Marie walked the bank all that day, calling and crying and fighting off
despair. She walked the floor of her little room all night, the
door locked against sympathy that seemed to her nothing but a prying
curiosity over her torment, fighting back the hysterical cries that kept
struggling for outlet.
The next day she was too exhausted to do anything more than climb up the
steps of the train when it stopped there. Towns and ranches on the
river below had been warned by wire and telephone and a dozen officious
citizens of Alpine assured her over and over that she would be notified
at once if anything was discovered; meaning, of course, the body of her
child. She did not talk. Beyond telling the station agent her name, and
that she was going to stay in Sacramento until she heard something, she
shrank behind her silence and would reveal nothing of her errand there
in Alpine, nothing whatever concerning herself. Mrs. Marie Moore,
General Delivery, Sacramento, was all that Alpine learned of her.
It is not surprising then, that the subject was talked out long before
Bud or Cash came down into the town more than two months later. It is
not surprising, either, that no one thought to look up-stream for the
baby, or that they failed to consider any possible fate for him save
drowning. That nibbled piece of cracker on the very edge of the river
threw them all off in their reasoning. They took it for granted that
the baby had fallen into the river at the place where they found the
cracker. If he had done so, he would have been swept away instantly. No
one could look at the river and doubt that--therefore no one did doubt
it. That a squaw should find him sitting down where he had fallen, two
hundred yards above the town and in the edge of the thick timber,
never entered their minds at all. That she should pick him up with
the intention at first of stopping his crying, and should yield to the
temptingness of him just as Bud bad yielded, would have seemed to Alpine
still more unlikely; because no Indian had ever kidnapped a white child
in that neighborhood. So much for the habit of thinking along grooves
established by precedent Marie went to Sacramento merely because that was the closest town of any
size, where she could wait for the news she dreaded to receive yet must
receive before she could even begin to face her tragedy. She did not
want to find Bud now. She shrank from any thought of him. Only for him,
she would still have her Lovin Child. Illogically she blamed Bud for
what had happened. He had caused her one more great heartache, and she
hoped never to see him again or to hear his name spoken.