“‘Seems as if it’d help if I’d canter in and shoot every one of ’em dead,” he said.
They went out on the street again, intent on finding a place to lunch. There were two hours until the Washington train left. The Inger refusing utterly to ask anybody anything, they walked until they came to a place which, by hot flapjacks in the making in the great window, the Inger loudly recognized to be his own.
Seated at a little white oil-cloth covered table beneath which the Inger insisted on stowing the packs, the two relaxed in that moment of rest and well-being.
The Inger, seeing her there across from him, spoke out in a kind of wonder.
“It seems like I can’t remember the time when you wasn’t along,” he said.
She laughed—and it was pathetic to see how an interval of comfort and quiet warmed her back to security and girlishness. But not to the remotest coquetry. Of that, since the morning on the desert, he had had in her no glimpse. By this he knew dimly all that he had forfeited. He made wistful attempts to call forth even a shadow of her old way.
“A week ago,” he said, “I hardly knew you.”
She assented gravely, and found no more to say about it.
“A week ago,” he said, “I was fishing, and didn’t bring home nothin’ but a turtle.” He smiled at a recollection. “I was scrapin’ him out,” he said, “when I heard your weddin’ bell. How’d you ever come to have a weddin’ bell?” he wondered.