"Oh, you're a perfect fool. Go on with your driving." Mercy sat back in her seat fuming, while the teamster sighed, gently smiling down at his horses.
"Mebbe you're right, ma'm," he said amiably. "These dogone hills makes fools o' most fellers, when they git lost proper--as I'd sure say we are now."
But the man had achieved his object. The woman desisted from further questioning. She sat quite still, conscious of the unpleasant fact that the man was laughing at her, and also perfectly aware that his incompetence was responsible for the fact that they were utterly lost amongst the wild hills about them.
She was very angry. Angry with the man, angry with herself, for not being guided by the hotel keeper at Crowsfoot, but more than all she was angry with Joan for bidding her make the journey.
Yet she had been unable to resist the girl's appeal. Her inability was not from any sentimental feeling or sympathy. Such feelings could never touch her. But the appeal of the manner in which her curse still followed the girl, and the details she had read through the lines of her letter, a letter detailing the circumstances of her life on Yellow Creek, and written under the impulse and hope inspired by the Padre's support had given her the keenest interest. All the mystical side of her nature had been stirred in a manner she could not deny, had no desire to deny.
Yes, she had come to investigate, to observe, to seek the truth of her own pronouncement. She had come without scruple, to watch their effect. To weigh them in the balance of her scientific mysticism. She had come to watch the struggles of the young girl in the toils which enveloped her. Her mind was the diseased mind of the fanatic, prompted by a nature in which cruelty held chief place.
But now had come this delay. Such was her nature that personal danger ever appalled her. Death and disaster in the abstract were nothing to her, but their shadows brushing her own person was something more than terrifying. And as she thought of the immensity of the world about her, the gloom, the awful hush, the spirit of the hills got hold of her and left her full of apprehension.
The teamster now devoted his whole attention to his whereabouts. His passenger's interminable questioning silenced, he felt more at his ease. And feeling at his ease he was able to bring his prairie-trained faculties to bear on the matter in hand. As they progressed down the slope he closely observed the tall, distant crown which he thought he recognized, and finally made up his mind that his estimate was right. It certainly was the cone crown of Devil's Hill. Thus his certainty now only left him concerned with the ultimate development of the trail they were on.