By which time Hugh and Vicky arrived, that long-legged young lady skipping on the hilltops, with high-pitched voluble comment. “Looky. Looky here, Sister Mollie, what I got,” she cried in her eager breathless fashion. “He got it for me, Mister—Mister Santa Claus.” One finger pointed straight at Hugh while she held out for the inspection of her sister a doll with blue eyes and flaxen hair. “Oh, but you shouldn’t—you ought not,” Mollie protested to the boy. “Did she ask you for it?” “No, ma’am. I wanted to get it for her. It was the only doll for sale in Virginia, far as I know. I been hankerin’ to buy that doll. Now I feel a heap better.” Vicky herself was so clearly in a seventh heaven of delight that her sister had not the heart to say anything more about it. But she was uneasy in her mind. She wondered if their obligations to these young men would never end. What would Rob say? How would he make her pay for the charity he had forced her to accept? In the days that followed she had occasion many times to feel weighted by the kindnesses of Scot McClintock. Hugh had departed to report for duty with the express company, but his brother made it a point to see that the little family in the prairie schooner did not lack for food. He hunted the cañons and brought back a young buck deer with him. One hind quarter of it went to Mollie Dodson to keep the pot boiling. Fish, rabbits, a prairie hen, three dozen eggs brought by a rancher all the way from Honey Lake Valley; these and other delicacies were forced upon the protesting woman. Robert Dodson’s attitude was one of sneering suspicion. He was willing that another man should supply his family with the food it needed, but he was mean enough to jeer at his wife and bully her because of it. Even while he ate the meat brought by McClintock his tongue was a whip that lashed Mollie and the man. His whole attitude implied that the two were carrying on a clandestine love affair. Mollie wept herself to sleep more nights than one. By nature a dependent woman, she did not now know which way to turn. Her husband was a broken reed. He no longer even pretended to be looking for work. Humiliating though it was, she had to accept Scot’s favours. She could not let the family starve. A thousand times Robert Dodson had trampled her pride and affection in the dust. She knew that life with him held nothing for her, but it must go on through the long gray years that stretched ahead till the end of things. She was not the sort of woman to contemplate suicide with any fortitude. Both the courage and the cowardice for it she lacked.