“Nothing. It’s not my concern. Now if Daniel will mind his affairs I’ll continue to mind mine.”
“Wall, Zion’s a long way off yet,” quoth friend Jenks. “I don’t look to see you or she get there—nor Dan’l either.”
He being stubborn, I let him have the last word; did not seek to develop his views. But his contentious harping shadowed like an omen.
CHAPTER XVI
I DO THE DEED
We had camped well beyond a last bunch of the red-shirted graders, so that the thread of a trail wended before, lonely, sand-obscured, leading apparently nowhere, through this desert devoid of human life. Line stakes of the surveyors denoted the grade; but the surveyors’ work was done, here. Rush orders from headquarters had sent them all westward still, to set their final stakes across other deserts and across the mountains, clear to Ogden at the north end of the Salt Lake itself.
Seemingly we had cut loose and were more than ever a world to ourselves. The country had grown sterile beneath ordinary, if possible; and our thoughts and talk would have been sterile also were it not for that one recurrent topic which kept them quick. In these journeyings men seize upon little things and magnify them; discuss and rediscuss a phase until launched maybe as an empty joke it returns freighted with tragedy.
However, now that once My Lady had eliminated herself from my field I did not see but that Daniel and I might taper off into at least an armed neutrality. If he continued to nag me, it would be wholly of his own free will. He had no grievance. 241