Although she had been up half the night, she was as
sweet and fresh and rosy as a child. Her vitality, her strength,
her indomitable energy, impressed him as no woman's had ever done
before.
When she had finished her story she suddenly caught Patsy out of
her father's arms and dropped with him into a chair, all the
mother-hunger in her still unsatisfied. She smothered him with
kisses and hugged him to her breast, holding his pinched face
against her ruddy cheek. Then she smoothed his forehead with her
well-shaped hand, and rocked him back and forth. By and by she
told him of the stone that the Big Gray had got in his hoof down
at the fort that morning, and how lame he had been, and how Cully
had taken it out with--a--great--big--spike!--dwelling on the last
words as if they belonged to some wonderful fairy-tale. The
little fellow sat up in her lap and laughed as he patted her
breast joyously with his thin hand. "Cully could do it," he
shouted in high glee; "Cully can do anything." Babcock,
apparently, made no more difference to her than if he had been an
extra chair.
As she moved about her rooms afterward, calling to her men from
the open door, consulting with Jennie, her arms about her neck, or
stopping at intervals to croon over her child, she seemed to him
to lose all identity with the woman on the dock.
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