“What nonsense!” retorted Moreau. “Do you suppose I’d let you and that baby stay in the brush shed, the place where the horses have been kept all summer? You’re going to keep the cabin, and if there’s anything you want--anything that’s short, or that you might need for the baby--why, Fletcher’ll go to Hangtown and get it. Just say what you want. Not having women around, we’re probably short of all sorts of little fixings.” “I don’t want nothing,” she said with her head down--“I ain’t never been so comfortable sence I was married.” “Have you been married long?” he asked, less from curiosity than from the desire to make her talk. “Four years,” she replied; “I was married in St. Louis, just before dad and I was startin’ to cross the plains. Dad was taken sick. He was consumpted, and some one tol’ him to go to California, so we was goin’ to start along with a heap of other folks. We was all waitin’ ’round St. Louis for the weather to settle and that’s how I met Jake.” “Jake?” said Moreau, interrogatively; “who was Jake?” “My husband--Jake Shackleton. He was one o’ the drivers of the train. He drove McGinnes’ teams. He was there in camp with us, and up and asked me, and dad was glad to get any one to take care of me, bein’ as he was so consumpted. We was married a week afore the train started. I didn’t favor it much, but dad thought it was a good thing. My father was a Methodist preacher, and knowin’ as how he couldn’t last long, he was powerful glad to get some one to look after me. I was pretty young to be left--just fifteen.” “Fifteen!” echoed Moreau--then piecing together her scant bits of biography--“Then you’re only _nineteen_ now?” “That’s my age,” she said with her laconic dryness. He looked at her in incredulous amaze. Nineteen! A girl, almost a child! A gush of pity and horror welled up in him, and for the moment he could find no words. She went on, evidently desirous of telling him of herself as in duty bound to her new master. “Dad died before we got to Salt Lake. Then Jake and I settled there and Willie was born, and for two years it wern’t so bad. Jake liked me and was good to me. But he got to know the Mormons and kep’ sayin’ all the time it weren’t no good doin’ anything not bein’ a Mormon. He said they had no use for him, bein’ a Gentile. And then he seen Bessie,--she was a waitress in the Sunset Hotel,--and got powerful set on her. She was a big, strong woman, and could work. Not like me. I couldn’t never work except in the house. I was no good for outdoor work. I was always a sort er drag, he said. So he turned Mormon and married Bessie, and she came to live with us.” She stopped and began rubbing a pan with a piece of flour sack. “Don’t tell any more if you don’t want to,” said the man, hearing his voice slightly husky.