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Updated: May 13, 2025
His breath came in gasps, he was shaken and blinded with passion, high-pitched and nerve-wracking as a woman's. Leff rose, volleying curses. "Here you," Courant shifted a hard eye on him, "get out. Get on your horse and go," then turning to Bess, "Damn bad luck if we got to lose her." Leff stood irresolute, his curses dying away in smothered mutterings.
More than the doctor who was a man of education, more than David who thought so much and loved to read, more than Leff who, if his brain was not sharp, might be supposed to have accumulated some slight store of experience, more than Daddy John who was old and had the hoar of worldly knowledge upon him.
At their feet, sucking life from the stream, a fringe of alder and willows decked the sallow landscape with a trimming of green. Here the doctor's party camped for the night, rising in the morning to find a new defection in their ranks. Leff had gone.
The valiant little mules bent their necks, the horses straining, iron muscled, hoofs grinding down to the solid clay. The first charge carried them half way up, then there was a moment of slackened effort, a relaxing, recuperative breath, and the wagon came to a standstill. Leff ran for the back, shouting a warning.
Leff raised his head and looked at her. His eyes were curiously pale and wide. She could see the white round the fixed pupil. "Do it yourself," he answered, his tone the lowest that could reach her. "Do it or go to Hell." She rested without movement, her mouth falling slightly open.
David had gone hunting, feeling that to sit near by and not attend would offer a slight to the doctor. No such scruples restrained Leff, who squatted on his heels at the edge of the creek, washing his linen and listening over his shoulder. By the second Sunday they had mastered their bashfulness and both came shuffling their hats in awkward hands and sitting side by side on a log.
Leff scrambled to his knees, his face ominous, and Courant, who had been looking at the mare, apparently indifferent to the quarrel, now slipped to the ground. "Let that hound alone," he said. "I'm afraid it's all up with Bess." David turned and knelt beside her, touching her with hands so tremulous he could hardly direct them.
He struck Leff on the chest, a blow so savage and unexpected that it sent him staggering back into the stream, where, his feet slipping among the stones, he fell sprawling. "Do that again and I'll kill you," David cried, and moving to the horse stood over it with legs spread and fists clinched for battle.
The doctor was stowed away in the wagon and Miss Gillespie had drawn the tent flaps round the mystery of her retirement. David and Leff, too tired to pitch theirs, were dropping to sleep by the fire, when the girl's voice, low, but penetrating, roused them. "Daddy John," it hissed in the tone children employ in their games of hide-and-seek, "Daddy John, are you awake?"
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