“Jim, we got to think. If there’s a chance in a thousand that you can get away, you got to take it; if there ain’t, the children mustn’t know. We got to think it out!”
“There ain’t a chance in a thousand, old girl. There ain’t one in a million. They’re circling round in the hills out here now, waitin’ for me, like buzzards waitin’ for the eyes of a dyin’ horse.”
She rocked herself, and the clutching fingers left white marks on her face, but the eyes that met his glittered tearless:
“Then there ain’t nothing left but to face it like a man?”
“That’s all there be.” He might have been giving an opinion on a matter in which he had no interest.
“Then there ain’t no use in our having any more talk about it?”
“’Tain’t just what you’d call an agreeable subject,” he answered, with the sinister humor of the frontiersman who has learned to make a crony of death.
She was tempted to kiss him—they were not given to demonstrations, this pair—then decided it were kinder to him, less suggestive of what they anticipated, not to deviate from their undemonstrative marital routine.
“Do you want your breakfast now?”
“I guess you might bring it along.”