“How many’s there of you?” asked the mate—­“Five?—­I can’t take you all.”

“All right,” said Auberry, “this gentleman and I will walk up to the town on this side.  You take the women and the boy.  We’ll send down for our things in the morning, if you don’t come up.”

So our little bivouac on the beach came to an end.  A moment later the passengers were embarked, and Auberry and I, standing at the bow, were about to push off the boat for them.

“A moment, sir,” exclaimed our friend of the fireside, rising and stepping toward me as I stood alongside the boat.  “You are forgetting your coat.”

She would have taken it from her shoulders, but I forbade it.  She hesitated, and finally said, “I thank you so much”; holding out her hand.

I took it.  It was a small hand, with round fingers, firm of clasp.  I hate a hard-handed woman, or one with mushy fingers, but this, as it seemed to me, was a hand excellently good to clasp—­warm now, and no longer trembling in the terrors of the night.

“I do not know your name, sir,” she said, “but I should like my father to thank you some day.”

“All ready!” cried the mate.

“My name is Cowles,” I began, “and sometime, perhaps—­”

“All aboard!” cried the mate; and so the oars gave way.

So I did not get the name of the girl I had seen there in the firelight.  What did remain—­and that not wholly to my pleasure, so distinct it seemed—­was the picture of her high-bred profile, shown in chiaroscuro at the fireside, the line of her chin and neck, the tumbled masses of her hair.  These were things I did not care to remember; and I hated myself as a soft-hearted fool, seeing that I did so.

“Son,” said old Auberry to me, after a time, as we trudged along up the bank, stumbling over roots and braided grasses, “that was a almighty fine lookin’ gal we brung along with us there.”

“I didn’t notice,” said I.

“No,” said Auberry, solemnly, “I noticed you didn’t take no notice; so you can just take my judgment on it, which I allow is safe.  Are you a married man?”

“Not yet,” I said.

“You might do a heap worse than that gal,” said Auberry.

“I suppose you’re married yourself,” I suggested.

“Some,” said Auberry, chuckling in the dark.  “In fact, a good deal, I reckon.  My present woman’s a Shoshone—­we’re livin’ up Horse Creek, below Laramie.  Them Shoshones make about the best dressers of ’em all.”

“I don’t quite understand—­”

“I meant hides.  They can make the best buckskin of any tribe I know.”  He walked on ahead in the dark for some time, before he added irrelevantly, “Well, after all, in some ways, women is women, my son, and men is men; that bein’ the way this world is made just at these here present times.  As I was sayin’, that’s a powerful nice lookin’ gal.”

I shuddered in my soul.  I glanced up at the heavens, studded thick with stars.  It seemed to me that I saw gazing down directly at me one cold, bright, reproving star, staring straight into my soul, and accusing me of being nothing more than a savage, nothing better than a man.