Her eyes, untroubled, scarcely left my face; I feared to let mine leave hers. Of what she was thinking I might not know, and I did not seek to know--was oddly yielding and content, for our decisions had been made. And still it was unreal, impossible: we, in this guise; the Sioux, watching; the desert, waiting; death hovering--a sudden death, a violent death, the end of that which had barely begun; an end suspended in sight like the Dionysian sword, with the single hair already frayed by the greedy shears of the Fate. A snap, at our own signal; then presto, change! It simply could not be true. Why, somewhere my father and mother busied, mindless; somewhere Benton roared, mindless; somewhere the wagon train toiled on, mindless; the stage road missed us not, nor wondered; the railroad graders shoveled and scraped and picked as blithely as if the same desert did not contain them, and us; cities throbbed, people worked and played, and we were of as little concern to them now as we would be a year hence. Then it all pridefully resolved to this, like the warming tune of a fine battle chant: That I was here, with my woman, my partner woman, the much desirable woman whom I had won; which was more than Daniel, or Montoyo, or the Indian chief, or the wide world of other men could boast. Soon she spoke, at times, musingly. "I did make up to you, at first," she said. "In Omaha, and on the train." "Did you?" I smiled. She was so childishly frank. "But that was only passing. Then in Benton I knew you were different. I wondered what it was; but you were different from anybody that I had met before. There's always such a moment in a woman's life." I soberly nodded. Nothing could be a platitude in such a place and such an hour. "I wished to help you. Do you believe that now?" "I believe you, dear heart," I assured. "But it was partly because I thought you could help me," she said, like a confession. And she added: "I had nothing wrong in mind. You were to be a friend, not a lover. I had no need of lovers; no, no." We were silent for an interval. Again she spoke. "Do you care anything about my family? I suppose not. That doesn't matter, here. But you wouldn't be ashamed of them. I ran away with Montoyo. I thought he was something else. How could I go home after that? I tried to be true to him, we had plenty of money, he was kind to me at first, but he dragged me down and my father and mother don't know even yet. Yes, I tried to help him, too. I stayed. It's a life that gets into one's blood. I feared him terribly, in time. He was a breed, and a devil--a gentleman devil." She referred in the past tense, as to some fact definitely bygone. "I had to play fair with him, or---- And when I had done that, hoping, why, what else could I do or where could I go? So many people knew me." She smiled. "Suddenly I tied to you, sir. I seemed to feel--I took the chance." "Thank God you did," I encouraged.