The men respected her sorrow, did her work for her, and let her alone. To them she was set apart in the sanctuary of her mourning, and that her grief should express itself by hours of drooping silence was a thing they accepted without striving to understand. Once or twice David tried to speak to her of her father, but it seemed to rouse in her an irritated and despairing pain. She begged him to desist and got away from him as quickly as she could, climbing into the wagon and lying on the sacks, with bright, unwinking eyes fastened on Daddy John's back. But she did not rest stunned under an unexpected blow as they thought. She was acutely alive, bewildered, but with senses keen, as if the world had taken a dizzying revolution and she had come up panting and clutching among the fragments of what had been her life.

If there had been some one to whom she could have turned, relieving herself by confession, she might have found solace and set her feet in safer ways. But among the three men she was virtually alone, guarding her secret with that most stubborn of all silences, a girl's in the first wakening of sex. She had a superstitious hope that she could regain peace and self-respect by an act of reparation, and at such moments turned with expiatory passion to the thought of David. She would go to California, live as her father had wished, marry her betrothed, and be as good a wife to him as man could have. And for a space these thoughts brought her ease, consoled her as a compensating act of martyrdom.

She shunned Courant, rarely addressing him, keeping her horse to the rear of the train where the wagon hood hid him from her. But when his foot fell on the dust beside her, or he dropped back for a word with Daddy John, a stealthy, observant quietude held her frame. She turned her eyes from him as from an unholy sight, but it was useless, for her mental vision called up his figure, painted in yellow and red upon the background of the sage. She knew the expression of the lithe body as it leaned from the saddle, the gnarled hand from which the rein hung loose, the eyes, diamond hard and clear, living sparks set in leathery skin wrinkled against the glare of the waste. She did not lie to herself any more. No delusions could live in this land stripped of all conciliatory deception.

The night before they left the Fort the men had had a consultation. Sitting apart by the tent she had watched them, David and Daddy John between her and the fire, Courant beyond it. His face, red lit between the hanging locks of hair, his quick eyes, shifting from one man to the other, was keen with a furtive anxiety. At a point in the murmured interview, he had looked beyond them to the darkened spot where she sat. Then Daddy John and David had come to her and told her that if she wished they would turn back, take her home to Rochester, and stay there with her always. There was money enough they said. The doctor had left seven thousand dollars in his chest, and David had three to add to it. It would be ample to live on till the men could set to work and earn a maintenance for them. No word was spoken of her marriage, but it lay in the offing of their argument as the happy finale that the long toil of the return journey and the combination of resources were to prelude.