She had never had a special friend before—not since those far-back little-girl days in Missouri.
“Mammy,” she said at breakfast, “I never slept a wink last night. I kept thinking about Sonny and Brand all the time—wondering why they’re hiding, and what relation they are, and why they live so hard and poor like. It seems dreadful, don’t it?”
“Seems funny, if you ask me,” said Bud shortly, “maybe this Brand feller knows something of all this rustling that’s been going on up and down Nameless.”
Nance laid down her knife and fork and looked at him.
“Of all things, Bud!” she said, “it’s not like you to cast the first stone. And you’ve never seen this man’s face, or you wouldn’t say that.”
“Well, I’m not so sure of it,” returned the boy, “I hate to see you take up so with a stranger.”
“I trust your feelin’ for him, Nance,” said Mrs. Allison, “somehow there’s somethin’ in a woman’s heart when she looks into a man’s eyes, most times, which sets th’ stamp on him for good or bad. Seems like it’s seventh sense which th’ Almighty gives us woman-kind for a safeguard. I trust it.”
“I guess I do, too, Mammy,” said Nance, “leastways I felt to trust Brand Fair the first minute I laid eyes on him. He’s different.”
Mrs. Allison said no more, but she was thinking back over the long years to that camp-meeting time when she had meant to “frail” the stranger, young John Allison, and how his smiling eyes had coaxed her angry heart to peace—a peace which stayed with her always, through hardship and poverty, through many Western moves, and which softened now the sorrow of his absence. John Allison had seemed to her “different” also.
For some subconscious reason Nance stayed away from the cañon for several days. She busied herself with odd jobs about the place. She mended the wire fence around the big flat where the wild hay was waving thick, its green floor flowing with sheets of silver where the light winds swept, and gave the harness a thorough oiling.