“I wonder if that could be it?” said Marta.
“You wonder what?”
“If Mr. Edwards came to the Cañada del Oro because his plans included some one who refused to be included.”
“Good Lord!” ejaculated Saint Jimmy under his breath.
“No,” she continued, “I don’t believe that is it. He doesn’t act as though that was the reason.”
Suddenly her mood changed. She seemed to awaken to some hitherto unrealized possibilities of her life, and to grasp with startled fierceness a defiant truth.
“Jimmy,” she cried, “just because I have no past is no reason why I should not have a future, is it?”
Before he could find an answer she went on, and her words came rushing, tumbling, hurrying out, as if the floodgate of her emotions were suddenly lifted and the passionate spirit of her released.
“I can see now that I have always been like our cañon creek in summer, just playing along any old way, taking things as they are, without even caring whether I stopped or not, but now—now I feel like the creek is to-day, with its springtime life, boiling and roaring and leaping—I won’t—I won’t be like the creek though—that for all its strength and fuss and fury just fades away at last into nothing, out there in the desert. I want to keep on going and going and going—I don’t know where. I don’t care where, just on, and on, and on!”
She sprang to her feet and stood before him in all the radiant, vigorous beauty of her young womanhood, and with reckless abandon challenged: