"Where is your mother?" asked Wid Gardner. He had come over near to
her when Doctor Barnes was helping Mary into the house.

"Dead--dead long ago," wept Annie. "When I was a little girl. Like
her, Mary, there--we didn't neither of us ever have a mother. We done
just the best we could, both of us. We've tried and tried to find some
sort of place where we belonged, and we couldn't. We haven't got any
place to go to. I haven't got a place on earth to call my home.

"And it's something a woman wants sometimes," she added after a while,
dabbing her wet handkerchief against her eyes. "That's the Gawd's
truth."

Wid approached more closely the weeping girl, touching her arm with a
brown hand now gentle as a child's.

"Now look-a-here," said he. "I can't stand to hear you go on that way.
Do you reckon you was ever any lonesomer fer a home than what I am,
living out here all my life?"

"And now I'm worse off than I ever was before," he went on frowningly.
"I didn't know nothing before you come out here. But now I do. I
can't think of your going back, Annie."

She did not answer him, but went on weeping.

"What's more, I ain't _a-going_ to stand it," he added savagely. "I
ain't _a-going_ to let you go back a-tall. Talk about home!--there's a
home right acrosst the fence. We can make it any way we like. It'll
do to start with, anyhow. Here's where you belong--you don't belong
back there in them dirty cities. You belong right out here--with me."

"I couldn't--I can't," said Annie. "I couldn't let her go back alone.
I got to take care of that kid."

"She ain't blind no more," said Wid. "But she don't have to go back!
This here place where we stand is hers, ain't it? What more does she
want? And we'd be right here, too, all the time, to help her and watch
her, wouldn't we, now?"

"You don't know her," said Annie Squires. "I do."

"But, Annie," he went on, "you'd ought to see this out here in the
valley when the spring comes! It's green, all green! The sage has got
five different colors of green in it--you wouldn't think that, would
you? And some blue. And you ain't seen the mountains yet when they're
white with snow on them--that's something you got to see fer to know
what a mountain is. And look at that little creek--it's plumb gentle
up here, ain't it? It's pretty, here. You ought to see the moonlight
on the meadows when the moon is full,--I was telling you about that,
Annie."

"I ain't n