CHAPTER VI
MURDER
"How do you think you'd like to live in Crawling Water?"
Wade looked whimsically at Helen, as she picked her way with the grace of a kitten through the dust of the main street. Carefully though she walked, her shoes and the bottom of her skirt were covered with dust, and gray with it.
"I shouldn't like it," she said, with a little moue. "I don't see why you stay here. You aren't going to always, are you?"
"I reckon it's likely."
"Not—for always?" She had stopped and was looking up into his face with delicious dismay. "That would be awful."
"Most of my friends, and all of my business interests are here. Besides, I have a kind of pride in growing up with this country. Back in the East, things have been settled for so long that a man's only a cog in a machine. Out here, a fellow has a sense of ownership, even in the hills. I think it's because he gets closer to the soil, until he comes to love it and to be almost a part of it."