“They’d be women of no judgment, then,” she said, with conviction.
Jim’s head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand. His profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain of Sioux blood. He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman’s penalty and come into her woman’s kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.
These things unmanned him as the sight of the gallows and the rope for his hanging could not have done. Shielding himself with an affected roughness, he asked:
“What the hell’s the matter with you? I’ve been drinking like a beast of an Indian, and you give me coffee instead of a tongue-lashing.”
The color had all gone out of her face. She gasped the words:
“Jim, I dreamed it last night—they came for you!”
She cowered at the recollection.
“Did they get me?” he asked. There was no surprise in his tone. He spoke as one who knew the answer.
“Yes, the children saw. The noise woke them.”
“You mustn’t let ’em see, when—they come. They’ve a right to a fair start; we didn’t get it, old girl.”