“Pooh, you men have such a limited comprehension,” the Sister complained, though her eyes still snapped delightfully.

We burst into a debate and sustained it through most of the afternoon, as I followed the energetic Sister about the mission. She didn’t skimp on her chores, but bookish people, encountering one another in a wilderness, will have their talk of books; after we’d finished disagreeing about Wedded but Not Won, we worked through Scott and Thackeray and Mrs. Humphry Ward; then we got onto the poets Mrs. Hemans and Byron. Sister Blandina even recited her favorite parts of Lalla Rookh.

Billy Bone was surprised, then bored, then disgusted.

“Why, I’ve never heard such a fit of talking—you’ve both got book hydrophobia!” he said. He went outside and spent most of the afternoon throwing his knife at a horned toad, and was petulant and surly all the next day. By then we had left the mission and were back out on the plain.

I even felt a little guilty—I suppose, in hogging the Sister’s conversation, I had deprived the boy of his one source of motherly affection. He was plainly jealous, and whenever the Sister’s name came up spoke bitterly about our book hydrophobia.

But the little nag of guilt didn’t cancel my astonishment that the nun of La Glorieta, after a busy day of butchering, plastering, cooking, praying, and teaching the heathen, would take a candle to her cell at night and fix her interest on such a thing as Wedded but Not Won—a tale of domestic strife among the privileged of Philadelphia.

I suppose we all—even nuns—dream of a life other than than the one we actually live on this indifferent earth.

Often in the hectic months that followed, when it seemed as if the whole Territory was chasing Billy, I thought of the small nun with the lively black eyes—wondering how near a thing her call to service had been. With her quick step and welcoming spirit, I have no doubt she could have had her due as regularly as Dora, had she chosen the domestic path.

I suppose I was half in love with her, inappropriate as that may seem. No doubt, had things stood differently, I would have failed in comprehension and brought woe to us both; but those eyes were so rewarding, and foolish dreams are much the sweetest.

The next time I saw her was the day she and Tully Roebuck walked Billy through the mob in Lincoln—it was lucky for Billy that Sister Blandina was in town that day, for he had shot down two citizens, and without her at their side neither he nor Tully would have made it to the middle of the street, much less to the safety of the jail.

15.