“They seen her at Wheeler’s, did they?”
“Yes, George saw her himself when she was goin’, an’ when she come back. George, he’s saddled up an’ gone on into Oracle to pass the word. He’ll be out with a bunch of riders at sun-up.”
Thad climbed stiffly into the saddle and for some minutes the two old prospectors sat on their horses without speaking, while over their heads the windtorn clouds swept past as if hurrying to some meeting place beyond the distant hills.
“There ain’t a God almighty thing that we can do ’til th’ mornin’,” said Bob at last.
Slowly and in silence they rode back to the little white house on the mountain side, there to wait with Saint Jimmy and Mother Burton for the coming of the day.
The two old prospectors, who had spent the greater part of their lives amid scenes of hardship and danger and whose years had been years of disappointment and failure in their vain search for treasure of gold, had given themselves without reserve to the child that chance had so strangely placed in their keeping. Lacking the home love and the fatherhood that spurs the millions of toiling men to their tasks, and glorifies the burden of their labors, Bob and Thad had spent themselves in their love for their partnership daughter. But, because these men had been schooled in silence by the deserts and the mountains, they made no outward show of their anxiety and fear. They did not cry out in wild protest and vain regrets and idle conjectures. They did not walk the floor or wring their hands. They sat motionless in stolid silence—waiting.
Mother Burton, in the seclusion of her own room, found relief for her overwrought nerves in quiet tears and carried the burden of her anxious, aching mother-heart to the God of motherhood.
Saint Jimmy paced the floor with slow, measured steps, pausing now and then to look from the window into the night or to stand in the open doorway with his face lifted to the wind-swept sky, listening—listening for a voice in the darkness.
In Marta’s home beside the roaring creek—alone amid the dear intimate things of her daily life—the man who had been made to live again in her love waited—waited for the eternity of the night to lift from the Cañon of Gold.