“I’ll never let you down,” she said shortly. “Let’s go.”
They went out under a sky of faint, clean blue, where a frosty moon queened it amidst a scattering of small pale stars, and found a man who was driving out of town in a wagon and went with him.
By one means and another they made their way into the Gray Dome country and Jim built a cabin there.
Fifteen years later, Rosie Briggs stood in the door of it and watched Jim climb down the steep trail toward his latest prospect hole.
There was a fresh sprinkling of snow, so light and dry that the faint wind started bits of it to rolling like feathers. Beneath it the smells of spruce and pine and juniper and little silver mountain sage were dormant. The cold, clean, thin air of early morning was stripped for the odor of Long Jim’s pipe, and it drifted up, rank and acrid. Rosie liked it, at that hour and in that place.
She watched him until he waved his hand far below like a tiny marionette before he took the fork of the trail under the big Engelmann spruce and disappeared for the day. She waved back and turned to her tubs. Every week she washed the clothes of four families in Gray Dome, the mining town down the main road just around the next bend. It was hard work, but she didn’t mind it much.
She didn’t think about it. Besides, she only worked four days a week. The other three she rested—sewed a little, crocheted a little, knit a little—sweaters and stockings and mittens for Jim and herself, and kept her diminutive house as clean as a chemist’s scales; or sat quietly out in front in summer or inside by the stove in winter and let the long waves of peace wash deeper and deeper in. Peace is good after a life like Rosie’s. She lay in it thankfully, as in a bath, and soaked old stains away.
On the side of Gray Dome Mountain, with the sheer drop of the cañon at her feet and the range spread out beyond; in the midst of cleanness and silence unbroken since that old rocky backbone of the continent thrust itself up into the sun, she had risen slowly out of the shards of the life of Captain Mac and come, late but surely, into her heritage of womanliness and dignity. The years had chipped away her prettiness, but in its place was beauty for those who could see it. The smooth face had been sculptured into something fine and strong and self-directed, something steadfast and serene. She wasn’t blown about by tantrums any more.
She had a stake in the game of life now, and she played to hold it. She had steadied to meet the responsibilities thrust upon her by Jim. He was as kind and patient as the seasons, and as unreliable. And she was like a cottonwood tree; she put out the leaves of her affection and confidence surely and abundantly, but with tireless caution and she rarely got nipped. She controlled him where he could be controlled, and where he couldn’t she accepted him as she did the weather. Her knowledge of men was empirical, unhampered by theories.