"Thou shalt not commit adultery.
"Thou shalt not steal."
And to each command Susan's was the only voice that answered, falling sweet and delicately clear on the silence:
"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."
Susan praying for power to resist such scarlet sins! It was fantastic and David wished he dared join his voice to hers and not let her kneel there alone as if hers was the only soul that needed strengthening. Susan, the young, the innocent-eyed, the pure.
He had come again the next Sunday—Leff went hunting that morning—and felt that some day, not so far distant, he would dare to kneel too and respond. He thought of it when alone, another port that his dreams were taking him to—his voice and Susan's, the bass and the treble, strength and sweetness, symbol of the male and the female, united in one harmonious strain that would stream upward to the throne of the God who, watching over them, neither slumbered nor slept.
It was on the afternoon of this Sunday, that David started out to walk to an Indian village, of which a passing emigrant had told him, lying in a hollow a mile to the westward. He left the camp sunk in the somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the shade of the cotton-woods, and Daddy John lying on the grass among the whiteness of the week's wash. The hour was hot and breathless, the middle distance quivering through a heat haze, and the remoter reaches of the prairie an opalescent blur.
The Indian village was deserted and he wandered through its scattered lodges of saplings wattled with the peeled bark of willows. The Indians had not long departed. The ash of their fires was still warm, tufts of buffalo hair and bright scraps of calico were caught on the bushes, yet it already had an air of desolation, the bleakness of the human habitation when the dweller has crossed the threshold and gone.
Shadows were filling the hollow like a thin cold wine rising on the edges of a cup, when he left it and gained the upper levels. Doubtful of his course he stood for a moment looking about, conscious of a curious change in the prospect, a deepening of its colors, a stillness no longer dreamy, but heavy with suspense. The sky was sapphire clear, but on the western horizon a rampart of cloud edged up, gray and ominous, against the blue. As he looked it mounted, unrolled and expanded, swelling into forms of monstrous aggression. A faint air, fresh and damp, passed across the grass, and the clouds swept, like smoke from a world on fire, over the sun.
With the sudden darkening, dread fell on the face of the land. It came first in a hush, like a holding of the breath, attentive, listening, expectant. Then this broke and a quiver, the goose-flesh thrill of fear, stirred across the long ridges. The small, close growing leafage cowered, a frightened trembling seized the trees. David saw the sweep of the landscape growing black under the blackness above. He began to run, the sky sinking lower like a lid shutting down on the earth. He thought that it was hard to get it on right, for in front of him a line of blue still shone over which the lid had not yet been pressed down. The ground was pale with the whitened terror of upturned leaves, the high branches of the cotton-woods whipping back and forth in wild agitation. He felt the first large drops, far apart, falling with a reluctant splash, and he ran, a tiny figure in the tragic and tremendous scene.