"Why, you see, honey, they wouldn't be nothing left to go on. I'd just sort of stop, you know—but it wouldn't matter—out there in the big world, people don't remember very long, and when you're grown you wouldn't know there'd ever been a cove with a dugout in it, and a window in the wall, and a Brick Willock to carry in the wood for the fire."
"I'll always remember—and I won't go without you. He COULD go with me, couldn't he, Bill?"
"I suspicion he has his reasons for not," Atkins observed gravely.
"I has, and I shall never go back to the States."
"Then what's the use civilizing me?" demanded Lahoma mournfully.
"I want you to enjoy yourself. And when I'm old and no-'count, you'd need somebody to take care of you—and you'd go full-equipped and ready to stand up to any civilized person that tried to run a bluff on you."
"But, oh, I want to GO—I want to go out THERE—where there ain't no plains and alkali and buffalo-grass—where they's pavements and policemen and people in beautiful clothes. I don't mean NOW, I mean when I have got civilized." She drew herself up proudly. "I wouldn't go till I was civilized, till I was like them." She turned impulsively to Brick: "But you've got to go with me when I go! I'm going to stay with you till I'm fit to go, and then you're going to stay with me the rest of my life."
"Am I fit to go with her?" Brick appealed to Bill Atkins.
"You ain't," Bill replied.
"I ain't fit," Brick declared firmly. "I'm a-going to fitten you; but it's too late to work on me; and besides, if they WAS time enough, it ain't to the grain of my nature. I knows all I wants to know, which if little or much is enough for me. And I wouldn't be fit to go with you out into the big world and cut a figger in it, which couldn't be no figger but a figger naught. And Atkins who knows more than me, he says the same."