“I guess the man I am asking about had something to do with the mills. There are mills there, ain't there?”
“Well, I declare! That's funny!” and the homesteader laughed a mirthless cackle. “Should say I did know the Thomases. My wife was a Thomas—old French Thomas' daughter. But”—lowering his voice—“the old man's been dead five years come next May.”
The Bad Man turned his face away.
So that was the woman he had loved!
There was silence again, undisturbed save for the clatter of the horses' hoofs and the rattle of the wagon. The child was asleep, and its mother no longer sang to it.
The homesteader thrust aside the flaps and glanced in. The woman, with the child in her arms, was seated on a mattress at the back of the wagon, looking out at the long dusty streak that wound over the range and lost itself in the gray distance of the plain.
Craning his neck the Bad Man saw her, and then as her husband dropped the flaps, he pulled up his horse and drew in behind the wagon. The woman raised her eyes.
“Is the little one asleep?” he asked, his voice shaking with an awkward tenderness.
“Yes. She's just pining away for green fields and trees.”
He surveyed the woman before him with a certain wonder. He would never have recognized her, she was so changed, so altered from the likeness he had carried in his heart; but now, knowing who she was, he could trace where she had fallen from that likeness. He was quite sure she could not recognize him, for he had changed, too, but in a different way.