The idea of a hunter’s bride was strongly fixed in her mind, and with it a tenderness towards all belonging to his craft. Esse now wanted to see the job over so she asked:
“And where is the first?”
Miss Gimp pulled out the lowest drawer of all and disclosed to Esse’s gaze a horrible looking leg of deer meat all blue, damp and sodden; and which had been rudely hacked from the carcase. The look and the smell almost turned Esse faint, and with a sudden jerk she shut up the drawer. What an awful thing to send you!’ was all she could say. Miss Gimp was pathetically apologetic in her manner as she said:
“Well, it is an odd way of showing affection. If it had been a nice gold specimen now, or one of those opals in the matrix, like the one that was presented to your mother in Mexico, or a slab of onyx, one would understand it better. But the dear man has his own ways I suppose! He is a fine figure of a man, isn’t he?”
This she said in a burst of something like rapture. Esse tried to cut this short — the new light still shone round her enough to make it seem unfair to let the other woman show her heart, more especially when her hopes were so baseless; so she turned the conversation to what was to be done with the offerings. Miss Gimp was beginning to be seriously alarmed about being found out, on one side as hoarding the provisions in such a ridiculous way, and on the other of being laughed at if she broached the subject at all; so she was glad to embrace Esse’s suggestion that they should during the darkness of the evening take out the gifts and bury them.
This fell deed was achieved before they went to bed that night, and Miss Gimp slept peacefully, with the consciousness of a weight taken off her mind.
The next morning Esse came across Dick, who was for once in a way in a tearing rage. She asked him the cause, and he told her:
“It’s that durned crowd — dirty, thievin’ scoundrels; an’ I believe that Heap Hungry is at the bottom of it. I’d make some of them own up, but that it don’t suit me to quarrel with them just now. I’ll lay for them some night an’ I’ll put a hole through some of them.”
“What have they been stealing?”
“Not much — nothin’ of any value, but it’s the beginnin’, and I mean to stop it right here. An Indian is real pizon when he gets off the square, and this may be only one in the lot; but it’s a beginnin’, and I won’t stand it!”
Esse began to have an understanding, so she asked again:
“What did they steal, Dick?”
“Oh, only some meat and such like. A week ago I had a buck hangin’ up, an’ in the night the durned thieves came and hacked a leg off it; last night it was a turkey. By gum, Little Missy, what air you laughin’ at now?” for Esse had gone off in peals of laughter after his own manner.
At first he was annoyed, but in a few seconds the anger of his face disappeared; then his features relaxed into a grin and the pent up whirlwind burst, and Esse’s laughter was drowned in the volume of his stentorian tones. When Esse recovered her breath she told him what she had found out, and as Dick’s laughter broke out afresh at every step of the doing, of Heap Hungry’s stealing the meat and placing it in Miss Gimp’s window as an offering to the parrot, of her taking it to herself and as a love gift from Dick, and of the mysterious burying. Then she suggested that to complete the circle Dick should come each night and dig up the offering and use it either for himself or for Mrs. Elstree’s household. The humour of the idea took hold of Dick, and his imagination was so manifestly touched that Esse got a little frightened lest he should in some way betray the secret. She was only made easy when he solemnly swore not to betray the secret in any way.
And so this night Dick went to his cabin shaking with laughter; and Esse put her head on her pillow filled with a secret but fearful exultation that Dick and she shared a secret between them.
Chapter 4
Esse’s first quarrel with Dick arose from wounded vanity. Remotely the feeling may have been on his side, but the immediate cause was on her own part. When the secret had been shared for some time, she began to take Dick to task in a purely feminine way. She wanted his hands to be always clean, and his nails to be properly regulated. Dick was something of a dandy in his way, but in the mountains vanity prefers more picturesque forms than the manifestations of soap and water. He was not by any means a dirty man; but more than the mere absence of dirt is demanded by the exigence of feminine propinquity, and Esse, greatly daring, took him to task. He received her monitions well enough at the time, but later on developed a certain huffiness which told her that his self-love had been wounded. Anxious to set matters right, she took an early opportunity of saying to him:
“Dick, you know you and I should help one another. You are big and strong, and mother says that the care you have taken of me, and the sense of security which your presence gives has made a new girl of me. I want to see you like other men — no, no! I don’t mean like them, with all their meanness and selfishness, but in not being ridiculous or not seeming at your best. Down in the cities men have rules among themselves as to how they should dress and what they should do; and I wouldn’t like any of them to misjudge you, if you should be there, or they here. You’re not offended with me, are you, Dick?”
He had been sitting with his knees apart and his face downcast, but there was something in her voice which made him look up. His great blue eyes looked into her great brown ones, and the whole quarrel was made up in one word as he held out his great brown hand and said:
“Shake!”
Esse took the pleasant punishment of his pump-handle shake without a wince, and when Dick had dropped her hand as suddenly as he had grasped it she felt in a less dictatorial mood towards him than she had ever experienced. With a certain new shyness she said:
“And I want you, Dick, to tell me of anything you notice that isn’t quite right in me — not quite as you’d have it in a girl that you respected. You know, Dick, we all want help to do the best that we are capable of!” she went on in a voice that somehow seemed to herself not to ring true, though Dick did not seem to notice it. He fidgeted his hands about awkwardly and blushed, actually blushed like a school-girl — that is, as a school-girl is supposed to blush according to the books.
Then he coughed prefatorily: this sent a pang through Esse’s heart, or whatever portion of her anatomy vanity resides in. Did a woman ever yet not feel a pang when a man whom she liked discovered the smallest fault? She could have beaten herself for the falsity of her tone as she said, with seeming impulsiveness:
“Go on, Dick! Don’t be afraid! I’ll tell you if you’re right.”
So Dick began:
“Wall, Little Missy, as you wish me to tell you, there is a matter — I don’t know as how I oughter mention it; or I don’t quite know how to say it right. But it hasn’t been my own noticin’ entirely. Them Shoshonies are mighty cute in noticin’, an’ they have a name for you which tells it; or rather they had, till I promised to knock the stuffin’ out of any of them that would use it again.”
“What was it?” asked Esse in curiosity, though her face was suffused with an indignant blush.
But Dick kept an artful silence on the point.
“Well, Little Missy, I think I’d better explain to you first. Why do you keep that nose-rag of yours always over your face the way you do? Guess, it looks mighty odd to folks!”
Esse’s blush turned a bright scarlet; she had a habit which had adhered to her from childhood up, just as some children maintain the habit of sucking the thumb, and concerning which she had often been spoken to and remonstrated with. She would twirl her handkerchief round her forefinger and thumb, and then place these fingers, parted widely, across her nose and mouth and sit reading hour after hour in this attitude. Even when she was not reading she would unconsciously assume the same position. She could not but be conscious that the habit was an odd one even