worry about it. There were others who knew Tom and the nature of Indians who felt less hopeful.
It took the last of their money to buy their household goods. The room at the Martin House was crowded with her purchases; gleaming pots and pans sat in the pine drawer among her toilet things, and Tom would gaze at them with proprietary pride.
"Now what's that for?"
She did not always know, and then Tom would throw back his head and roar with laughter.
"It's a fine wife I've got! Good thing for you I'm some cook myself!"
But he would not have been Tom had he not had his depressed and even violent spells. One day he took her hands and examined them.
"They're going to have to work, those hands," he told her, almost roughly.
"That's what hands are for, or ought to be."
"Not if you'd married Percy!"
And that thought seemed to madden him. He worked himself into a frenzy over it. Why was she sticking to him? He wasn't worth it and she knew it. If it was because she was sorry for him, damn being sorry for him. He didn't want pity. He was more of a man as he was than any one of that crowd of mavericks he had met back East. And that memory lashing him to a fresh grievance, his undisciplined temper carried him on and on. She listened, her hands cold, her heart beating fast, until he flung out of the room. Half an hour later he was back, offering to get down and let her trample some of the "orneriness" out of him.
She began to feel the strain of meeting his varying moods. One day he went around to the Mallorys' and returning with his saddle, dumped it onto the floor with a strange expression on his face.
"Got to learn some new tricks, this old saddle!"
She was afraid to let him see the tears in her eyes
So she had learned a great deal, this Kay McNair, sitting on the rocking swaying wagon, with her dressing case be-
