Thus addressed, the woman moved to the back of the cart, drew the flap aside and slipped out. She came behind the others, and Moreau, looking back, saw that she walked slowly, as if feeble, or in pain.
Advancing to the sunbonneted figure in front of him he said, with a backward jerk of his head: “What’s the matter with her? Is she sick?”
The woman gave an indifferent glance backward. Like the man, she seemed completely preoccupied by their disaster.
“Not now,” she answered, “but she has been. But good Lord!”—with a sudden burst of angry bitterness—“women like her ain’t meant to take them sort of journeys. If it weren’t for her, Jake and I could go on all right.”
She relapsed into silence as the cabin revealed itself through the trees. It appeared to interest her, and she went to the door and looked in.
It was the typical miner’s cabin of the period, consisting of a single room with two bunks. Opposite the doorway was the wide-mouthed chimney, a slab of rock before it doing duty as hearthstone. There was an armchair formed of a barrel, cushioned with red flannel and mounted on rockers. Moreau’s bunk was covered with a miner’s blanket, and the ineradicable habits of the gentleman spoke in the very simple but sufficient toilet accessories that stood on a shelf under a tiny square of looking-glass. Over the roof a great pine spread its boughs, and in passing through these the slightest breaths of air made soft eolian murmurings. To the pioneers, the wild, rough place looked the ideal of comfort and luxury.
A small spring bubbled up near the roots of the pine and trickled across the space in front of the cabin. To this, by common consent, the party made its way. The exhausted horse plunged its nose in the cool current and drank and snorted and drank again. The elder woman knelt down and laved her face and neck and even the top of her head in the water. The man stood looking with a moody eye at his broken animal, and joined by Fletcher, they talked over its condition. The miner, versed in this as in all practical matters, deemed the beast incapacitated for journeys of any length for some time to come. Both animals had been driven to the limit of their strength.
The pioneer asserted:
“I had to get acrost before the snows blocked us, and they’re heavy up there now,” with a nod of his head toward the mountains above; “then I wanted to get down into the settlements as soon’s I could. I knew there weren’t two more days work in ’em, but I calk’lated they’d get me in. After that it didn’t matter.”
“The only thing for you to do is to walk into Hangtown, buy a mule there, and come back.”