Page:Max Brand--The Seventh Man.djvu/206

192 end, and her blue eyes were blazing with excitement. Kate was on her knees with her arms held out.

“Joan, dear, have you forgotten munner?”

The wildness flickered away from the eyes of the child little by little.

“Munner?” she repeated dubiously.

No shout of welcome, no sudden rush, no arms to fling about her mother. But if her throat was dry and closed Kate allowed no sign of it to creep into her voice.

“Where's Daddy Dan?”

“He's gone away.”

“Where?”

“Oh—over there!”

The mother rose slowly to her feet, and looked out across the mountains as if in search of aid. For her mind had harked back to that story her father used to tell of the coming of Dan Barry; how he had ridden across the hills one evening and saw, walking against the sunset, a tattered boy who whistled strangely as he went, and when old Joe Cumberland asked where he was going he had only waved a vague hand toward the north and answered, “Oh—over there. It was sufficient destination for him, it was sufficient explanation now for the child. She remembered how she, herself a child then, had sat at her father's table and watched the brown face of the strange boy with fascination, and the wild, quick eyes which went everywhere and rested in no one place. They were the eyes which looked up to her now from Joan's face, and she felt suddenly div-