CHAPTER XXVII INTO THE GOLDEN SUNSET
It was a fair, sweet evening, and the room where Jessica sat beside David Stires' bed, reading aloud to him, was flooded with the failing sunlight. The height was still in brightness, but the gulches below were wine-red and on their rims the spruces stood shadow-straight against the golden ivory of the southern sky. Since the old man's seizure in the night he had been much worse and she had scarcely left his room. To-day, however, he had sat propped by pillows, able to read and chat, and the deep personal anxiety that had numbed her had yielded. She was reading now from a life of that poetess whose grave has made a lonely Colorado mountain a place of pilgrimage. She read in a low voice, holding the page to the dimming light:
"The spot she chose was a bare knoll, facing out across the curved chasm, the wide empty gulf on three sides, a plot hounded by a knot of noble trees that whispered softly together. Here above the sky was beautifully blue, the searching fall wind that numbed the fingers in the draw of the gorge was gone, and the warm sunshine was mellow and pleasant. It was a spot to dream in, leaning upon the great facts of God that He teaches best to those who love His Nature. A spot in which to be laid at last for the long sleep, when mortal dreams are over and work is done."
"That is beautiful," he said. "I should choose a spot like that." He pointed down the long slope, where a red beam of the sun touched the gray face of the Knob and turned it to a spot of crimson-lake. "That must be such a place."
Her cheeks flushed. She knew what he was thinking. He would not wish to lie in the far-away cemetery that looked down on the white house in the aspens, the theater of his son's downfall! The Knob, she thought with a thrill, overlooked the place of Hugh's regeneration.
A knock came at the door. It was a nurse with letters for him from the mail, and while he opened them Jessica laid aside the book and went slowly down the hall to the sun-parlor, where the doctor stood with the group gathered after the early supper, chatting of the newest "strike" on the mountain.
"We'll be famous if we keep on," he was saying, as she looked out of the wide windows across the haze where the sunlight drifted down in dust of gold. "I've a mind to stake out a claim myself."
"We pay you better," said one of the occupants grimly. "Anyway, the whole of Smoky Mountain was staked in the excitement a year ago. There's no doubt about this find, I suppose?"
"It's on exhibition at the bank," the doctor replied. "More than five thousand dollars, cached in a crevice in the glacial age, as neat as a Christmas stocking!"
"Wish it was my stocking," grunted the other. "It would help pay my bill here."