"What's it matter what a man's parents are if he's kind to you?" she said, cutting viciously into the meat. "It's a lot to have some one fill the kettles for you and help you get the firewood, and when you're tired tell you to go back in the wagon and go to sleep. Nobody does that for me but Zavier."
It was the first time she had shown any appreciation of her swain's attentions. She expressed the normal, feminine point of view that her friend had been looking for, and as soon as she heard it Susan adroitly vaulted to the other side:
"But, Lucy, you can't marry him!"
"Who says I'm going to?" snapped Lucy. "Do I have to marry every Indian that makes eyes at me? All the men in the fort were doing it. They hadn't a look for anyone else."
Susan took this with reservations. A good many of the men in the fort had made eyes at her. It was rather grasping of Lucy to take it all to herself, and in her surprise at the extent of her friend's claims she was silent.
"As for me," Lucy went on, "I'm dead sick of this journey. I wish we could stop or go back or do something. But we've got to keep on and on to the end of nowhere. It seems as if we were going forever in these tiresome old wagons or on horses that get lame every other day, and then you have to walk. I don't mind living in a tent. I like it. But I hate always going on, never having a minute to rest, getting up in the morning when I'm only half awake, and having to cook at night when I'm so tired I'd just like to lie down on the ground without taking my clothes off and go to sleep there. I wish I'd never come. I wish I'd married the man in Cooperstown that I wouldn't have wiped my feet on then."
She slapped the frying pan on the fire and threw the meat into it. Her voice and lips were trembling. With a quick, backward bend she stooped to pick up a fork, and Susan saw her face puckered and quivering like a child's about to cry.
"Oh, Lucy," she cried in a burst of sympathy. "I didn't know you felt like that," and she tried to clasp the lithe uncorseted waist that flinched from her touch. Lucy's elbow, thrown suddenly out, kept her at a distance, and she fell back repulsed, but with consolations still ready to be offered.
"Let me alone," said Lucy, her face averted. "I'm that tired I don't know what I'm saying. Go and get the children for supper, and don't let them stand round staring at me or they'll be asking questions."
She snatched the coffee pot and shook it upside down, driblets of coffee running out. With her other hand she brushed the tears off her cheeks.