“If you’d keep yourself clean and tidy, like a self-respecting white woman, you wouldn’t appear so—so Injuny, and I wouldn’t be so very much ashamed of you. I’m sick to death of this bondage, Wahnetta. I, too, was a young and unsophisticated fool when we were married. What will you take to let me out of it honorably? I want to do everything I can to atone; but something must be done. I will not longer endure this mode of existence.”
“I have an idea, Joseph. My inheritance from my father arrived several days ago. I hadn’t thought of claiming it for myself, but I will now. Give me a letter of credit for the whole of it, with an outfit for travelling, and I will go, with the children, to a village on the Willamette River called Portland, in the Territory of Oregon. You know Dr. McLoughlin well, and so do I. There’s a convent in Portland, where I can place the girls, and a brothers’ school near by for the boys. I’ll get a boarding-place, not too far away, for myself and the little tots that are too young to be in school. I will soon recruit if I can get a chance to rest up and dress myself as the white women in my position do. You won’t know me in three months after I have had a chance to live in keeping with my station.”
She paused, panting because of her own audacity. Never before had she ventured to give utterance to so long a speech in his presence. He saw a ray of hope and pursued it eagerly.
“I have a good wagon, and a fine four-mule team that is idle,” he said musingly. “I guess we can manage to make the change.”
“What will you do, Joseph? Can you stay here when we are gone?”
“I shouldn’t think you’d care to consider me after all that’s happened, Wahnetta.”
“You cannot give me back my heart, my husband. I can never be happy without you. But, savagely as I spoke a while ago, my heart is full of love for you, and the thought of leaving you alone in this God-forsaken wilderness brings back all the tenderness of the past.”
“I can take care of myself, I reckon.”
“Of course; if I can take care of myself and seven children, you ought to be able to get along alone, or hire somebody to help you,” she exclaimed, straightening her shoulders, and revealing long-lost or hidden traces of her girlhood’s beauty in the light of an awakening hope. “I know the tendency of my race, or any other, to hark back to primitive conditions under adverse circumstances. The time has now come when the children must have the social and educational advantages of a higher civilization, or they’ll be Indians to the end of the chapter. As you will not permit me to take them to the East, I am glad that I can take them to the farthest West.”