There was a silence, and then she said, hesitatingly, “What are we going to do?”
He glanced at her. Her attitude and the troubled expression of her face, as well as her voice, indicated that the logic of the situation was overthrowing the jaunty self-possession which she had at first affected. The desert was staring her out of countenance. How his heart yearned toward her! If she had only given him a right to take care of her, how he would comfort her! what prodigies would he be capable of to succor her! But this rising impulse of tenderness was turned to choking bitterness by the memory of that scornful “No, sir.” So he replied coldly, “I 'm not in the habit of being left behind in deserts, and I don't know what it is customary to do in such cases. I see nothing except to wait for the next train, which will come along some time within twenty-four hours.”
There was another long silence, after which she said in a timid voice, “Had n't we better walk to the next station?”
At the suggestion of walking he glanced at her close-fitting dress, and a sardonic grin slightly twitched the corners of his mouth as he dryly answered, “It is thirty miles one way and twenty the other to the first station.”
Several minutes passed before she spoke again, and then she said, with an accent almost like that of a child in trouble and about to cry, “I 'm cold.”
The strong, unceasing wind, blowing from snowy mountain-caverns across a plain on which there was not the slightest barrier of hill or tree to check its violence, was indeed bitterly cold, and Lombard himself felt chilled to the marrow of his bones. He took off his overcoat and offered it to her.
“No,” said she, “you are as cold as I am.”
“You will please take it,” he replied, in a peremptory manner; and she took it.
“At this rate we shall freeze to death before midnight,” he added, as if in soliloquy. “I must see if I can't contrive to make some sort of a shelter with this sagebrush.”
He began by tearing up a large number of bushes by the roots. Seeing what he was doing, Miss Dwyer was glad to warm her stiffened muscles by taking hold and helping; which she did with a vigor that shortly reduced her gloves to shreds and filled her fingers with scratches from the rough twigs. Lombard next chose an unusually high and thick clump of brush, and cleared a small space three feet across in the centre of it, scattering twigs on the uncovered earth to keep off its chill.