“No.”
“She’s going to stay?”
“She’s got consumption.”
“Oh!”
“They came in the steerage. No, the mother won’t go home, and won’t need my tent long, I think.”
Hildegarde stroked his hand. “It was like you, father, to give them shelter.”
“It’s been pretty much as you saw it this morning”—Mar turned to Louis—“for two weeks now. People are paralyzed. The fall from the height of their anticipations has stunned them. The women sit and wait. For what, they don’t know. The men drink and play high, and when they’re cleaned out and can’t think of anything else to do, they shoot. There were two men killed last night in a fight over a lot. In the last week there have been six suicides. Nobody minds. What’s the spilling of a little blood? A thing far more important is the scarcity of water. You buy it by the small bucketful and carry it home yourself. If you don’t boil it, you get typhoid. The mayor told somebody that, after all, we lacked only two things here—water and good society. The stranger said: ‘It’s all the damned lack.’” It was as striking to ears that heard the retort then for the first time as though the saying had not grown hoary. “You’ll see,” Mar said, as though Cheviot had denied such a possibility, “it’ll be worse here than ever Dawson was in the toughest times. We haven’t got any such body of men to keep the peace as the mounted police.”
“And to think it’s all your fault, father.”
Mar stared at her.