With angry self-accusation he replied: "I cud 'a' got the horses, Mira, an'—an' we'd 'a' bin back in the Hills long before this. Thar was jes' a padlock to smash . . . an' I didn't smash it."
She smiled sadly and wound a small arm about his neck.
"I know," she whispered. "We can't help it. . . . There are so many reasons why we can't go yet."
She turned swiftly away to the stove that he might not see how it tore her. Never in his gloomiest suffering had Blue Pete longed as she had for a home. For he had never known home as she had. Her efforts to brighten up their days were the expression of a desire to plant in his inexperienced mind the picture of home that kept passing before her eyes. Her nights were but one long dream of a fireside, with Blue Pete in the other chair. And as the time of their penance seemed to be nearing an end the ugly ranch-house at the 3-bar-Y became to her a palace. Over and over again she planned the fresh home they would start—every chair and table and picture and rug had a place. Helen Mahon, the Sergeant's wife—her own educated cousin—would help her, would supply the art Mira herself, in her prairie upbringing, only groped for. She would make of the 3-bar-Y a home for the whole Cypress Hills district. Every day of delay was agony.
Yet she spoke cheerfully. "It wouldn't be just—just right to go till the trestle's done, Pete, dear."
He looked at her sharply. It was the conviction he had been fighting many a day—that it seemed to be only his own had made it so much harder for him. From the silence he had forced on himself of late he spoke fiercely:
"That damned Pole! We can't let him win. We got to lick them bohunks."
"And Mr. Torrance—after all, Pete, he's only a tenderfoot. . . . Then there's Tressa."
He nodded slowly. "Yes, there's Tressa." A chivalry he would never have acknowledged had been thrusting the girl more and more into the foreground. From the ordinary perils of isolation father and lover might defend her, but in the great calamity that Blue Pete knew was planned to overwhelm her two protectors she would inevitably fall.
"But yuh shudn't have to wait, Mira," he burst out. "An yuh wudn't," he added miserably, "if I wasn't jes' a common rustler."