They peopled my dreams, with their loud voices, their drunkenness, their oaths, their obscenities, their lures, their tricks, their awful counterfeit of love; and, a figure apart from them in these dreams, partaking of their nature only so far as I desired to have it so, walked Virginia Royall, who had come to me across the prairie to escape a life with Buckner Gowdy.

But to the meaning of this fact I shut the eye of my mind.

I was I, and Gowdy was Gowdy.

It was no time for thought.

Every moment I pressed closer and closer to that action which I was sure would have been taken by Eben Sproule, or Bill the Sailor--the only real friends I had ever possessed.
We used to go fishing along the creek; and ate many a savory mess of bullheads, sunfish and shiners, which I prepared and cooked.