“You haven’t slept out of doors as I have hundreds of times,” he answered. “The night and I are brothers; the stars are my little cousins; and the moon”—he giggled in his boyish way—“is my maiden aunt. She’s so prudish and so kind and friendly, as you say. She’s like an aunt I had—Aunt Samantha. She was my father’s sister. I used to love her to visit my mother. She always brought me things, and she gave them to me as if they were on silver dishes—like a ceremony. She was so prim, I used to call her Aunt Primrose. She made me feel as if I could do anything I liked and break any law I pleased. But all the time, like a saint in a stained-glass window, she always seemed to be saying, ‘Yes, you’d like to, but you mustn’t.’ She was just like the moon. I’m well acquainted with the moon, and—”
“Hush!” Louise interrupted. “Don’t you hear something stirring—there, behind us?”
He laughed. “Of course something’s always ‘stirring behind us’ on the prairie, and things you can’t hear at all in the day are almost loud at night. There are thousands of sounds that never get to your ears when the sun is busy, but when Aunt Primrose Moon is saying, ‘Hush! Hush!’ to the naughty children of this world, you can hear a whole new population at work, cracking away like mad. Say, ain’t I letting myself go to-night?” he added, giggling again and sitting down beside her. “I’m going to give you just half an hour, and at the end of that half-hour you’ve got to go to sleep.”
“I can’t—I can’t,” she said scarcely above a whisper. As though in response to an unspoken thought, he said casually: “I’m going to walk awhile when you’ve lain down, and then—” He pointed to a spot about twenty yards away. “Do you see the two big stones there? Well, when I’ve finished my walk and my talk with Aunty Primrose”—he laughed up at the moon—“I’m going to sit down there and snooze till daylight.” He pointed again: “Right over there beside those two rocks. That’s my bed. Do you see?”
She did not reply at once, but a long sigh came from her lips. “You’ll be cold,” she said.
“No, it’s a hot night,” he answered. “I’m too hot as it is.” And he loosened his heavy red shirt at the throat.
“If I’ve got to go to bed in half an hour,” she said presently, “tell me more about your Aunt Samantha, and about yourself, and your home before you came out here, and what you did when you were a little boy—tell me everything about yourself.”
She was forgetting Tralee for the moment, and the man who raised his hand against her yesterday, and the life she had lived. Or was it only that she had grown young during these last two months, and the young can so easily forget!
“You want to hear? You really want to hear?” he asked. “Say, it won’t be a very interesting story. Better let me tell you about the broncho-busting today.”
“No, I want to hear about yourself.” She looked intently at him for an instant, and then her eyes closed and the long lashes touched her cheek. There was something very wilful in her beauty, and her body too had delicate, melancholy lines strange in one so young. She was not conscious that, in her dreamy abstraction, she was leaning towards him.