Hesther’s needle was still. She was looking up with a pair of soft, brown, questioning eyes, and the gentle mentality behind them was reading the girl through and through with a certainty that her transparent simplicity and innocence made possible.
“How can it be anything else, Mum? I guess ther’s nothing around this farm to worry with but the feeding of hungry mouths.”
The Kid had turned away. Again her eyes had sought the gleam of waters sedately flowing on to their junction with the greater river beyond.
The mother shook her head. She leant forward on her door-sill with her lean, bare arms folded over her offspring’s clothing.
“I don’t just see how it can be a thing else,” she admitted promptly. “But I was thinkin’. You see, Kid, you’re over twenty. Let’s see. Why, I guess you’re over twenty-one. Yes. Sure you must be.”
And she deliberately began to count up the years that had passed since the terrible time of the descent of the Euralians on Fox Bluff. The girl watched the counting fingers, and the abstracted gaze of the other as she reckoned up her sum.
“But what’s that to do with it, Mum?” she cried.
“Sure I’m over twenty-one, but—”
Hesther laughed gently. She shook her head.
“There was no talk of quitting, whatever our trade, before you made Placer last year with Usak. Say, Kid,” she went on, with infinite sympathy and gentleness, “you’re a woman now. You aren’t a—Kid—any longer. Does it tell you anything?” She raised a pointing finger that was painfully work-worn, and admonished her. “My dear, things are a heap different through a woman’s eyes. When you’re a kid you’re mostly crazy with every new thing just living can show you. When you’re a woman it isn’t life just to live. Ther’s a whole book full o’ feelings, and wants, an’ notions start in to worry around, and the answer to ’em isn’t found in the work of running a caribou farm, and beating a bunch of scallawags who’re grabbing your trade. It isn’t found in yearning to hand a stomach full o’ food to a crowd of kids you love like brothers an’ sisters, either.”