“What th’ hell are you babying me for?” But his roughness did not deceive her woman’s wits.  He was not getting the lecture he anticipated, and this was his way of showing that he was not embarrassed by her kindness.  The morning sunlight was pitilessly frank in its exposure of the grim pinch of poverty in the mean little room, but the woman was unconscious of these things; what she saw was that Jim, the reckless, Jim, the dare-devil terror of the country, Jim, who had married and settled with her into home-keeping respectability, Jim, who had struggled with misfortune and fallen, had, young as he was, lost every look of youth; that hope had gone from his dull eyes, and that his face had become drawn until the death’s-head grinned beneath the scant padding of flesh.  But he was to-day, as always, the one man in the world for her.  In making a world of their own and reducing their parents to supplementary consideration, their children, whom she had sent away that she might be alone with him, had given a different quality to the love of this pair that had known so many curious vicissitudes.  The responsibilities of parenthood had placed them on a tenderer, as well as a securer footing; and as she saw his age and weariness, he recognized hers, and both felt a self-accusing twinge.

“That’s a blamed good cup of coffee,” he said, by way of relieving the tension that had crept into the situation.  “Any one would think you was settin’ your cap for me ’stead of us being married for years.”

Alida sighed.  “It’s better to end than to begin like this,” she said, in the far-away voice of one who thinks aloud.  The word “end” had slipped out before she realized what she was saying, and the knowledge haunted her as an omen.  She glanced at him quickly, to see if he had noticed it.

“Why did you say end?” He saw that her eyes were full of tears and chafed her.  “You ain’t thinking of divorcing me, like Mountain Pink done Bosky?”

“Oh, Jim,” she said, and her face was all aquiver, “I never could divorce you, no matter what you done.”  And then the grim philosophy of the plains-woman asserted itself.  “I never can understand why women feed their pride on their heart’s blood; it never was my way.”

He did not like to remember that he had given her cause for a way.  “There’s a lot of women as wouldn’t exactly regard me as a Merino, or a Southdown, either;” he gulped the coffee to ease the tightness in his throat.

“They’d be women of no judgment, then,” she said, with conviction.

Jim’s head was tilted back, resting in the palm of his hand.  His profile, sharpened by anxiety, more than suggested his quarter-strain of Sioux blood.  He might almost have been old Chief Flying Hawk himself, as he looked steadily at the woman who had been a young girl and reckless, when he had been a boy and reckless; who had paid her woman’s penalty and come into her woman’s kingdom; who had made a man of him by the mystery of her motherhood, and who had uncomplainingly gone with him into the wilderness and become an alien and an outcast.