“Oh, you are too kind. I am sorry you have deprive yourself of your coat to put it over me. That is why I have been so warm.”
The mother rose and shook out her skirt and glanced furtively about her. “It is not the morning? It is the moon. That is well we go early.” She drank the coffee hurriedly and scarcely tasted the bacon and hard biscuit. “It is no toilet we have here to make. So we go more quickly. So is good.”
“But you must eat the food, mother. You will be stronger for the long, hard ride. You have not here to hurry. No one follows us here.”
“Your father may be already by the camp, Amalia––to bring us help––yes. But of those men ‘rouge’––if they follow and rob us––”
The two women spoke English out of deference to the big man, and only dropped into their own language or into fluent French when necessity compelled them, or they thought themselves alone.
“Ah, but those red men, mother, they do not come here, so the kind man told us, for now they are also kind. Sit here and eat the biscuit. I will ask him.”
She went over to where he stood by the animals, pouring a very little water from the cans carried by the pack mule for each one. “They’ll have to hold out on this for the day, but they may only have half of it now,” he said.
“What shall I do?” Amalia looked with wide, distressed eyes in his face. “She believes it yet, that my father lives and has gone to the camp for help. She thinks we go to him,––to the camp. How can I tell her? I cannot––I dare not.”
“Let her think what satisfies her most. We can tell her as much as is best for her to know, a little at a time, and there will be plenty of time to do it in. We’ll be snowed up on this mountain all winter.” The young woman did not reply, but stood perfectly still, gazing off into the moonlit wilderness. “When people get locoed this way, the only thing is to humor them and give them a chance to rest satisfied in something––no matter what, much,––only so 187 they are not hectored. No mind can get well when it is being hectored.”