She looked up quickly, and there were scrolls unreadable in the black eyes.
"Air you a man now, Tom-Jeff, or on'y a boy like you used to be?" she asked.
Tom squared his broad shoulders and laughed.
"I'm big enough to be in my own way a good deal of the time. I believe I could muddy Sim Cantrell's back for him now, at arm-holts."
But there was still a question in the black eyes.
"Where's your preacher's coat, Tom-Jeff? I was allowin' you'd be wearin' it nex' time we met up."
"I reckon there isn't going to be any preacher's coat for me, Nan; that's one of the things I want to talk to you about. Let's go over yonder and sit down in the sun."
The place he chose for her was a flat stone half embedded in the up-climbing slope beyond the great boulder. She sat facing the path and the spring, listening, while Tom, stretched luxuriously on a bed of dry leaves at her feet, told her what had befallen; how he had been turned out of Beersheba, and what for; how, all the former things having passed away, he was torn and distracted in the struggle to find a footing in the new order.
In the midst of it he had a feeling that she was only dimly apprehending; that some of his keenest pains—most of them, perhaps—did not appeal to her. But there was comfort in her bodily presence, in the listening ear. It was a shifting of the burden in some sort, and there be times when the humblest pack animal may lighten a king's load.
His fears touching her understanding, or her lack of it, were confirmed when he had reached a stopping-place.