"I'm sure I don't know. I don't know why I do everything or why I like this thing and don't like that. I don't always have a reason, or if I do I don't stop to think what it is. I just do things because I want to and feel them because I can't help it. I like children and so I wanted to talk to them and hear about them from their mother." "But would your liking for them make you blind to such a thing as dirt?" "I don't know. Maybe it would. When you're interested in anything or anybody small things don't matter." "Small things! Those children were a sight!" "Yes, poor little brats! No one had washed the baby for weeks. The woman said she was too tired to bother and it wouldn't bathe in the creeks with the other children, so they let it go. If we kept near them I could wash it for her. I could borrow it and wash it every morning. But there's no use thinking about it as we'll pass them to-morrow. Wasn't it a darling with little golden rings of hair and eyes like pieces of blue glass?" She sighed, relinquishing the thought of the baby's morning bath with pensive regret. David could not understand it, but decided as Susan felt that way it must be the right way for a woman to feel. He was falling in love, but he was certainly not falling in love--as students of a later date have put it--with "a projection of his own personality." CHAPTER VI They had passed the Kaw River and were now bearing on toward the Vermilion. Beyond that would be the Big and then the Little Blue and soon after the Platte where "The Great Medicine way of the Pale Face" bent straight to the westward. The country continued the same and over its suave undulations the long trail wound, sinking to the hollows, threading clumps of cotton-wood and alder, lying white along the spine of bolder ridges. Each day they grew more accustomed to their gypsy life. The prairie had begun to absorb them, cut them off from the influences of the old setting, break them to its will. They were going back over the footsteps of the race, returning to aboriginal conditions, with their backs to the social life of communities and their faces to the wild. Independence seemed a long way behind, California so remote that it was like thinking of Heaven when one was on earth, well fed and well faring. Their immediate surroundings began to make their world, they subsided into the encompassing immensity, unconsciously eliminating thoughts, words, habits, that did not harmonize with its uncomplicated design.