You haven't got the heart to treat
me so."
She looked down not answering, but her silence gave no indication of a
softened response. He seemed to throw himself upon its hardness in
hopeless desperation.
"Send him away. He needn't go on with us. Tell him to go back to the
Fort."
"Where would we be now without him?" she said and smiled grimly at the
thought of their recent perils with the leader absent.
"We're on the main trail. We don't need him now. I heard him say
yesterday to Daddy John we'd be in Humboldt in three or four days. We
can go on without him, there's no more danger."
She smiled again, a slight flicker of one corner of her mouth. The
dangers were over and Courant could be safely dispensed with.
"He'll go on with us," she said.
"It's not necessary. We don't want him. I'll guide. I'll help. If
he was gone I'd be all right again. Daddy John and I are enough. If I
can get you back as you were before, we'll be happy again, and I _can_
get you back if he goes."
"You'll never get me back," she answered, and rising moved away from
him, aloof and hostile in the deepest of all aversions, the woman to
the unloved and urgent suitor.
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