“Then do, please, act as if you believed your grandfather is there when Johnny says he is there! You needn’t pretend to see him. I never do. I always say I can’t see him; and then Johnny Buffalo tells me just how he looks, and what he says. It pleases him so! He will be sure to have his sergeant meet you, Cousin Rawley. And you must pretend to believe. He’s just waiting for you to come, so that something important can take place. He wouldn’t even tell Uncle Peter what it is.” Nevada leaned dangerously toward Rawley and laid a hand on his, apparently as unconscious of the possible results as is a child who picks up an explosive.
“Promise me, Cousin Rawley, that you’ll be careful not to hurt Johnny’s feelings.” Her hand closed warmly over his.
Rawley’s silence was not the stubbornness she seemed to think it. He was holding his teeth clamped together, trying to reach that quiet strength of soul she had naïvely credited him with possessing. He had tried to hold himself together, to refrain from making a fool of himself, and she had mistaken the effort for strength of soul, he thought with secret chagrin. Oh, as to Johnny Buffalo—
“I should feel very badly if I knew that I had hurt any one’s feelings,” he said. “Least of all, Johnny Buffalo. If he can be happy with an hallucination, I shall not disturb his happiness. But that means a mental letting go, according to my way of thinking. When he takes to having delusions, he’s weakening. I don’t like that. I can’t be with him, you see. I have a few days to myself, and then I must be on the job again.”
“Oh. I thought you would be here for awhile, anyway.”
Rawley tried to extract some comfort from Nevada’s tone of regret. But her regret was, after all, too candid to mean anything especial, he feared. He did not make the mistake of asking her if she really minded his going again so soon.
“How is the dam coming along?” That, at least, would be a sane subject, he hoped.
“Oh—it’s coming along. I believe they’re all across the river, to-day.”
She did not seem eager to pursue that subject, either. He began to wonder more than ever what was in her mind. Something she would not talk about, he knew. But presently she pulled herself out of her preoccupation.
“Can you imagine that sliding volume of water being halted in all its hurry and made to stop running to the gulf; thwarted in its whole purpose?” she asked dreamily. “I’ve watched it all my life. Sometimes it’s savage and boils along, with driftwood and débris of all kinds—I saw it at Needles, once, in flood time. It was awful. Then to think how three men have lived beside it and planned and worked for years and years, to stop all that tremendous movement and pen it up in the hills and—it seems to me that it’s like life. It goes hurrying along, too, for years and years, and its power is devastating and awful, sometimes. And then—after all, it’s so easy to stop it.”