McCloud looked past him out to the eternal hills.
Wah-na-gi went to the preacher timidly. "Please don't be angry. I sent him word. I asked him to take me away. Don't make me go back. Won't you let me stay? Won't you?"
McCloud did not look at her but gave her hand a reassuring touch. Then he said to Hal, in a tone of pity: "I thought you were a man. You're only a boy; a crazy boy."
"Don't be too hard on me, John."
He said this with a plaintive appealing smile, very hard to resist, but John McCloud did not see it. He was looking into the future with the prescience and the sternness of the prophet. He had been accustomed all his life to self-examination. He had only an acquired patience with those who act first and think afterwards. He belonged to a race that by instinct and training had learned to scrutinize desire, to stop inclination at the door, and make her tell her business. It was much easier than to turn her out of doors after she was once in.
Hal felt the need of sympathy and understanding, and he put out his hand toward the other but withdrew it. Turning to Wah-na-gi, he said: "Go in, little woman; lie down and rest. You must be very tired."
He walked with her to the door with a protecting hand on her shoulder. It is difficult to altogether appreciate what this meant to her starved soul, worn out with the struggle against her pitiless environment, ready to lie down and die. This hand, so strong, so gentle! At last she could trust, and rest. She could forget the past; she could leave the present and the future in his hand, so strong, so gentle.
"Yes, I'm tired; but nothing matters now," she said with a smile from which every trace of care had vanished—the smile of a happy child.
He stood looking after her for a moment after she disappeared into the house—his house. He would have liked to close the door and turn to the world and say: "She's mine. Leave us alone. Forget us. Go your ways and let us be happy."
But no, the world would not do that. It never did. It was a crazy, cruel world, where everything was as wrong as it could be. He turned to find McCloud still sitting on the bench before the door, staring into space. He seemed so much older. The skin seemed to have been drawn tighter over his big bones; or was it the gray, pitiless light of dawn? Now that the stress of action was off he, too, felt weary and old as he came over and sat down beside his friend.