As I passed the carriage Virginia nodded to me; and looking at her I saw that she was pale and tremulous, with a look in her eyes like that of a crazy man I once knew who imagined that he was being followed by enemies who meant to kill him.  There is no word for it but a hunted look.

She came to my wagon, pretty soon, and surprised me by touching my arm as I was about to start on so as to make a few more miles before camping.  I had got my team straightened out, and ready to start, when I felt her hand on my arm, and on turning saw her standing close to me, and speaking almost in a whisper.

“Do you know any one,” she asked, “good people—­along the road ahead—­people we’ll overtake—­that would be friends to a girl that needs help?”

“Be friends,” I blundered, “be friends?  How be friends?”

“Give her work,” she said; “take her in; take care of her.  This girl needs friends—­other girls—­women—­some one to take the place of a mother and sisters.  Yes, and she needs friends to take the place of a father and brothers.  A girl needs friends—­friends all the time—­as you were to me back there in the night.”

I wondered if she meant herself; and after thinking over it for two or three days I made up my mind that she did; and then I was provoked at myself for not understanding:  but what could I have done or said if I had understood?  I remembered, though, how she had skithered[7] back to the carriage as she saw Pinck Johnson coming out of the saloon with Buck Gowdy; and had then clambered out again and gone into the little hotel where they seemed to have decided to stay all night; while I went on over roads which were getting more and more miry as I went west.  I had only been able to tell her of the Fewkes family—­Old Man Fewkes, with his bird’s claws and a beard where a chin should have been, Surajah Dowlah Fewkes with no thought except for silly inventions, Celebrate Fourth Fewkes with no ideas at all—­

[7] A family word, to the study of which one would like to direct the attention of the philologists, since traces of it are found in the conversation of folk of unsophisticated vocabulary outside the Clan van de Marck.  Doubtless it is of Yankee origin, and hence old English.  It may, of course, be derived according to Alice-in-Wonderland principles from “skip” and “hither” or “thither” or all three; but the claim is here made that it comes, like monkeys and men, from a common linguistic ancestor.—­G.v.d.M.

“But isn’t there a man among them?” she had asked.

“A man!” I repeated.

“A man that knows how to shoot a pistol, or use a knife,” she explained; “and who would shoot or stab for a weak girl with nobody to take cart of her.”

I shook my head.  Not one of these was a real man in the Kentucky, or other proper sense:  and Ma Fewkes with her boneless shoulders was not one of those women of whom I had seen many in my life, who could be more terrible to a wrong-doer than an army with bowie-knives.