Cabin Fever

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.