Life seemed to have moved sluggishly in the basin, save in the increase of the tribe. Six young Cramers now walked upright, though the smallest walked insecurely and frequently fell down and lay squalling with its eyes shut and its nose wrinkled until one of the older children picked it up and dusted it off, remonstrating the while in Pahute. The seventh was not yet old enough to ride the well-upholstered hip of Gladys, but wailed in a cradle which some one must be incessantly rocking.
Gladys was more slatternly than ever she had been, and her vacuous grin had lost a tooth. Anita had aged terribly, Rawley thought. She moved slowly, with a long stick for a staff, and her eyes held a dumb misery he could not face. Nevada informed him that Grandmother had not been very well, lately, although there was nothing wrong, particularly.
“She doesn’t sleep at all, it seems to me,” Nevada detailed. “Often she’s up and prowling along the river bank in the middle of the night, and I have to go and lead her back. I think she’s getting childish. She will sit and watch me by the hour, when I’m working, but she doesn’t seem to want me to talk to her. She just sits and looks, the way she’s been looking at you.”
Nevada went away then to some work which she said was important, and Rawley wandered down to the river bank. In a few minutes he heard a sound behind him and turned, hoping that Nevada had yielded to his unspoken desire and was coming to join him.
But it was Anita, walking slowly down the uneven pathway, planting her crude staff ahead of her in the trail and pulling herself to it with a weary, laborious movement. Her gray bangs hung straight down to her eyelids. Her wrinkled old face was impassive, her eyes dumb. Rawley bit his lip suddenly, thinking of his Grandfather King sitting, “a hunk of meat in the wheel chair.” Life, it seemed to him, had dealt very harshly with these two. He was no longer swayed by the stern prejudice of Johnny Buffalo. He did not believe that Anita, in her lovely youth, had been merely a whimsy of love. His grandfather had loved her, had meant to return to her. He did not believe that King, of the Mounted, would have loved one who loved many. The King pride would not have permitted that.
Anita came up to him and leaned hard upon her stick, her eyes turned dully upon the river. Never before had she sought him out; rather had she avoided him, staring at him with a look he interpreted as resentment. She looked so old, so infinitely tired with life, and her eyes went to the river as if it alone could know the things she had buried in her heart, long ago when she was a slim young thing, all fire and life.
With a sudden impulse of tenderness he put his arm around her, leading her to the flat rock and seating her there as gallantly as if she were Nevada, whom he loved. It was what his grandfather would have done. Rawley felt suddenly convicted of a fault, almost of a sin; the sin of omission. Here was the love of his grandfather’s youth, the mother of his grandfather’s first-born. And because she was old and fat, because the primitive blood had triumphed and she had yielded to environment and slipped back into Indian ways, he had snobbishly held himself aloof. He had ignored her claim upon his kindness. Had her beauty remained with her, he told himself harshly, his attitude had been altogether different. Now he wanted to make up to her, somehow, for his selfish oversight. He sat down beside her and patted her hand,—for the Anita who had been beautiful, the Anita whom King, of the Mounted, had loved.
“You love—my girl—Nevada?” The old squaw spoke abruptly, though her voice held to a dead level of impassivity.
“How did you know?” Rawley took away his hand.
“I know. I have seen love—in eyes—blue. Eyes like your eyes.”