her broken hat. He was thoroughly
discomfited for he had not the least idea what was the matter. Then he
shifted the reins to his left hand and edging near her laid his right
on her knee.

"Don't you want to marry him?" he said gently.

"It isn't that, it's something else."

"What else? You can say anything you like to me. Ain't I carried you
when you were a baby?"

"I don't know what it is." Her voice came cut by sobbing breaths. "I
don't understand. It's like being terribly lonesome."

The old frontiersman had no remedy ready for this complaint. He, too,
did not understand.

"Don't you marry him if you don't like him," he said. "If you want to
tell him so and you're afraid, I'll do it for you."

"I do like him. It's not that."

"Well, then, what's making you cry?"

"Something else, something way down deep that makes everything seem so
far away and strange."

He leaned forward and spat over the wheel, then subsided against the
roof prop.

"Are you well?" he said, his imagination exhausted.

"Yes, very."

Daddy John looked at the backs of the mules. The off leader was a
capricious female by name Julia who required more management and
coaxing than the other five put together, and whom he loved beyond them
all. In his bewildered anxiety the thought passed through his mind
that all creatures of the feminine gender, animal or human, were
governed by laws inscrutable to the male, who might never aspire to
comprehension and could only strive to please and placate.

A footfall struck on his ear and, thrusting his head beyond the canvas
hood, he saw Leff loafing up from the rear.

"Saw her come in here," thought the old man, drawing his head in, "and
wants to hang round and snoop."

Since the Indian episode he despised Leff. His contempt was unveiled,
for the country lout who had shown himself a coward