“Is she ill in Heaven?”
“No, dearie. She is well and happy in Heaven, and so is every one who goes there.”
“When I go to Heaven shall I see my mamma?”
“Yes, dear.”
The child was silent for a few moments and Marguerite turned again to her own thoughts. She scarcely heard him when he spoke again:
“Heaven is up in the sky, ain’t it, Daisy?”
His eyes were caught by the sunset glow on the Hermosa mountains and he did not press her for confirmation of his idea. The swelling flanks and the towers and pinnacles and castellated crags of the rugged Hermosa range were glowing and flaming with the tenderest, deepest pink, as though the living granite had been dyed in the blood of crimson roses. The eastern sky, vivid with seashell tints, hovered so low that the topmost crags seemed to support its glowing colors. It was no wonder that the child’s mind, already awed and made receptive by his thoughts of Heaven, was at once filled with the idea that its gates had been opened before him. He dropped his sister’s finger and went forward a few steps, his eager eyes fixed on the glory that flamed in the east, and his heart beating wildly with the thought that if he ran on a little way he could go in and see his mother. Of course, she would see him coming and she would run out to meet him and take him in her arms, just as Marguerite did when he came home from Janey’s. Filled with the sudden, imperious impulse, he ran down the hill on which they were standing, across the dry, sandy bed of a watercourse, and up the hill on the other side. The miracle of beauty which dazzled him was of almost daily occurrence, but, baby that he was, he had never noticed it before.
Marguerite took Wellesly’s letter from her pocket when Paul dropped her hand, and, turning to get the sunset light on the page, read it over and over. She knew Paul had run on ahead, but thought he was playing in the arroyo. She folded the letter slowly and put it in her pocket again and watched for a few moments the glowing banks of color that filled the western sky. Then she looked down the little hill and along the arroyo, calling, “Come, Paul! We must go home.” But the sturdy little figure was nowhere in sight. At that moment he was crossing the second hill beyond. She ran up and down the arroyo calling, “Paul! Paul!” at the top of her voice. Gathering her white skirts in one hand, she rushed to the top of the hill and called again and again. But there was no reply. As she listened, straining forward, all the earth seemed strangely still. The silence struck back upon her heart suffocatingly. Over the crest of the next hill Paul heard her voice and hid behind a big, close clump of feathery mesquite, fearful lest she should find him and take him home again. Across the arroyo she ran, and up to the hill-top, where she stood and called and looked eagerly about. But he, intent on carrying out his plan of reaching the rosy, glowing gates of Heaven over there such a little way, crouched close behind the spreading bush and made no answer.
“He would not have gone so far,” she thought, anxiously. “He must be back there in one of those arroyos.”
She ran back and hurried farther up and down, first one and then the other gulch, calling the little one’s name and straining her eyes through the dusk that had begun to gather for a glimpse of his flaxen curls and red cap. Paul, meanwhile, was scurrying across the hills as fast as his two fat, determined legs could carry him, straight toward the deepening, darkening glory upon the mountains.