“If you wish it, although–Well, yes–if you wish it.”
“I do, most earnestly,” she assured him.
“You need a good sleep,” he counseled. “Turn in as soon as I’m gone, and don’t worry about this. 271 There’s a good deal of bluff in Boyle.”
“He’s treacherous, and he shoots wonderfully. He killed that poor fellow last night without ever seeing him at all.”
“But I’m not going to take a shot at him out of the dark,” said he.
“I know. But I’ll be uneasy until you return.”
“There’s too much trouble in your face today for one of your years,” he said, lifting her chin with rather a professional rebuke in his eyes. “You’ll have to put it down, or it will make you old. Go right on dreaming and planning; things will come out exactly as you have designed.”
“Perhaps,” she agreed, but with little hope in her voice.
Slavens saddled his horse after they had refreshed themselves with coffee. Agnes stood by, racked with an anxiety which seemed to grind her heart. The physician thought of the pioneer women of his youth, of those who lived far out on the thin edge of prairie reaches, and in the gloom of forests which groaned around them in the lone winds of winter nights. There was the same melancholy of isolation in Agnes’ eyes today as he had seen in theirs; the same sad hopelessness; the same hunger, and the longing to fly from the wilderness and its hardships, heart-weariness, and pain.
Her hand lay appealingly upon his shoulder for a moment before he mounted, and her face was turned up to him, unspoken yearning on her lips. 272