"D' you promise?"
"Promise?" she repeated. "Yes,—I—I promise."
Dallas knew that the trip to the land-office was impossible unless Lounsbury should chance along—which was unlikely, some weeks having passed since his last visit. Undoubtedly were he to come, he would help them. But would her father allow her to ask the storekeeper's aid? Probably not.
"I'll tell Charley about it to-night," she said finally. "We just got to find a way."
"What c'n he do?" retorted her father. "Far's him's gitting a team's concerned, we-all might's well look fer someone t' come right outen th' sky."
Her determination to ask advice of the pariah was a natural one. The morning that succeeded the night of the mules' terror, she had awakened to find a reassuring explanation for their fear: In the growing light, as the trumpet sounded reveille from the fort, she sprang up and looked out expectantly. On the top of a drift in front of the door was a bundle of sticks! A hard crust had formed during the night; and moccasin tracks, leading up to the wood, and then pointing away again, were cast in it with frozen clearness.
"That poor Indian!" she had exclaimed, in grateful relief.
Not once after his summoning before Colonel Cummings had The Squaw forgotten daily to leave firewood at the shack. The evening of his second trip across the Missouri, Dallas had lain in wait for him, secreted under the dismantled schooner, which she had drawn into place beside the door. And as, bringing his offering, he crossed the snow softly and approached, the terrified mules again announced his coming, and she hailed him.
"Come on, come near," she had called; "I want to see you."
Eager to prove his good intent, he had hastened forward; and she, just as eager to show her thankfulness, had led him into the house. There, with the distrustful eye of the section-boss upon him, and with Marylyn watching in trepidation from a distance, he had eaten and drunk at Dallas' bidding.