"What are you staying in town so long for?" demanded Barb. His voice had lost nothing of its husky heaviness.
She answered with a question: "Where else have I to stay, father? I've been waiting for money to get East with and it hasn't come yet."
"What do you want to go East for?"
"I've nowhere else to go."
"Why don't you come home?"
"Because you told me to leave."
He sat slowly down on a chair near the table and with the care of a burdened man.
"Well," he said, "you mustn't take things too quick from me nowadays." She made no answer. "I've had a good deal of money trouble lately," he went on, "everything going against me." He spoke moodily and his huge frame lost in the bulk of his big storm coat overran almost pathetically the slender chair in which he tried to sit. His spirit seemed broken. "I reckon," he added, taking his hat from the table and fingering it slowly, "you'd better come along back."
She was sorry for him. She told him how much she wished he would give up trying to carry his big load, and she urged him to take a small ranch and keep out of debt. He laid his hat down again. He told her he didn't see how he could let it go, but they would talk it over when she got home.
This was the point of his errand that she dreaded to meet and putting it as inoffensively as possible she tried to parry: "I think," she ventured, "now that I've got some clothes ready and got started, I'd better go East for awhile anyway."