I had heard women talk of greenhorns and backwoods boys in those days when I had lived a life in which women played an important, a disturbing, and a baleful part for every one but the boy who lived his strange life on the tow-path or in the rude cabin; and now these outcast women came back to me and through the very memories of them poisoned and corrupted my nature.  They peopled my dreams, with their loud voices, their drunkenness, their oaths, their obscenities, their lures, their tricks, their awful counterfeit of love; and, a figure apart from them in these dreams, partaking of their nature only so far as I desired to have it so, walked Virginia Royall, who had come to me across the prairie to escape a life with Buckner Gowdy.  But to the meaning of this fact I shut the eye of my mind.  I was I, and Gowdy was Gowdy.  It was no time for thought.  Every moment I pressed closer and closer to that action which I was sure would have been taken by Eben Sproule, or Bill the Sailor—­the only real friends I had ever possessed.

We used to go fishing along the creek; and ate many a savory mess of bullheads, sunfish and shiners, which I prepared and cooked.  We had butter, and the cows, eased of the labors of travel, grew sleek and round, and gave us plenty of milk.  I saved for Virginia all the eggs laid by my hens, except those used by her in the cooking.  She gave me the daintiest of meals; and I taught her to make bread.  To see her molding it with her strong small hands, was enough to have made me insane if I had had any sense left.  She showed me how to make vinegar pies; and I failed in my pies made of the purple-flowered prairie oxalis; but she triumphed over me by using the deliriously acid leaves as a flavoring for sandwiches—­we were getting our first experience as prairie-dwellers in being deprived of the common vegetable foods of the garden and forest.  One day I cooked a delicious mess of cowslip greens with a ham-bone.  She seemed to be happy; and I should have been if I had not made myself so miserable.  I remember almost every moment of this time—­so long ago.

One day as we were fishing we were obliged to clamber along the bank where a tree crowded us so far over the water that Virginia, in stooping to pass under the body of the tree, was about to fall; and I jumped down into the stream and caught her in my arms as she was losing her hold.  I found her arms about my neck as she clung to me; and, standing in the water, I turned her about in my arms, rather roughly of necessity, caught one arm about her waist and the other under the hollows of her knees and held her so.

“Don’t let me fall,” she begged.

“I won’t,” I said—­and I could say no more.

“You’ve got your feet all wet,” said she.

“I don’t care,” I said—­and stopped.

“How clumsy of me!” she exclaimed.

“It was a hard place to get around,” said I.

“I hope you didn’t lose the fish,” said she.