“Jake was hard to me on the trip. He was a hard man and he never loved me. After Bessie came he got to dislike me. I was always a drag, he said. I couldn’t seem to get well after you were born. Coming over the Sierras we stopped at a cabin. Dan was there with another man, a miner, called Fletcher. That was the first time I ever saw Dan.”
Mariposa lifted her head and her eyes fastened on her mother’s face. The indifference that had held it seemed breaking. A faint smile was on her lips, a light of reminiscence lit its gray pallor.
“He was always good to anything that was sick or weak. He was sorry for me. He tried to make Jake stop longer, so I could get rested. But Jake wouldn’t. He said I had to go on. I couldn’t, but knew I must, if he said it. We were going to start when Jake said he’d exchange me for the pair of horses the two miners had in the shed. So he left me and took the horses.”
“Exchanged you for the horses? Left you there sick and alone?”
“Yes, Jake and Bessie went on with the horses. I stayed. I was too sick to care.”
She made a slight pause, either from weakness, or in an effort to arrange the next part of her story.
“I lived there with them for a month. I was sick and they took care of me. Then one day Fletcher stole all the money and the only horse and never came back. We were alone there then, Dan and I. I got better. I came to love him more each day. We were snowed in all winter, and we lived as man and wife. In the spring we rode into Hangtown and were married.”
She stopped, a look of ineffable sweetness passed over her face, and she said in a low voice, as if speaking to herself:
“Oh, that beautiful winter! There is a God, to be so good to women who have suffered as I had.”
Mariposa sat dumbly regarding her. It was like a frightful nightmare. Everything was strange, the sick-room, the bed with the screen around it, her mother’s face with its hollow eyes and pinched nose. Only the two old dirty papers on the white counterpane seemed to say that this was real.