Lahoma did not reply, and Bill feared that under the conviction of her friend's eloquence, she had begun to idealize the efforts of Wilfred Compton. He need not have been afraid. To her imagination, "big people" were not living in dugouts, or tents, far from civilization; "big people" were going to the opera every night, and riding in splendid carriages along imposing boulevards every day. Brick and Bill had contrived to live as well as they desired from profits on skins obtained in the mountains and the small tract of ground they had cultivated in a desultory manner had done little beyond supplying themselves with vegetables and the horses with some extra feed. She had no great opinion of agriculture; and though she had taken part in planting and hoeing with a pleasurable zest, she had never entertained herself with the thought that she was engaged in a great work. As to dugouts, they had no place in her dreams of the future. Since Wilfred had chosen to handicap himself with the same limitations that bound her, even the thought of him was to be banished from her world, banished absolutely.
Her day-dreams did not cease, but became more dreamy, more unreal, since the hero of her fancies, for whom she now had no flesh-and-blood prototype, was suggested only by her moods and her books. As the sun-clear days of maidenhood melted imperceptibly into summer glow and winter spaces, the memory of Wilfred's face and voice sometimes surprised her at unexpected turns of solitary musings. But the face grew less defined, the voice lost its distinctive tone, as the years passed uninterruptedly by.
"I reckon it ain't right," said Brick Willock to Bill Atkins as they went one morning to examine their traps before Lahoma was astir, "to keep our little gal to ourselves as we're doing. You're getting old, Bill, awful old—"
"Well, damn it," growled Bill, "I guess I don't have to be told!"
"You ain't very long for this world, Bill, not in the ordinary course of nature. And when I've laid you to rest under the rock-pile, Lahoma ain't going to find the variety in me that she now has in the two of us. Besides which, I'm in the fifties myself, and them is halves of hundreds."
"Yes," Bill growled, "and give Lahoma time, she'll die, too. Nothing but the mountain'll be left to look out on the plains. Lord, Brick, who do you reckon'll be living in that cove, when we three are dead and gone?"
"Guess I'll be worrying about something else, then."
"Do you reckon," pursued Bill, in an unwonted tone of mellowness, "that those who come to live in our dugout will ever imagine what happy hours we've passed there, just sitting around quiet and enjoying ourselves and one another?"
"They wouldn't imagine YOU was enjoying of yourself, not if they was feeding their eyes on you every day. But I'm awful bothered about Lahoma. I tell you, it ain't right to keep her shut up as in a cage. Can't you see she's pining for high society such as I ain't got it in me to supply, and you are too cussed obstinate to display?"
"I guess that's so." Bill drew himself stiffly up by the tree above—they were ascending the wooded gully that extended from base to mountain-top.