Girl in a Buckskin

nodded. “My mother and father were killed at York.”
    “York. That would be in ninety-two?”
    “Aye. And Eseck was captured. Sometimes I wonder—I wonder if it is not better to be killed.” And suddenly realizing what she had said she shivered and returned to her work.
    Closing his eyes O’Hara pretended to sleep but as he turned over her words in his mind he could not have been more wakeful. For what interested him the most about this smoaky home was that everything had been made Indian-fashion by an Indian—or one who had lived long among the Indians.
     

Chapter Seventeen
     
     
     
    THERE CAME A DAY WHEN O’HARA ATE A FULL MEAL AND then another, and with his face less haggard from the fever Becky let him drag himself to the entrance of the cave. He lay a moment with his huge shoulders in the snow, blinking in surprise at the shining white mountains and the lake glittering in the sun. The vapor of his breath curled like smoke from his mouth for it was a frosty cold day, but he suddenly buried his face in the snow and grasping a handful held it in the palm of his hand. “What a beautiful thing it is,” he said. “I never thought to be cold again!”
    Becky laughed to see the expression on his face and he smiled back at her with pleasure. “T’is good to see you laugh,” he said. “What may I say to make you laugh again?”
    “Nothing.” She laughed. “As I have said before, you have a strange way of looking at life, Mr. O’Hara.”
    “Strange?” He looked astonished. “And how is that, lass?”
    She shook her head. “You are far from home, you have been close to death this last week and you have a leg that gives you much pain and may never mend straight. Yet you lie in the snow and laugh.”
    “Now that is a dark way to look at it,” he said, his eyes twinkling. “Rather say that if you’d not rescued me I would never be here at all. I came close to dying of fever and closer still to dying in the snows, yet look, here I am, with only a bad leg as a souvenir. I’m thinking I am an optimist and you a pessimist, for who could be luckier than I?”
    “Well, all I know is,” Becky said with a smile, “you will truly freeze to death if you stay out here.”
    “Very well, I shall go in,” he said with a grandly martyred air, and let her pull him back into the warmth of the cave and give him a cup of raspberry-leaf tea.
    There was silence while he sipped the delicately-flavored water and watched her mend a pair of moccasins. “You did rescue me,” he said suddenly. “Did you not hesitate, lass? For I could have brought you great harm.”
    She raised her eyes from her mending and looked at him. “You could still bring me great harm,” she said frankly. “For you must guess by now that I am a fugitive.”
    “Aye, lass, I know that. But I think too highly of my life to pay for it with treachery and your secret is safe with me. But I was not thinking of that. Just as my musket shot might have fetched Injuns less charitable than you, so you might have rescued a man more dangerous than myself.”
    “The thought had occurred to me,” she said steadily. “Yet you still came after me?”
    “Of course,” she said. “I live alone, Mr. O’Hara, and my thoughts are my only company. Do you think my thoughts would have been pleasant companions if I had let another soul perish in the forest?”
    He shook his head. “You’re a good lass-—a strange one and a brave one.”
    “Not so strange,” she said softly, biting the rawhide thread in two with her teeth.
    “And do you mind so much being alone?” His eyes were close on her face as he spoke, not wanting to force a story from her lips but waiting to see what she might let slip.
    Becky, bent over her mending, thought of how lonesome she had been since Eseck had gone, of how she had chattered to herself all day long lest she forget she was human. “No, I did not mind,” she lied.
    “Then what have you missed the most?” he asked softly.
    She gave him a keen glance. He was a knowing man all right. In all the months she had lived with Eseck he had never thought to speak of what she might miss, perhaps because he missed nothing himself. “I miss a cup of milk,” she said wistfully. “Thick and yellow with cream. But most of all I miss knowing just what day it is. T’is true I have a calendar but I cannot be sure it’s right. At first I did not think of this—it came upon me gradually. I would see by my calendar that it was the