Joan nodded, her head drooping just a little from its proud lift. Tears were on her face; she turned it a bit to hide them from his eyes.
“You mind the time, Joan, four years ago it was the winter past, when you stood a full head shorter than you stand today, when the range was snowed in, and the sheep was unable to break the crust that froze over it, and was huddlin’ in the cañons starving wi’ the hunger that we couldn’t ease? Heh––ye mind that winter, Joan, gerrel?”
Joan nodded again, her chin trembling as it dropped nearer to the fluttering necktie at her warm, round throat. And the tears were coursing hotter, the well of them open, the stone at the mouth of it rolled away, the recollection of those harsh days almost too hard to bear.
“And you mind how you read in the book from the farmer college how a handful of corn a day would save the life of a sheep, and tide it over the time of stress and storm till it could find the grass in under the snow? Ah-h, ye mind how you read it, Joan, and come ridin’ to tell me? And how you took the wagons and the teams and drove that bitter length in wind and snow to old Wellfleet’s place down on the river, and brought corn that saved to me the lives of no less than twenty thousand sheep? It’s not you and me, that’s gone through these things side by side, that forgets them in the fair days, Joan, my little darlin’ gerrel. Them was hard days, and you didn’t desert me and leave me to go alone.”
Joan shook her head, the sob that she had been 227 smothering breaking from her in a sharp, riving cry. Tim, feeling that he had softened her, perhaps, laid his hand on her shoulder, and felt her body trembling under the emotion that his slow recital of past hardships had stirred.
“It’ll not be that you’ll leave me in a hole now, Joan,” he coaxed, stroking her hair back from her forehead, his touch gentle as his heart could be when interest bent it so.
“I gave you that––all those years that other girls have to themselves, I mean, and all that work that made me coarse and rough and kept me down in ignorance––I gave you out of my youth till the well of my giving has gone dry. I can’t give what you ask today, Dad; I can’t give you that.”
“Now, Joan, take it easy a bit, draw your breath on it, take it easy, gerrel.”
Joan’s chin was up again, the tremor gone out of it, the shudder of sorrow for the lost years stilled in her beautiful, strong body. Her voice was steady when she spoke: