Nakoa's Woman Read Free Page A

and behind them, but now there was not the safety of their wagons stretching from horizon to horizon.
    Roll on, oh great wheels; nothing can stop the path you are making to the shining sea! The prairie wind is strong and behind us now are the still hands and the molding furniture; ahead lies the future. Time is pressing! Why wait for the other wagons? Why wait?
    Anson Frederich returned Maria Frame to her wagon. He spoke briefly to her father and Ana and left her with them.
    “I don’t like you out with Anson at night,” Maria’s father said crossly.
    “When else can I see him?” Maria retorted. “The only time the train isn’t moving is when the sun goes down.”
    “Why do you stay out with him so late?”
    “We have a lot to say,” Maria said sarcastically.
    Ana gave her a disapproving look and then retired to their wagon.
    “Ana thinks I am naughty again,” Maria said wearily.
    “No. She thinks you are deviling Anson Frederich, and so do I,” her father replied.
    “What on earth is that?”
    “You know damned well what it is!” Her father lit his pipe and studied her through its smoke. “It is all promising and no giving!”
    “Father, what would you know about that?” Maria asked, suddenly bitter.
    Her father looked at her shrewdly. “I mean you are making him want you and you have no intention of marrying him.”
    Maria felt a rage building against him, a rage that she hadn’t felt even when she had seen him in Meg’s room. “I didn’t know you cared so much for marriage,” she whispered.
    “I just don’t want you alone with Anson—so late at night,” he answered.
    “Why not, Father?” she lashed out. “Are you afraid I would do for him what your little Meg was doing for you the afternoon my mother was dying?”
    Her father recoiled. “Maria!” he breathed, as if the wind had been knocked from his body.
    “That is my name!” Maria panted. “That was also her name—do you remember? That was my mother’s name too!”
    “Maria, Maria!” he repeated brokenly.
    “She called you too, when she was dying. I am sorry you were so busy!”
    He lashed out and slapped her across the face, sending her reeling away from the fire. “Daughter” he choked, “do not judge me! Never—never—can you judge me! I am my own executioner! Do you hear? Do you hear?”
    Maria got to her feet and walked toward the wagon where Ana apparently slept. “I will never hear you again,” she said grimly.
    “You do not know anything!” he said. “You do not know any thing!”
    “I know what I saw! I know what made me so sick that I had to go to mother’s orchard to throw up!”
    “Mother’s orchard?”
    “Her orchard! It was her touch that brought the fruit to your marriage! Not yours! You would bring blight—blight!”
    “You do not understand,” Edward Frame said, close to weeping. “You will never understand.”
    “She wasn’t even dead—she wasn’t even dead!” Maria began to sob. “With everything that was left—she called for you! She wanted you so! She wasn’t even—dead!”
    “That is why,” her father said, turning to her with tears touching his face. “When she was gone, Meg became like cardboard to me. To me—then—Meg was your mother—I can’t speak my feeling, I don’t know why I did what I did—but it was not because I didn’t love your mother!”
    Maria shuddered and hid her face in her hands. When she looked up, her father was walking away from her, his form bent against the light of the fires. Pity and revulsion for him combined with her overwhelming love drove her to the ground. She clawed the roots of the prairie grass with her fingernails, crying desperately.
    From somewhere in the camp came the sound of a fiddle, and as she lay upon the earth and wept, hands clapped to a dancing tune, and the fiddle played gaily on and on.
    When Edward Frame walked away from his daughter, he knew spring would never come to him again. He wondered if he had ever known spring