Finally, when the meal was over, it was triumphantly handed back to her, sticky from end to end, but sleepy and satisfied.
A few hours later, in the star-sown darkness of the early night, Moreau started on his twelve-mile walk to the Porter ranch. The next morning, some time before midday, he reappeared, red and perspiring, but proudly leading by a rope a lean and dejected-looking cow.
The problem of the baby’s nutriment was now satisfactorily solved. The cow proved eminently fitted for the purpose of its purchase, and though the two miners had several unsuccessful bouts in learning to milk it, the handy Fletcher soon overcame this difficulty, and the stock of the cabin was augmented by fresh milk.
The baby throve upon this nourishment. Its cries no longer disturbed the serenity of the cañon. It slept and ate most of the time, but kindly consented to keep awake in the late afternoon and be gentle and patient when the men charily passed it from hand to hand during the rest before supper. Fletcher regarded it tolerantly as an object of amusement. But Moreau, especially since the feeding episode, had developed a deep, delighted affection for it. Its helplessness appealed to all that was tender in him, and the first faint indications of a tiny formed character were miraculous to his fascinated and wondering observation. He was secretly ashamed of letting the sneeringly indifferent Fletcher guess his sudden attachment, and made foolish excuses to account for the trips to the cabin which frequently interrupted his morning’s work in the stream bed.
Lucy’s recovery was slow. The collapse from which she suffered was as much mental as physical. The anguish of the last two years had preyed on the bruised spirit as the hardships of the journey had broken the feeble body. No particular form of ailment developed in her, but she lay for days silent and almost motionless on the bunk, too feeble to move or to speak beyond short sentences. The men watched and tended her, Moreau with clumsy solicitude, Fletcher dutifully, but more through fear of his powerful mate than especial interest in Lucy as a woman or a human being.
In his heart he still violently resented Moreau’s action in acquiring her and parting with the valuable horses. Had she possessed any of the attractions of the human female, he could have understood and probably condoned. But as she now was, plain, helpless, sick, unable even to cook for them, demanding care which took from their work and lessened their profits, his resentment grew instead of diminishing. Moreau saw nothing of this, for Fletcher had long ago read the simple secrets of that generous but impractical nature, and knew too much to bring down on himself wrath which, once aroused, he felt would be implacable.
At the end of two weeks Lucy began to show signs of improvement. The fragrant air that blew through the cabin, the soothing silence of the foothills, broken only by the drowsy prattle of the river or the sad murmuring of the great pine, began its work of healing. The autumn was late that year. The days were still warm and dreamily brilliant, especially in the little cañon, where the sun drew the aromatic odors from the pines till at midday they exhaled a heavy, pungent fragrance like incense rising to the worship of some sylvan god.
Sometimes now, on warm afternoons, Lucy crept out and sat at the root of the pine where she had found her first place of refuge. There her dulled eyes began to note the beauties that surrounded her, the pines mounting in dark rows on the slopes, the blue distances where the cañon folded on itself, the glimpses of chaste, white summits far above against the blue. Her lungs breathed deep of the revivifying air, clean and untainted as the water in the little spring at her feet. The peace of it all entered her soul. Something in her forbade her to look back on the terrible past. A new life was here, and her youth rose up and whispered that it was not yet dead.
During the period of her illness Moreau had begun to see both himself and the cabin through feminine eyes. Discrepancies revealed themselves. He wanted many things heretofore regarded as luxuries. From the tin cups of the table service to the towels made of ripped flour sacks, his domestic arrangements seemed mean and inadequate. They were all right for two prospectors, but not fitting for a woman and child. Lucy’s illness also revealed wants in her equipment that struck him as piteous. Her only boots were the ones he had seen her in on the morning after her arrival. She had no shawl or covering for cold weather. The baby’s clothes were a few torn pieces of calico and flannel. Moreau had washed these many times himself, doing them up in an old flour sack, which was attached to an aspen on the stream’s bank, and then placed in one of the deepest parts of the current. Here it remained for two days, the percolating water cleansing its contents as no washboard could.
One evening, smoking under the pine, he acquainted Fletcher with a design he had been some days formulating. This was that Fletcher should ride into Hangtown the next day and not only replenish the commissariat, but buy all things needful for Lucy and the baby. Spotty was now also recovered, and, though hardly a mettlesome steed, was at least a useful pack horse. But the numerous list of articles suggested by Moreau would have weighted Spotty to the ground. So Fletcher was commissioned to buy a pack burro, and upon it to bring all needful food stuffs for the cabin and the habiliments for Lucy and the baby.