"Oh, fudge! Men with homes are gone more. You can't fool me! I've heard the women talk who have homes. Their husbands are always gone somewhere, their servants are always stealing them blind or quitting, and the house is a white elephant. Besides, I don't know where I'd like to live permanently. I can't picture myself settling down in any one town—can you, Bill? Now be honest."
"Yes. Parowan."
Well, she had wanted him honest, and she got the truth. Nor did she relish it, judging from the look on her face.
"Parowan! Of all the places in the world——"
"It's where we got the money to spend here," Bill stated stubbornly. "I've had some mighty happy times there, even if I did eat bacon and beans and hike a hundred miles after them sometimes. It made our stake for us—that same Parowan. Only for that mountain, you'd still be hazing your dad's cattle away from the loco patches, maybe, and helping your mother with the dishes. I don't wish you were—I'm tickled to death that you can wear diamonds and hire a nigger to comb your hair for you. But just the same, Doris, let's not get our heads so high in the air we can't see what Parowan ought to mean to us.
"This baby's mine—and yours. We've got her, and we haven't got a roof for her to sleep under, except what we hire by the week. Only for Parowan, we couldn't have married at all; don't forget that. You wouldn't have married a poor prospector, and if you would, I wouldn't have let you. It was the gold I found on that mountain side that made it possible for me to ask you to marry me. And it was the gold that made you say yes."
He swallowed as if there were some obstruction in his throat and went on, staring straight before him,—seeing that cut in the gulch's side, perhaps, and the slim girl in the stained khaki riding skirt and cotton shirt waist staring at the vein of yellow-flecked rock.
"You can't think of any place where you want to give our child a home. Well, I can! She's going to have one, whether it's ever lived in or not. It's going to be at Parowan, on the spot where her daddy lived when he found the gold that made her possible. I wouldn't do it for you, against your wish. You like this froth, and I want you to have what you like best. But Mary's going to have a home."
He did not raise his voice; indeed he almost whispered the words. Yet they struck Doris like a lash. Never before had Bill opposed her wishes, or declared that he would do a thing which Doris had not first decided to do.
"You can't take her away from me," she said breathlessly.