the blooded rich, came to add new colors to Eugene’s horizon: when they returned Gant was able again to walk, the rheumatism had been boiled from his limbs, but his right hand, gnarled and stiff, was permanently crippled. He was never again able to close it, and there was something strangely chastened in his manner, a gleam of awe and terror in his eyes.
But the union between Gant and his daughter was finally consummated. Before Gant lay, half-presaged, a road of pain and terror which led on to death, but as his great strength dwindled, palsied, broke along that road, she went with him inch by inch, welding beyond life, beyond death, beyond memory, the bond that linked them.
“I’d have died if it hadn’t been for that girl,” he said over and over. “She saved my life. I couldn’t get along without her.” And he boasted again and again of her devotion and loyalty, of the expenses of his journey, of the hotels, the wealth, the life they both had seen.
And, as the legend of Helen’s goodness and devotion grew, and his dependence upon her got further advertisement, Eliza pursed her lips more and more thoughtfully, wept sometimes into the spitting grease of a pan, smiled, beneath her wide red nose, a smile tremulous, bitter, terribly hurt.
“I’ll show them,” she wept. “I’ll show them.” And she rubbed thoughtfully at a red itching patch that had appeared during the year upon the back of her left hand.
She went to Hot Springs in the winter that followed. They stopped at Memphis for a day or two: Steve was at work there in a paint store; he slipped quickly in and out of saloons, as he took Eugene about the city, leaving the boy outside for a moment while he went “in here to see a fellow”—a “fellow” who always sent him forth, Eugene thought, with an added impetuosity to his swagger.
Dizzily they crossed the river: at night he saw the small bleared shacks of Arkansas set in malarial fields.
Eliza sent him to one of the public schools of Hot Springs: he plunged heavily into the bewildering new world—performed brilliantly, and won the affection of the young woman who taught him, but paid the penalty of the stranger to all the hostile
