“I am born of Shala, married in Shoshi,” she answered. Her voice was soft, and her hands and feet would have been madness to a sculptor. In any Paris restaurant those slender fingers, almond nails, and delicate wrists, aristocratic, well bred, would have been a sensation.
We admired the baby, excavating it from five folds of blankets to do so. How they live beneath the smothering I do not know; a Western baby would die in three hours. We asked the mother how old she was. Eighteen, she said, and she had been married three years.
“And have you been home since?”
“Ah no,” she said, with a wistful smile.
“Born in Shala,” said Cheremi. “But she was married in Shoshi, and in Shoshi she will die.”
“I wonder what she thinks of us,” I said, for, though she must have felt great curiosity about these strange beings, dropped apparently from the sky upon her well-known trails, she did not reveal it by the flicker of an eyelash, and she asked no questions. It was we who were so rude.
“How old do you think we are?” Frances asked her. She looked at us candidly beneath her long lashes.
“How can I say?” she answered. “I cannot read or write; I am stupid; I gather wood.”
The Shoshi man now rose, slinging his rifle back on his shoulder, and said farewell. “Go on a smooth trail,” said our men, his blood enemies, who must have killed him at sight if no woman had been there, and he went on up the trail without turning his head, the woman following him.
“Well, we must be getting on,” said Perolli. “We’ve a long way to go, and we ought to get in before dark.” And he showed us, far away across the darkening valley, the white dot that was the priest’s house where we were to spend the night.