“The lonesomeness,” said Mackenzie, with a curious dwelling on the word; “I never heard it used in that specific sense before.”
“Well, it sure gets a greenhorn,” said Joan.
Charley held the sage-branch to the embers, blowing them until a little blaze jumped up into the startled dark. The sudden light revealed Joan’s face where she sat across from Mackenzie, and it was so pensively sad that it smote his heart like a pain to see.
Her eyes stood wide open as she had stretched them to roam into the night after her dreams of freedom beyond the land she knew, and so she held them a moment, undazzled by the light of the leaping blaze. They gleamed like glad waters in a morning sun, and 59 the schoolmaster’s heart was quickened by them, and the pain for her longing soothed out of it. The well of her youth was revealed before him, the fountain of her soul.
“I’m goin’ to roll in,” Charley announced, his branch consumed in the eager breath of the little blaze. “Don’t slam your shoes down like you was drivin’ nails when you come in, Joan.”
“It wouldn’t bother you much,” Joan told him, calmly indifferent to his great desire for unbroken repose.
Charley rolled on his back, where he lay a little while in luxurious inaction, sleep coming over him heavily. Joan shook him, sending him stumbling off to the wagon and his bunk.
“You could drive a wagon over him and never wake him once he hits the hay,” she said.
“What kind of a man is Dad Frazer?” Mackenzie asked, his mind running on his business adventure that was to begin on the morrow.
“Oh, he’s a regular old flat-foot,” said Joan. “He’ll talk your leg off before you’ve been around him a week, blowin’ about what he used to do down in Oklahoma.”