I had got my team straightened out, and ready to start, when I
felt her hand on my arm, and on turning saw her standing close to me,
and speaking almost in a whisper.
"Do you know any one," she asked, "good people--along the road
ahead--people we'll overtake--that would be friends to a girl that
needs help?"
"Be friends," I blundered, "be friends? How be friends?"
"Give her work," she said; "take her in; take care of her. This girl
needs friends--other girls--women--some one to take the place of a
mother and sisters. Yes, and she needs friends to take the place of a
father and brothers. A girl needs friends--friends all the time--as you
were to me back there in the night."
I wondered if she meant herself; and after thinking over it for two or
three days I made up my mind that she did; and then I was provoked at
myself for not understanding: but what could I have done or said if I
had understood? I remembered, though, how she had skithered[7] back to
the carriage as she saw Pinck Johnson coming out of the saloon with Buck
Gowdy; and had then clambered out again and gone into the little hotel
where they seemed to have decided to stay all night; while I went on
over roads which were getting more and more miry as I went west. I had
only been able to tell her of the Fewkes family--Old Man Fewkes, with
his bird's claws and a beard where a chin should have been, Surajah
Dowlah Fewkes with no thought except for silly inventions, Celebrate
Fourth Fewkes with no ideas at all--
[7] A family word, to the study of which one would like to direct the
attention of the philologists, since traces of it are found in the
conversation of folk of unsophisticated vocabulary outside the Clan van
de Marck.
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