She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in hopeless desperation.
"Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the Fort."
"Where would we be now without him?" she said and smiled grimly at the thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.
"We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We can go on without him, there's no more danger."
She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.
"He'll go on with us," she said.
"It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and I can get you back if he goes."
"You'll never get me back," she answered, and rising moved away from him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to the unloved and urgent suitor. He followed her and caught at her dress.
"Don't go. Don't leave me this way. I can't believe it. I can't stand it. If I hadn't grown into thinking you were going to be my wife maybe I could. But it's just unbearable when I'd got used to looking upon you as mine, almost as good as married to me. You can't do it. You can't make me suffer this way."
His complete abandonment filled her with pain, the first relenting she had had. She could not look at him and longed to escape. She tried to draw her dress from his hands, saying: