“I’m not going to hurt you,” he said softly.
At the sound of his voice she trembled again, but he leaned over and touched her on the shoulder.
“I’m very sorry I frightened you,” he said again. And then after a moment, “Have you lost your way?”
She painfully freed one arm, and looked up; then quickly buried her head again in her hands, her shoulders heaving convulsively, her slender body racked by childish sobs.
Gallatin straightened in some confusion. He had never, to his knowledge, been considered a bugaboo among the women of his acquaintance. But, as he rubbed his chin pensively, he remembered that it was a week or more since he had had a shave, and that a stiff dark stubble discolored his chin. His brown slouch hat was broken and dirty, his blue flannel shirt from contact with the briers was tattered and worn, and he realized that he was hardly an object to inspire confidence in the heart of a frightened girl. So, with a discretion which did credit to his knowledge of her sex, he sat down on a near-by rock and waited for the storm to pass.
His patience was rewarded, for in a little while her sobs were spent, and she raised her head and glanced at him. This time his appearance reassured her, for Gallatin had taken off his hat, and his eyes, no longer darkly mysterious in shadow, were looking at her very kindly.
“I want to try and help you, if I can,” he was saying gently. “I’m about to make a camp over here, and if you’ll join me——”
Something in the tones of his voice and in his manner of expressing himself, caused her to sit suddenly up and examine him more minutely. When she had done so, her hands made two graceful gestures—one toward her disarranged hair and the other toward her disarranged skirt. Gallatin would have laughed at this instinctive manifestation of the eternal feminine, which even in direst woe could not altogether be forgotten, but instead he only smiled, for after all she looked so childishly forlorn and unhappy.