And just before night a girl
on a _pinto_ came down the side of that uncurried hill round a bend and
got me. She took me to a cabin hidden in the bottom of a canon and
looked after me four days. Her father, a prospector, had gone into
Tucson for supplies and we were alone there. She fed me, nursed me,
and waited on me. We divided a one-room twelve-by-sixteen cabin.
Understand, we were four days alone together before her dad came back,
and all the time the sky was lettin' down a terrible lot of water.
When her father showed up he grinned and said, 'Lucky for you Myrtle
heard that six-gun of yore's pop!' He never thought one evil thing
about either of us. He just accepted the situation as necessary. Now
the question is, what ought she to have done? Left me to die on that
hillside?"
"Of course not. That's different," protested Beatrice indignantly.
"I don't see it. What she did was more embarrassing for her than what
I did for Kitty. At least it would have been mightily so if she hadn't
used her good hawss sense and forgot that she was a lone young female
and I was a man. That's what I did the other night. Just because
there are seven or eight million human beings here the obligation to
look out for Kitty was no less."
"New York isn't Arizona."
"You bet it ain't. We don't sit roostin' on a fence when folks need
our help out there. We go to it."
"You can't do that sort of thing here. People talk."
"Sure, and hens cackle.
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