“Why have you done this?”
“I don’t know.”
She hung her head and looked up from under her curtain of hair.
I threw a fresh log on the fire and she seated herself. I stood looking down at her half in anger, half in dismay.
“Are you hungry? Have you eaten to-day?” I asked.
“I have all the food I need in the saddle bags.”
I seated myself then, and as there seemed nothing more to say I was silent. But I looked at her in deep perplexity from time to time. She was flushed, and her eyes were burning. Her hair was tangled about her neck and veiled her bosom. She faced me, wide-eyed and silent.
It was deeply dark in the hill-hollows by now, but the sky was a lighter tone, and the stars seemed to burn more brightly than usual. There was no faintest stirring of wind. The silence was intense, bated, you could feel it, vibrating about you. The trees were heavy black masses, shadowing us. I heard a coyote yelp away off on some distant hill side, and the sound but made the ensuing silence more pronounced.
Presently Wanza spoke: “I wish I was a real gipsy,” she said. Her tone was subdued, there was something softened and wistful in it. “All day long I have had the time I’ve always wanted, to do nothing in. I waded in the spring. I slept hours in the shade. I drank milk and ate bread. I bought the milk at a ranch house way up on the side of the mountain. Glory! It was great! I hadn’t a single dish to wash. It’s all right when you’re rich—everything is, I guess. But when you’re squeezy poor and uneducated and of no account, and you’re housekeeper and peddler and Lord knows what! You don’t get no chance to have a good time. Now, do you, Mr. David Dale?”
Her words aroused me somewhat rudely from a reverie into which I had drifted, so that I answered abstractedly: “Perhaps not, girl.”