ate my third meal cooked by
Virginia Royall.

2

I do not know how long we camped in this lonely little forest; for I
lost reckoning as to time. Once in a while Virginia would ask me when I
thought it would be safe to go on our way; and I always told her that it
would be better to wait.

I had forgotten my farm. When I was with her, I could not overcome my
bashfulness, my lack of experience, my ignorance of every manner of
approach except that of the canallers to the waterside women, with which
I suddenly found myself as familiar through memory as with the route
from my plate to my mouth; that way I had fully made up my mind to
adopt; but something held me back.

I now began leaving the camp and from some lurking-place in the distance
watching her as a cat watches a bird. I lived over in my mind a thousand
times the attack I would make upon her defense, and her yielding after a
show of resistance. I became convinced at last that she would not make
even a show of resistance; that she was probably wondering what I was
waiting for, and making up her mind that, after all, I was not much of
a man.

I saw her one evening, after looking about to see if she was observed,
take off her stockings and go wading in the deep cool water of the
creek--and I lay awake at night wondering whether, after all, she had
not known that I was watching her, and had so acted for my benefit--and
then I left my tossed couch and creeping to the side of the wagon
listened, trembling in every limb, with my ear to the canvas until I was
able to make out her regular breathing only a few inches from my ear.
And when in going away--as I always did, finally--I made a little noise
which awakened her, she called and asked me if I had heard anything, I
said no, and pacified her by saying that I had been awake and watching
all the time. Then I despised myself for saying nothing more.

I constantly found myself despising my own decency. I felt the girl in
my arms a thousand times as I had felt her for those delicious hours the
night she had invited me to share the wagon with her, and we had sat in
the spring seat wrapped in the buffalo-robe, as she slept with her head
on my shoulder. I tormented myself by asking if she had really slept, or
only pretended to sleep. Once away from her, once freed from the
innocent look in her eyes, I saw in her behavior that night every
advance which any real man might have looked for, as a signal to action.
Why had I no