He let her hand fall carelessly. "It's damn lonesome!" he grumbled.
All the shy boldness of an enamoured girl peeped out of Rina's eyes, as she whispered: "I'm glad it's lonesome! I don' want nobody to come—but you!"
Mabyn was unimpressed. He struck the ribs of his tired pony with his heels. "Come on," he said; and led the way down the incline.
Later, reaching the shack, on the threshold Rina spread out her arms with an unconscious gesture. "This is my home!" she cried. "I will jus' love it!"
Mabyn looking around at the gaping walls, the empty panes and the foul litter, laughed jeeringly at her simplicity.
The girl was too happy to feel the sting. "I will fix it!" she said stoutly. "I will mak' it like an outside house. It will be as nice than the priest's parlour in the Settlement!" She clasped her hands against her breast in the intensity of her eagerness. "Jus' you wait, 'Erbe't! Some day I will have white curtains in the window! and a piece of carpet on the floor! and a holy picture on the wall! Oh! I will work so hard!"
"Get about the supper, Rina," said Mabyn shortly.
She prepared the meal at the rough mud fireplace built across the corner of the shack, for they had no stove; and they ate squatting on the floor in the breed fashion, for neither was there a table. Afterward Mabyn dragged the bench—a relic of the former tenant, and sole article of furniture they possessed—outside the door; and sat upon it, smoking, yawning, looking across the lake with lack-lustre eyes.
Rina having redd up the shack, came to the doorway, where she stood looking at him wistfully. Finally she hovered toward him and retreated; and her hands stole to her breast. She was longing mightily to sit beside him; but she did not dare. In a breed's wife it would have been highly presumptuous, and would very likely have been rewarded with a blow; but Rina had a dim notion that a white man's wife had the right to sit beside him—still she was afraid. In the end her desire overcame her fears; drifting hither and thither toward the bench like a frond of thistledown, she finally alighted on the edge, and her cheek dropped on his shoulder. The act must have been subtly suggested by the tincture of white blood in her veins, for it is not a redskin attitude. The man neither repulsed nor welcomed her.
"'Erbe't," she whispered, "my head is so full of things I am near crazy wit' thoughts! And my tongue is in a snare; I cannot speak at all!"