“That you don't go to my home and my people for five years.” He laughed.
“Why, you big, beautiful, silly young person, I know mountains and mountaineers.”
“Yes—of Europe—but not mine.”
“Very well,” he said, and, not knowing women, he asked:
“Why didn't you say 'Yes' the first time?”
“I don't know,” she said.
II
She had lifted her voice first, one spring dawn, in a log cabin that clung to the steep bank of Clover Fork, and her wail rose above the rush of its high waters—above the song of a wood-thrush in the top of a poplar high above her. Somewhere her mother had heard the word Juno, and the mere sound of the word appealed to her starved sense of beauty as did one of the old-fashioned flowers she planted in her tiny yard. So the mother gave the child that name and, like the name, the child grew up, tall, slow, and majestic of movement, singularly gentle and quiet, except when aroused, and then her wrath and her might were primeval.
St. Hilda, the Mission teacher, was the first from the outside world to be drawn to her. She had stopped in at the cabin on Clover one day to find the mother of the family ill in bed, and twelve-year-old Juno acting as cook and mother for a brood of ten. A few months later she persuaded the father to let the girl come down to her school, and in the succeeding years she became St. Hilda's right hand and the mainstay in the supervision of the kitchen, housework, and laundry, and even in the management of the Mission's farm. No one had the subtle understanding of St. Hilda's charges as had Juno—no one could handle them quite so well. So that it was with real grief and great personal loss that St. Hilda opened the way for Juno to go to school in the Bluegrass. And now, one sunset in mid-May, she was back at the Mission in Happy Valley, and the two were in each other's arms.
Happy Valley it was no longer, for throughout it the plague had spread fear or sickness or death in every little home. St. Hilda had gathered her own little sufferers in tents collected from a railway-camp over the mountains, a surveying party, and from the Bluegrass. A volunteer doctor had come from the “settlements,” and two nurses, and so Juno took to the outside work up and down the river, up every little creek, and out in the hills. All day and far into the night she was gone. Sometimes she did not for days come back to the Mission. Her face grew white and drawn, and her cheeks hollow from poor food, meagre snatches of sleep, and untiring work. The doctor warned her, St. Hilda warned her, she got anxious warning letters from her husband, but on she went. And the inevitable happened.