The girl’s eyes were searching for all their responsive smile, and she made no attempt at denial.
“Wher’ d’you find the answer, Mum?” she asked.
The older woman’s eye fell serious. A wistful yearning crept into them.
“I found it in two things when I was your age,” she said. “First it was in the excitement of fancy clothes, and parties, where folks of my own age got around, boys and gals. Then I guessed the answer to every yearning I had was in my Jim, and in the bunch o’ scallawags he set crawling around my knees. Why, Kid, this queer old world’s just got only one place where it can make me feel good. It’s where my Jim’s babies are. You been down to Placer. You and Usak. You’ve seen a big city where ther’s white-folk like yourself, where ther’s lights burning on the streets, and folks dancing, and parties racketing, and the boys and gals are having quite a time. Then you get along back to the farm here, and the kids, and, maybe, me. And I guess you’re glad—for awhile.”
The girl moved from the door-casing where she had been leaning. She abruptly dropped to a seat on the door-sill beside Hesther, and took possession of the thin, strong hand nearest to her. There was a change in her as sudden as had been her movements. Her eyes were shining and full of something Hesther had never seen in them before. And somehow the magnetism of it, her sudden, almost passionate earnestness claimed the older woman and left her with a feeling that was something scared.
“Tell me, Mum,” she cried, in a thrilling voice. “You haven’t told me enough. You loved your Jim. Tell me just how you loved him.”
“It ’ud be easier to tell you how the thunder banks up in summer and bursts over us,” Hesther replied with a headshake, while her hand responded with sympathetic pressure to the clasp of the girl’s.
She gazed into the earnest face that so reminded her of the father who had been slain so many years before, and the pretty, fair-haired woman who had borne this foster child of hers. She was wondering at the girl’s sudden passion of interest in her love for the dead man who had given her such a wealth of simple happiness. It was a new phase, and it meant something. And she wondered what the meaning was.
“No, Kid,” she went on. “I don’t reckon if I talked from now to Kingdom Come I could ever tell you the thing you’re asking. He was my man, just all of him. Could you feel so that any feller could tell you to do the craziest thing and you’d want to get busy right away doing it? Could you feel so that a feller’s frown was better than the whole world’s smile? Could you feel you’d rather have one man call you a crazy fool, and beat you over the head with a club, than a hundred swell fellers bowing an’ scraping to hand you a good time? If you could feel all that foolish stuff you’d know something how I loved my Jim. He was mine, Kid,” she went on squeezing the girl’s plump hand in her thin, strong fingers. “He was mine from the roof of his head to the soles of his caribou moccasins, and life with him was full of sunshine, even when the night of winter shut down. And he handed me all these ‘God’s blessings’ that aren’t never content but that I’m doing an’ making for them all the time. My, but I’d be glad to have you feel all those things.”
The girl nodded. Her eyes were deeply contemplative. She was not looking at the woman beside her but gazing abstractedly into space.