“And you can live with a woman for more than two years, share the burdens of the road, eat at the same campfire, travel with her as your wife, and then dismiss her with a wave of the hand? You may consider yourself free perhaps, but I am a married woman and, besides, I love my husband.”
“You think you love him, no doubt, and maybe you do—now. But who knows how long that love will last? You yourself admit that love is the only legitimate basis for marriage. Your love for your husband may die to-morrow as the love of thousands of other women has done. Love is free as the wind, it comes and goes without reason, without warning, without restraint.
“Now, I am rich. I flatter myself that I know the world. I will aid you to a divorce and obtain one myself. After marriage we will travel, visit Florence, Naples, drink in all the myriad beauties of the Old World. If you have ambitions, I will help you to achieve. I will gratify your tastes for music, art, literature; I will free those wonderful impulses that throb beneath that calm exterior—those sensuous instincts to which your lout of a husband is so totally oblivious.”
I sprang to my feet. “That will be all, if you please. Don’t say another word.”
I busied myself with the horses. He placed their grain, then drew close to me.
“My God, Ethel. I love you, girl, love you, do you hear? Give me just a little chance, won’t you?”
He caught my hand and pressed it to his lips. I wrenched it away roughly, and looked about in desperation. The long shadows of late afternoon lay among the hills; the country was wild and rugged—not a human habitation in sight. I was absolutely alone with this maniac. I turned with resolute mien.
“See here, my friend. If you love me even half as much as you say you do, you will cease your insulting proposals, hitch up this team and take me back to civilisation. You will make me hate you, if you keep on as you are doing.”
He stood motionless, staring at me with sombre eyes. Then, as I began to place the harness on the horses, he came to my assistance, and together we watered them and hitched them to the buckboard.
We drove home in silence and reached camp just as Dan came whistling down the road. It was plain that my husband knew nothing of my desertion by Mrs. Adams that morning, and I was in no condition to tell him anything coherent. I stood like a wooden Indian as he seized me around the waist with a bearlike hug.