“You must promise me. Oh, my beloved child, I couldn’t leave you alone. It seemed as if God had said to me, ‘Die in peace. Her father will care for her.’ I couldn’t go and leave you this way, without a friend. Now I can rest in peace. Promise to let him take care of you. Promise.”
“Oh, mother, don’t ask me. What have you just told me? That he sold you to a stranger for a pair of horses, left you to die in a cabin in the mountains! That’s not my father. My father was Dan Moreau. I can do nothing but hate that other man now.”
“Don’t blame him, dear, the past is over. Forgive him. Forgive me. If I sinned there were excuses for me. I had suffered too much. I loved too well.”
Her voice suddenly hesitated and broke. A gray pallor ran over her face and a look of terror transfixed her eyes. She straightened her arms out toward her daughter.
“Promise,” she gasped, “promise.”
With a spring Mariposa snatched the drooping body in her arms and cried into the face, settling into cold rigidity:
“Yes—yes—I promise! All—anything. Oh, mother, darling, look at me. I promise.”
She gently shook the limp form, but it was nerveless, only the head oscillated slightly from side to side.
“Mother, look at me,” she cried frantically. “Look at me, not past me. Come back to me. Speak to me, I promise everything.”
But there was no response. Lucy lay, limp and white-lipped, her head lolling back from the support of her daughter’s arm. Her strength was exhausted to the last drop. She was unconscious.