They watched her leap down from the buckboard and mount the saddle, a little awkward at first whether to put the right knee fore or aft, from her Eastern training to a side saddle; and side saddles in the range country are rare as low neck gowns and tuxedo coats; but once she had caught the far stirrup, riding was riding. She had the pace, and the two figures loped off up the burn for the hill known as the Brulé, Wayland turning and waving his hat.
"Now the Lord have mercy on your soul, Williams. This ride will settle it; an' A'm not darin' t' hope which way it goes! A 'm not keen to go back empty-handed with yon little old lady payin' m' expenses heavy an' generous; but yet—but yet—"
"Yet what?" asked Mrs. Williams, leaning forward between the two men.
"Th' great joy comes only once; an' when it cam' t' me, A put a handspike thro' it, an' kept it."
He had come to her that morning with a look on his face that she had not dreamed a human face could wear. She wondered if all men crucified for right won such joy. And he did not tread earth. He trod air. Eleanor could not trust her eyes to meet his. She felt their light burning to the centre of her soul. What was it? Was it renunciation? The thought turned her faint. Her determination to break his resolution seemed the cheap obtrusion of egotism on the great mission of a devoted life. Then, going up the hog's back trail along the rim of the Ridge, they were facing the Holy Cross Mountain. The glint of the morning sun on the far snows shone like diamonds, a tiared jeweled thing poised in mid-heaven like a crown held by invisible hands; the base of the lower mountain outlines melting and losing edge in the purple shadows; the crown only, shining diademed, winged with opal light.
"Look Dick," she said pointing with her riding crop, "do you remember the night on the Ridge? Do you remember about the snow flakes massing to the avalanche? It has—hasn't it? The Nation has wakened up."
Wayland looked ahead. He couldn't answer. 'Remember the night on the Ridge?' He had a lump in his throat and an ache at his heart from never letting himself remember it. By that strange perversity, which we all know in ourselves, he couldn't talk. The hundred and one things he had wanted to ask, died on his lips in a dumbness of gladness. Of course, you, dear reader, on the return of a husband or wife (prospective or present), on the sudden appearance of friend or kith have never been similarly affected. You didn't forget the questions you had meant to ask till thousands of miles again separated you.
It was good to leave the Valley road and go into seclusion and shelter on the Forest trail; for a hurricane September wind was blowing, the kind of Western wind that the Eastern woman with a big hat thinks is possessed by ten thousand devils; the kind of wind that the Eastern office man with sensitive eyes curses with tears that are not grief; the kind of wind that makes the Westerner put screw nails in his hat and look out for the fire guard round wheat, stock and timber.
Such a different home-going he had planned from this visitation of dumb devils that obsessed them both! He used to dream at night in the Desert of the day, perhaps, coming when they should set out together adventuring a life joy in the Forests; his Forests; when he would show her the golden cottonwoods and the pale birches nursing the pineries to strong maturity; and the fire blisters on the firs; and the sugar blisters on the sugar pines; and the rain of green-gray tempered light from the under side of the funereal hemlocks; and the park like glades of the wonderfully straight and serried soldier ranks of the engleman spruce and the lodge-pole pines; and the larches yellow as gold dust to the touch of the alchemist autumn. He wanted to bring out his violin some day with her and see if they could catch the exact tone and pitch of the pines, when they began harping those age-old melodies of Pan: they were harping them to-day in the high wind; he was sure it was the same as the bass undertone of a big orchestra. Had she ever noticed the way the seeds came fluffing out of the cinnamon cones and the asters and the golden rod and the fire flower in September, for all the world like fairies sailing pixie parachutes? People said that autumn was sad, it presaged death! Did it? A Forester did not see it so; he saw the triumphal procession of the years lighted to its consummation by the flaming torches of ten thousand golden twinkling gay, recklessly gay flowers and trees—the cottonwood and the poplar and the larch, the cone flower and the golden rod and the aster! But to-day, he could not say a word. They were no longer his Forests. He had been cast out from his life work—the continuity of a National Life Work broken—because he had dared to interfere with the petty plans of peanut politicians and public plunderers.
"It is level here! Let us gallop out of this bare burn to the shelter of the evergreens," she said. "I don't mind wind, but I'd just as soon get under cover where it couldn't lash us so."