For a long time she sat thus, lost in reverie, while the eternal silence around her was broken only by the low cadence of the whispering pines.
Suddenly there came into her inner consciousness a call, unspoken yet heard, “Jean!”
She closed her eyes and saw, as plainly as with physical vision, Ashton Ashleigh’s border home; and he was gazing hard at Le-Le, who was kneeling at his feet in beseeching attitude.
“Jean!”
Gradually, as the demon Doubt aroused her senses, a wild, unreasoning jealousy crept into her heart. She turned her face to the eastward and sent out to him an answering call, “Ashleigh!”
She listened eagerly; but no response was felt or heard, and no mental vision reappeared. With her heart like lead, she returned to the wagon and crept into bed.
When she awoke the sun was shining, and she could not recall the vision that had distressed her. Had her soul visited the abode of her heart’s idol? Who knows? and who can tell?
On and on the teams kept crawling, until on the 6th of September the summit of the Blue Mountains was passed, and the wearied travellers gazed for the first time upon the Cascade Mountains, lying to the westward in the purple distance; and in their midst arose, supported by a continuous chain of undulating, tree-crowned, lesser heights, the majestic proportions of Mount Hood, the patriarch of the solitudes, his hoary head uplifted in the shimmering air, and at his feet a drapery of mist.
The Umatilla River left the gorges through which it had fought its way, and glided peacefully through a sagebrush plain toward the great Columbia. But no settlements were yet to be seen. No navigation had yet been started on the broad bosom of the upper Columbia. The rock-ribbed Dalles frowned far below in the misty distance; and no dream of a fleet of palatial river craft, with portage railways around otherwise impassable gorges, had yet taken practical shape. The Cascade locks had not entered the liveliest imagination, and a transcontinental railroad was considered an engineering impossibility, existing only in the mind of an impractical theorist or incurable crank.
A vast and practically level plain or upland lay between the Blue and the Cascade mountains. The Whitman settlement had already made the existence of the infant city of Walla Walla possible. Wallula and Umatilla were not, and the site of Pendleton was an unbroken plain.