“And I,” I confirmed.
Strangely enough we seemed to have little to say, now in this precious doldrums where we were becalmed, between the distant past and the unlogged future. We had not a particle of shade, not a trace of coolness: the sun was high, all our rocky recess was a furnace, fairly reverberant with the heat; the flies (and I vaguely pondered upon how they had existed, previously, and whence they had gathered) buzzed briskly, attracted by the dead mule, unseen, and captiously diverted to us also. We lay tolerably bolstered, without much movement; and as the Sioux were not firing upon us, we might wax careless of their espionage.
Her eyes, untroubled, scarcely left my face; I feared to let mine leave hers. Of what she was thinking I might not know, and I did not seek to know—was oddly yielding and content, for our decisions had been made. And still it was unreal, impossible: we, in this guise; the Sioux, watching; the desert, waiting; 302 death hovering—a sudden death, a violent death, the end of that which had barely begun; an end suspended in sight like the Dionysian sword, with the single hair already frayed by the greedy shears of the Fate. A snap, at our own signal; then presto, change!
It simply could not be true. Why, somewhere my father and mother busied, mindless; somewhere Benton roared, mindless; somewhere the wagon train toiled on, mindless; the stage road missed us not, nor wondered; the railroad graders shoveled and scraped and picked as blithely as if the same desert did not contain them, and us; cities throbbed, people worked and played, and we were of as little concern to them now as we would be a year hence.
Then it all pridefully resolved to this, like the warming tune of a fine battle chant: That I was here, with my woman, my partner woman, the much desirable woman whom I had won; which was more than Daniel, or Montoyo, or the Indian chief, or the wide world of other men could boast.
Soon she spoke, at times, musingly.
“I did make up to you, at first,” she said. “In Omaha, and on the train.”
“Did you?” I smiled. She was so childishly frank.
“But that was only passing. Then in Benton I knew you were different. I wondered what it was; but you were different from anybody that I had met 303 before. There’s always such a moment in a woman’s life.”
I soberly nodded. Nothing could be a platitude in such a place and such an hour.