I had forgotten my farm.  When I was with her, I could not overcome my bashfulness, my lack of experience, my ignorance of every manner of approach except that of the canallers to the waterside women, with which I suddenly found myself as familiar through memory as with the route from my plate to my mouth; that way I had fully made up my mind to adopt; but something held me back.

I now began leaving the camp and from some lurking-place in the distance watching her as a cat watches a bird.  I lived over in my mind a thousand times the attack I would make upon her defense, and her yielding after a show of resistance.  I became convinced at last that she would not make even a show of resistance; that she was probably wondering what I was waiting for, and making up her mind that, after all, I was not much of a man.

I saw her one evening, after looking about to see if she was observed, take off her stockings and go wading in the deep cool water of the creek—­and I lay awake at night wondering whether, after all, she had not known that I was watching her, and had so acted for my benefit—­and then I left my tossed couch and creeping to the side of the wagon listened, trembling in every limb, with my ear to the canvas until I was able to make out her regular breathing only a few inches from my ear.  And when in going away—­as I always did, finally—­I made a little noise which awakened her, she called and asked me if I had heard anything, I said no, and pacified her by saying that I had been awake and watching all the time.  Then I despised myself for saying nothing more.

I constantly found myself despising my own decency.  I felt the girl in my arms a thousand times as I had felt her for those delicious hours the night she had invited me to share the wagon with her, and we had sat in the spring seat wrapped in the buffalo-robe, as she slept with her head on my shoulder.  I tormented myself by asking if she had really slept, or only pretended to sleep.  Once away from her, once freed from the innocent look in her eyes, I saw in her behavior that night every advance which any real man might have looked for, as a signal to action.  Why had I not used my opportunity to make her love me—­to force from her the confession of her love?  Had I not failed, not only in doing what I would have given everything I possessed or ever hoped to possess to have been able to do; but also had I not failed in that immemorial duty which man owes to woman, and which she had expected of me?  Would she not laugh at me with some more forceful man when she had found him?  Was she not scorning me even now?