“Do you care to sit out here and wait for them?” he asked as they stopped before the tent.
“I think I’ll go to bed,” she answered. “I’m tired.”
“I’ll stand sentry,” he offered.
She thanked him, and started to go in. At the door she paused, went back to him, and placed her hand in her soothing, placid way upon his arm again.
“You’ll fight out the good fight here,” said she, “for this is a country that’s got breathing-room in it.”
She looked up into his face a bit wistfully, he thought, as if there were more in her heart than she had spoken. “You’ll win here–I know you’ll win.”
He reached out to put his arm about her, drawn by the same warm attraction that had pulled the words from him at the riverside. The action was that of a man reaching out to lean his weary weight upon some familiar object, and there was something of old habit in it, as if he had been doing it always.
But she did not stay. He folded only moonlight, in which there is little substance for a strong man, even in Wyoming. Dr. Slavens sighed as the tent-flap dropped behind her. 43
“Yes; that’s what I’ve needed all the time,” said he.
He sat outside with his pipe, which never had seemed so sweet. But, for all of its solace, he was disturbed by the thought that perhaps he had made a blunder which had placed him in a false light with Miss Horton–only he thought of her as Agnes, just as if he had the right. For there were only occasions on which Dr. Slavens admitted himself to be a fizzle in the big fireworks of the world. That was a charge which he sometimes laid to himself in mortification of spirit, or as a flagellant to spur him along the hard road. He had not meant to let it slip him aloud over there by the river, because he didn’t believe it at all–at least not in that high-hoping hour.