Dylks got to his feet too, with little moans for the stiffness in his joints. “I know you would, Nancy,” he said humbly, “but all the same I won't forget it. If there was anything I could do to show—”
“There's something you could do besides drownin' yourself in the creek, which I don't ask you: in the first place because I don't want your death on my hands, and in the next place because you're the un-fittin'est man to die that I can think of; but there's something else, and you know it without my tellin' you, and that is to stop all this, now and forever. Don't you pretend you don't know what I mean!”
“I know what you mean, Nancy, and the good Lord knows I would be glad enough to do it if I could. But I wouldn't know how to begin.”
“Begin,” she said with a scornful glance at the long tangle of his hair, “begin by cuttin' off that horse's tail of yours, and then stop snortin' like a horse.”
He shook his head hopelessly. “It wouldn't do, Nancy. They wouldn't let me draw back now. They would kill me.”
“They?”
“The—the—Little Flock,” he answered shamefacedly.
“The Herd of the Lost will kill you if you don't.” She said it not in mocking, but in realization of the hopeless case, and not without pity. But at his next words, she hardened her heart again.
“I don't know what to do. I don't know where to go. I have nowhere to lay my head.”