itself before she got back, and the “enemy” not be “done good to,” after all. So she set to work to gnaw the supplejack with her strong little white teeth; and she had got it half done, too, when the terrified brute, finding one of its hoofs thus unexpectedly set free, kicked out with all its might, and struck its poor little deliverer.
It was not until evening that Eva, wandering distraught to seek her darling, found the little mangled body, still moaning. . . . The stars kept vigil with them through a night of agony. . . . Then at daybreak, little Paulie left the hills for ever. In the one sacred half hour of peace before she died, she told her mother the story. “Did I do right, mother?” she asked, and, “Quite right, my darling!” the mother answered. It was the supreme sacrifice, and it broke her heart. But you can live on with a broken heart. Eva lived on for years.
Then at last there came a day when one of the settlement women happening to ask Joel about his ”missus,” was told, carelessly, that she was sick, or said she was; anyway, he couldn’t get the slut to stand up on her feet, and he had no time to waste looking after her, he hadn’t. On that tacit invitation, two of Eva’s old neighbours hurried up as fast as they could, though snow was threatening, and found her, as Joel had said, too ill at last to rise. She was lying on some old fern, that had broken out of its rotten sacking, and she had a ragged old skirt over her.
The women asked for blankets and linen, and something in Joel’s face made them keep on asking, until at length, with a curse at their meddling, he flung them the key of an old leather trunk that
