"I don't want any help," cried the woman violently. "All I want is to be let alone."
The exertion, the violence of her reply brought on a fit of coughing that left her panting and too weak to resist the hands that tenderly lifted and held her. When the spasm had passed, she lay inert in Nettie's arms, but when she opened her eyes again, they widened with a strange light as they stared up fixedly at the pitying face bent above her. The dry lips quivered, something that was pitifully like a smile broke over the sick woman's face. She whispered:
"Why, you look—like—my mother did!"
CHAPTER IV
More than a year had passed since that day in March when Nettie, the doctor and Cyril Stanley had driven along the trail to the cabin on the C. P. R. quarter. Slowly but surely, the place had changed. The sturdy log house that had grown into being represented the efficient labor of young Cyril Stanley's hands. He had built it in the "lay-off time" he had taken that summer. Slowly the holes for the fence posts were going into the ground around the entire quarter. Soon the "home" would be ready for the radiant Nettie, and in a few more months Cyril would leave the Bar Q, with savings enough to give him and Nettie a fair start in life.
Things had moved also upon the quarter section of C. P. R. land where lived in defiant solitude the woman who had resented and fought the help forced upon her by the gruff Scotch doctor and Nettie Day.
Her name, it seemed, was Angella Loring, but some wag had named her "Mr." Loring, because of her clipped hair and her workingman's attire, and this name had stuck, though Nettie Day called her "Angel."
Her appearance in Yankee Valley had caused the usual sensation always created by a strange newcomer. There had been the usual wagging of heads and tongues, and tapping of foreheads. The woman was a "bug," the farm people of Yankee Valley had decided. At all events, she was the kind of "bug" they found it prudent to keep at a safe distance. She had met all overtures of friendship with hostility and contempt. She was on her own land; she desired no commerce with her neighbors; and needed no help. It was nobody's business but her own why she chose to dress and live as she did. That was the substance of her replies to those who ventured to call upon her, and when some jocular fellows, intent on being smart, pressed their company upon her, she demonstrated her ability to shoot straight—at their feet, so that for a time a joke ran around the country about the number of young "bucks" who limped, and for a time the jeering taunt, "Mr. Loring'll git you if you don't watch out," was often heard. Thus she became a sort of bugaboo in the popular imagination, but as time passed the country grew accustomed to its woman hermit and gave her the wide berth she asked for.