t used my opportunity to make her love me--to force from her
the confession of her love? Had I not failed, not only in doing what I
would have given everything I possessed or ever hoped to possess to have
been able to do; but also had I not failed in that immemorial duty which
man owes to woman, and which she had expected of me? Would she not laugh
at me with some more forceful man when she had found him? Was she not
scorning me even now?

I had heard women talk of greenhorns and backwoods boys in those days
when I had lived a life in which women played an important, a
disturbing, and a baleful part for every one but the boy who lived his
strange life on the tow-path or in the rude cabin; and now these outcast
women came back to me and through the very memories of them poisoned and
corrupted my nature. They peopled my dreams, with their loud voices,
their drunkenness, their oaths, their obscenities, their lures, their
tricks, their awful counterfeit of love; and, a figure apart from them
in these dreams, partaking of their nature only so far as I desired to
have it so, walked Virginia Royall, who had come to me across the
prairie to escape a life with Buckner Gowdy. But to the meaning of this
fact I shut the eye of my mind. I was I, and Gowdy was Gowdy. It was no
time for thought. Every moment I pressed closer and closer to that
action which I was sure would have been taken by Eben Sproule, or Bill
the Sailor--the only real friends I had ever possessed.

We used to go fishing along the creek; and ate many a savory mess of
bullheads, sunfish and shiners, which I prepared and cooked. We had
butter, and the cows, eased of the labors of travel, grew sleek and
round, and gave us plenty of milk. I saved for Virginia all the eggs
laid by my hens, except those used by her in the cooking. She gave me
the daintiest of meals; and I taught her to make bread. To see her
molding it with her strong small hands, was enough to have made me
insane if I had had any sense left. She showed me how to make vinegar
pies; and I failed in my pies made of the purple-flowered prairie
oxalis; but she triumphed over me by using the deliriously acid leaves
as a flavoring for sandwiches--we were getting our first experience as
prairie-dwellers in being deprived of the common vegetable foods of the
garden and forest. One day I cooked a delicious mess of cowslip greens
with a ham-bone. She seemed to be happy; and I should have been if I had
not made my