“My dear child, I hate to disappoint you, knowing your feelings on the subject. If you must know, we killed a couple of Yaquis and we’re burying them on what we’d call at home ‘the lawn.’ It’s rather awful, but we can’t help it.”
“Killed them!” Polly’s eyes were wide with horror.
“It’s a rotten business, if you ask me, both killing and burying. I’m just beginning to form a faint idea of the sort of thing the youngsters we sent abroad had to face. I was keeping up my courage by whistling. Won’t you go to bed like a nice girl?”
“No. I couldn’t stand it in there in the dark. It doesn’t seem so bad out here. Go on—don’t bother about me.”
After Hard had got his match and joined Scott again behind the bushes, Polly sat and listened to the ominous sounds, her pleasant reflections quite at an end.
“That’s how it always goes. You begin to feel comfortable and pleased with your philosophy and yourself and then reality comes along and swats you one in the eye. I will not think of those Indians! I’ll think of Bob and Emma. Wonder what kind of a nurse Emma makes? Not that she’ll have a chance to try, poor lamb. Those trained ones will shoo her off and flirt with Bob themselves.”
It was some time before the two men finished their ugly job. Polly saw them come out from behind the bushes and go into the house by the back door. She stretched herself sleepily—it was beginning to be a bit chilly, even when wrapped in a coat and a serape. Perhaps it would be wiser to go in. She folded the serape and started for the door, only to stop midway as Scott came out.
“Oh,” she said, “I thought you’d all gone to bed.”
“And you know you ought to,” said he. “I don’t blame you for not wanting to. Those mountains get one, don’t they?”
They were standing exactly where they had stood so short a time ago, but so much had happened since that it seemed hours gone by. It wasn’t to be expected, the girl thought, that they could go on from where they had left off. She looked up. He was staring at the mountains. She felt a ridiculous mixture of relief and disappointment.