Must make her laugh every day."
Poor Joe! Humor was not his forte, and his attempt in this direction
in the weeks that followed would have been humorous were they not so
pathetic. How I did my part I cannot tell. Those weeks are to me now
like the memory of an ugly nightmare. The ghostly old man moving out
and in of his little daughter's room in useless, dumb agony; Ponka's
woe-stricken Indian face; Joe's extraordinary and unusual but loyal
attempts at fun-making grotesquely sad, and The Duke's unvarying and
invincible cheeriness; these furnish light and shade for the picture my
memory brings me of Gwen in those days.
For the first two weeks she was simply heroic. She bore her pain without
a groan, submitted to the imprisonment which was harder than pain with
angelic patience. Joe, The Duke and I carried out our instructions with
careful exactness to the letter. She never doubted, and we never let her
doubt but that in a few weeks she would be on the pinto's back again and
after the cattle. She made us pass our word for this till it seemed as
if she must have read the falsehoods on our brows.
"To lie cheerfully with her eyes upon one's face calls for more than I
possess," said The Duke one day. "The doctor should supply us tonics. It
is an arduous task."
And she believed us absolutely, and made plans for the fall "round-up,"
and for hunts and rides till one's heart grew sick.
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