ping firewood, and now and then looking at her furtively with anxious harassed young eyes.
"Getting better every minute, isn't it?"
The house was damp and cold. He put her in a chair and wrapping a blanket around her, forbade her to move. "I'm doing this job. You can boss all you like." And underneath it all was his pathetic desire to make her comfortable, to see her smile, to have her share his own sense of what he had had only once before, of journey's end.
Long after that first meal of theirs had been eaten and she was in the white iron double bed, he was still at work. He had the team to see to, the wagon to cover from the rain, more wood to chop. She lay there, listening to him moving about, and to the rain on the roof just over her head, and after a while she got out of bed and dropped down on her knees. She was going to stick, no matter what; just give her strength to stick, and she asked nothing else.
But she had to get up once again that night, to help Tom to get his boot off his swollen and discolored foot.
"Been as busy as a dog licking a dish!" he told her cheerfully. "And don't you worry about this leg of mine. It's got to get limbered up, that's all."
He was up at dawn, and he had the fire going and water carried from the well before she stirred.
"You mustn't spoil me like that."
"I'm just breakin' you in kind of easy! No use putting the saddle on until you're halter broke, you know."
The house had three rooms, a large one, opening directly from a narrow porch, and two smaller rooms, one the kitchen. It sat out on the rolling plains, unshaded from the sun, and below it, lined with a few cottonwoods, a thin and now muddy stream wound its way beneath cut banks from the distant mountains. In summer it was hot, and the dust came in and covered floors and furniture with a fine gray grit; in winter the gales shook it, and only a small area around the stove was warm. Tom, spending those tragic months later on, was to learn that, and finally to move his bed into the kitchen.
There was no other house in sight. Judson, the nearest
