She smiled across the fire and said:
"I'm glad you've come. We've been watching for you ever since we
struck the Platte. There aren't any girls in the train. I and my
sister are the youngest except Mrs. Peebles over there," with a nod in
the direction of the girl on the wagon tongue, "and she's married."
The woman beside her, who had been too busy over the bacon pan to raise
her head, now straightened herself, presenting to Susan's eye a face
more buxom and mature but so like that of the speaker that it was
evident they were sisters. A band of gold gleamed on her wedding
finger and her short skirt and loose calico jacket made no attempt to
hide the fact that another baby was soon to be added to the already
well-supplied train. She smiled a placid greeting and her eye, lazily
sweeping Susan, showed a healthy curiosity tempered by the
self-engrossed indifference of the married woman to whom the outsider,
even in the heart of the wilderness, is forever the outsider.
"Lucy'll be real glad to have a friend," she said. "She's lonesome.
Turn the bacon, Lucy, it makes my back ache to bend"; and as the sister
bowed over the frying pan, "move, children, you're in the way.
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