"By God! Who offered you that?" Gale's face was whiter than hers now, but she disregarded him and abandoned herself to the tempest of emotion that swept her along.
"He can play with me, but nothing more, and when he is gone another one can have me, and then another and another and another—as long as I can cook and wash and work. In time my man will beat me, just like any other squaw, I suppose, but I can't marry; I can't be a wife to a decent man."
She was in the clutch of an hysteria that made her writhe beneath Gale's hand, choking and sobbing, until he loosed her; then she leaned exhausted against a post and wiped her eyes, for the tears were coming now.
"That's all damned rot," he said. "There's fifty good men in this camp would marry you to-morrow."
"Bah! I mean real men, not miners. I want to be a lady. I don't want to pull a hand-sled and wear moccasins all my life, and raise children for men with whiskers. I want to be loved—I want to be loved! I want to marry a gentleman."
"Burrell!" said Gale.
"No!" she flared up. "Not him nor anybody in particular, but somebody like him, some man with clean finger-nails."
He found nothing humorous or grotesque in her measure of a gentleman, for he realized that she was strung to a pitch of unreason and unnatural excitement, and that she was in terrible earnest.
"Daughter," he said, "I'm mighty sorry this knowledge has come to you, and I see it's my fault, but things are different now to what they were when I met Alluna. It wasn't the style to marry squaws where we came from, and neither of us ever thought about it much. We were happy with each other, and we've been man and wife to each other just as truly as if a priest had mumbled over us."
"But why didn't you marry her when I came? Surely you must have known what it would mean to me. It was bad enough without that."