At this moment there came a knocking at the outer door, and the master of the house hastened out to see who it was demanding admittance, and was followed by his son.
"He's all right," said Stephens cheerfully to the girl, as he looked into her anxious eyes. "He's safe enough as long as he stays inside here. They'll none bother him while he's protected by these walls. And I've good hopes that we may be able to bring them to a reasonable settlement, so that he can go about again in perfect safety. Don't you fret yourself over it. We'll make these Navajos sing a proper tune before we've done with them." He spoke with the easy confidence of a man accustomed to deal with serious affairs, and conscious of possessing the ability and the experience for handling them successfully. But he was equally astonished and embarrassed when Manuelita, instead of appearing calmed by his reassuring words, flung her hands over her face and burst into a passion of sobs.
At the girl's outburst Stephens was completely taken aback. Tears, a woman's tears, were a novelty to him, and he felt the quick leap of his heart in response. But it was ten years since he had heard a woman sob, and his practical sympathy, or at least the power of expressing it, had become blunted. He did not know what to say; half a dozen phrases struggled to be born in his throat; he wanted to explain at once to the pretty creature that it was all right; to tell her that there was nothing to cry about; to say there was no use in getting into a fuss over it; that after all a man had to take his chances; and that anyhow the milk wasn't spilt yet; that it would be time enough to begin to cry when something really happened. But he felt the brutal stupidity of such remarks, and they remained unspoken, while there arose in him at the same instant the urgent desire to do something; to take her by the hand like a frightened child; to smooth her ruffled hair and staunch her tears; to console her, and, by some means or other, stay the sobs that shook the slender body. But he had no right to do any such thing, and he hesitated to intrude himself on her grief, which, moreover, appeared to him, like a child's, a trifle exaggerated. To him who had lived so many years on the frontier, a violent death had come to seem almost the natural end. Few pioneers expected to die in their beds. Along the trails and around the mining-camps were many mounds, each one of which marked a six-by-two claim that was the last that the holder would ever occupy, one that he needed no ever-ready Winchester to defend. Nameless graves they were for the most part, or if there slanted at the head some rude board with a name and date roughly scribbled to say who lay beneath, the brief legend that gave all that would ever be known of how he came there repeated with monotonous regularity the tale of misadventure or of wrong. "Shot, stabbed, stripped and mangled by Thugs," "Killed by Indians," "Murdered by road-agents," "Lynched by Vigilantes," "Blown up by dynamite", "Crushed by a fall of rock," "Died of starvation," "Died of thirst," "Died of cold,"--these and such as they were the forms of death with which his Odyssey of toils had made him familiar. Small wonder, then, if he who had lived so long face to face with the possibility of such an end, taking the chances of it freely himself, and seeing them taken as freely by others, now felt as if the young man Don Andrés was a trifle overpitied. He was sorry for him himself, he was trying to help him all he knew, and he was ready to turn out and fight for him at any minute, but he could not see why anybody should want to cry about it. And yet here was this startlingly agitating, insistent noise of a girl sobbing beside him that gripped his heart with an emotion he hardly knew the meaning of.