We were both hungry when she awoke, and in the total darkness we felt
about for the dinner-basket, in which were the dinners of the children
of the McConkey family with whom she had boarded, and who had gone home
at noon, because the fuel was gone. We ate frozen pie, and frozen boiled
eggs, and frozen bread and butter; and then lay talking and caressing
each other for hours. We talked about the poor horses, for which
Virginia felt a deep pity, out there in the fierce storm and the awful
cold. We talked of the beautiful cutter; and finally, I explained the
way in which I had robbed Gowdy of horses and robes and sleigh, and dog.
"He can never have the dog back," said she. "And to think that I am
hiding out in a strawstack with a robber and a horse-thief!"
Then she said she reckoned we'd have to join the Bunker gang, if we
could find any of it to join. Certainly we should be fugitives from
justice when the storm was over; but she for herself would rather be a
fugitive always with me than to be rescued by "that man"--and it was
lucky for him, too, she said, that I had licked him and shut him up in a
house where he would be warm and fed; because he never would have been
able to save himself in this awful storm as I had done. Nobody could
have done so well as I had done. I had snatched her from the very
jaws of death.
"Then," said I, "you're mine."
"Of course I am," said she. "I've been yours ever since we lived
together so beautifully on the road, and in our Grove of Destiny.
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