“Sir, your voice startled me,” replied the woman, with a gasp. “But it’s a voice I trust. The looks of men in this hard country deceive me sometimes—but never their voices.... Sir, if you will help us in our extremity, you will have the gratitude of a dying woman—of a mother.”
The darkness was intense inside the hut, and Adam, leaning at the door, could see nothing. The girl touched his arm timidly, almost appealingly, as Adam hesitated over his reply.
“You can—trust me,” he said, presently. “My name is Wansfell. I’m just a desert wanderer. If I may—I’ll stay here—look after your little girl till her uncle comes.”
“At last—God has answered my—prayer!” exclaimed the woman, pantingly.
* * * * *
Adam unpacked his burros a half dozen rods from the hut, under a spreading cottonwood and near the juncture of two little streams of water that flowed down out of the gloom, one on each side of the great corner of mountain. And Adam’s big hands made short shift of camp well made, with upright poles and thatch, covered by a thatched roof of palm leaves. The girl came out and watched him, and Adam had never seen hungrier eyes even in an Indian.
“It’d be fun to watch you—you’re so quick—if I wasn’t starved,” said Genie.
What a slender, almost flat slip of a girl. Her dress was in tatters, showing bare brown flesh in places. The pinched little face further stirred Adam’s pity. And there waved over him a strange pride in his immense strength, his wonderful hands, his desert knowledge that now could be put to the greatest good ever offered him in his wanderings.
“Genie, when you’re starved you must eat very slowly—and only a little.”
“I know. I’ve known all about people starving and thirsting. But I’m not that badly off. I’ve had a little to eat.”