It was hard mining, however, and, being poor, I was still gripping my drill and hammer after the town had grown up.
"A woman came out from the East--Vermont, it was--and school-teaching was her line of business, only she hadn't been raised to it, and this was her first clatter at the game; but things had broke bad for her people, and ended in her pulling stakes and coming West all alone.

Her folks died and left her up against it, I gathered from what little she told me--sort of an old story, I guess, and usual too, only for her.
She was plumb unusual." He seemed to ponder this a moment, and then resumed: "It don't make any difference to you how I first saw her, and how I began to forget that anything else in the world was worth having but her.

I'd lived in the woods all my life, as I said, and knew more about birds and bugs and bees than I did about women; I hadn't been broke proper, and didn't know how to act with them; but I laid out to get this girl, and I did fairly well.

There's something wild in every woman that needs to be tamed, and it isn't like the wildness that runs in wood critters; you can win that over by gentleness, but you have to take it away from a woman.

Every live thing that couldn't talk was my friend; but I made the mistake of courting my own kind the same way, not knowing that when two of any species mate the male must rule.