“Oh, Jim,” she said playfully, “you are getting muscles like steel. You hadn’t these when you were colonel of the Kentucky Carbineers!”
“I guess I need them now,” he said, smiling, and with the child still in his arms drew her to a window looking northward. As far as the eye could see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land. Here and there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman riding towards the postriding hard.
“It was root, hog, or die with me, Sally,” he continued, “and I rooted ... I wonder—that fellow on the horse—I have a feeling about him. See, he’s been riding hard and long-you can tell by the way the horse drops his legs. He sags a bit himself.... But isn’t it beautiful, all that out there—the real quintessence of life.”
The air was full of delicate particles of frost on which the sun sparkled, and though there was neither bird nor insect, nor animal, nor stir of leaf, nor swaying branch or waving grass, life palpitated in the air, energy sang its song in the footstep that crunched the frosty ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air trembled. Sally had chosen right.
“You had a big thought when you brought me here, guinea-girl,” he added presently. “We are going to win out here”—he set the child down—“you and I and this lucky sixpence.” He took up his short fur coat. “Yes, we’ll win, honey.” Then, with a brooding look in his face, he added:
“‘The end comes as came the beginning,
And shadows fail into the past;
And the goal, is it not worth the winning,
If it brings us but home at the last?
“‘While far through the pain of waste places
We tread, ‘tis a blossoming rod
That drives us to grace from disgraces,
From the fens to the gardens of God!’”
He paused reflectively. “It’s strange that this life up here makes you feel that you must live a bigger life still, that this is only the wide porch to the great labour-house—it makes you want to do things. Well, we’ve got to win the stake first,” he added with a laugh.
“The stake is a big one, Jim—bigger than you think.”
“You and her and me—me that was in the gutter.”
“What is the gutter, dadsie?” asked Nancy.