And all the way, he had been trying to understand. She was very gentle with him—sometimes he felt as if she were almost pitying. Always she seemed the elder. How was it possible, he wondered, that she could be to him like this?
For in these days he had come to understand her, with a man’s curiously clear understanding of a “good” woman. He knew the crystal candor of her, the wholesomeness, the humanness, and, for all her merriment and her charm and her comradeship, the exquisite aloofness of her, a quality as strange in Jem Moor’s daughter as it was unusual in any womanhood of Inch. But, these things being so, how was it possible that she could tolerate him? She could not have forgiven him—that was unthinkable, and, he dimly felt, undesirable. How then could she be to him so gentle, so genuinely human?
Of exactly what had occurred that night on Whiteface, he could not be sure. He wearied himself, trying to remember what he had said, what he had done. Of one thing he was certain: he had not laid his hands on her. That he should have remembered, and that, he knew, she would not have let pass by as she was letting memory of that night pass. Yet it was the same thing, for he had tried. What, then, exactly, was she thinking?
These things he did not cease to turn in his mind. And bit by bit it seemed to him that he understood: for at first, on the mountain, she had needed him. Without him she could not have followed that imperceptible trail. Then, here on the train, she was deeply his debtor, as he had forced her to be. Whatever, in her heart, she was thinking of him, she could not now reveal to him. Indeed how was it possible that she did not despise him? So, as she had sat beside him on the Overland, he had been torturing himself.
Yet never once did her gentleness to him fail. There was, in her manner now, as she spoke to him, something of this incomparable care:
“Will you do something?” she said, looking away from him.
“If it’s for you, I reckon you can reckon on it,” he said.
“I donno who it’s for,” she told him. “But will you be just as nice to my uncle as you are to me?”
“Be kind of polite to him,” she said. “Don’t pull your revolver on him,” she explained.
“I hardly ever pull my revolver,” he defended himself indignantly.