She shook her reins to go, with a last look at his phantom farmlands. “‘An’ I ’a stubb’d Thurnaby waäste.’ That’s what they’ll put on Hobby’s tombstone.”
She lifted up her eyes from the waste places and the seeming, and let them rest on the glowing mesas beyond the river and the long dim ridges of misty mountain beyond and over all; and saw them in the light that never was on sea or land. The heart of the good warm boisterous earth called to kindred clay, “and turned her sweet blood into wine.”
Shy happiness tinged her pale cheek with color, a tint of wild rose and sea-shell delicacy, faint and all unnoted; he was half inattentive to her as she rode beside him, glowing in her splendid spring, a noble temple of life, a sanctuary ready for clean sacrifice.
“Yes. Hobby, he’s all right. Him and his likes, they put up the brains and take the risks and do the work. But after it’s all done some of these austere men we read about, they’ll ooze in and gather the crops.”
“He doesn’t miss much worth having. What may be weighed and counted and stolen and piled in heaps—oh, yes, Hobby Lull may miss that. Not real things, like laughter and joy and—and love, Charlie.”
Charlie See turned his head toward Redgate. She read his thought; in her face the glow of life faded behind the white skin. But he did not see it; nor the thread of pain in her eyes. In his thought she was linked with Adam Forbes, and at her word he smiled to think of his friend, and looked up to Redgate where, even then, “Nicanor lay dead in his harness.”
Pete Harkey’s buckboard stood by the platform in front of the little store, and the young people waited there for him and his marketing.
“Mail day?” asked Charlie.
“Nope. To-morrow is the big day.”