California -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Western stories
Nevertheless, he asked several questions based upon these recently
discovered qualities. It appeared that in the old days of her
wanderings with the circus troupe she had often been forced to
undertake this nomadic housekeeping. But she "despised it," had never
done it since, and always had refused to do it for "him"--the personal
pronoun referring, as Low understood, to her lover Curson. Not caring
to revive these memories further, Low briefly concluded:--
"I don't know what you were, or what you may be, but from what I see of
you you've got all the _sabe_ of a frontierman's wife."
She stopped and looked at him, and then, with an impulse of impudence
that only half concealed a more serious vanity, asked, "Do you think I
might have made a good squaw?"
"I don't know," he replied quietly. "I never saw enough of them to
know."
Teresa, confident from his clear eyes that he spoke the truth, but
having nothing ready to follow this calm disposal of her curiosity,
relapsed into silence.
The meal finished, Teresa washed their scant table equipage in a little
spring near the camp-fire; where, catching sight of her disordered
dress and collar, she rapidly threw her shawl, after the national
fashion, over her shoulder and pinned it quickly. Low _cached_ the
remaining provisions and the few cooking-utensils under the dead embers
and ashes, obliterating all superficial indication of their camp-fire
as deftly and artistically as he had before.
"There isn't the ghost of a chance," he said in explanation, "that
anybody but you or I will set foot here before we come back to supper,
but it's well to be on guard. I'll take you back to the cabin now,
though I bet you could find your way there as well as I can."
On their way back Teresa ran ahead of her companion, and plucking a few
tiny leaves from a hidden oasis in the bark-strewn trail brought them
to him.
"That's the kind you're looking for, isn't it?" she said, half timidly.
"It is," responded Low, in gratified surprise; "but how did you know
it? You're not a botanist, are you?"
"I reckon not," said Teresa; "but you picked some when we came, and I
noticed what they were."
Here was indeed another revelation. Low stopped and gazed at her with
such frank, open, utterly unabashed curiosity that her black eyes fell
before him.
"And do you think," he asked with logical deliberation, "that you could
find any plant from another I should give you?"
"Yes."
"Or from a drawing of it?"
"Yes; perhaps even if you described it to me."
A half-confidential, half fraternal silence followed.
"I tell you what. I've got a book"--
"I know it," interrupted Teresa; "full of these things."
"Yes. Do you think you could"--
"Of course I could," broke in Teresa, again.
"But you don't know what I mean," said the imperturbable Low.
"Certainly I do. Why, find 'em, and preserve all the different ones for
you to write under--that's it, isn't it?"
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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