It was a clear starlit night when I rode across a tract of the Assiniboian prairie, some two hundred miles east of Crane Valley. A half-moon hung in the cloudless ether, and the endless levels, lying very silent under its pale radiance, seemed to roll away into infinity. They had no boundary, for the blueness above them melted imperceptibly through neutral gradations into the earth below, which, gathering strength of tone, stretched back again to the center of the lower circle a vast sweep of silvery gray.
There was absolute stillness, not even a grass blade moved; but the air was filled with the presage of summer, and the softness of the carpet, which returned no sound beneath the horse's feet, had its significance. That sod had been bleached by wind-packed snow and bound into iron hardness by months of arctic frost. Bird and beast had left it, and the waste had lain empty under the coldness of death; but life had once more conquered, and the earth was green again. Even among the almost unlettered born upon it there are few men impervious to the influence of the prairie on such a night; and in days not long gone by the half-breed voyageurs told strange stories of visions seen on it during the lonely journeys they made for the great fur-trading company. Its vastness and its emptiness impresses the human atom who becomes conscious of an indefinite awe or is uplifted by an exaltation which vanishes with the dawn, for there are times when, through the silence of measureless spaces, man's spirit rises into partial touch with the greater things unseen.
My errand was prosaic enough—merely to buy cattle for Haldane and others on a sliding-scale arrangement. I could see a possibility of some small financial benefit, and that being so had reluctantly left Crane Valley, where I was badly needed, because the need of money was even greater. Also, as time was precious, I had decided to travel all night instead of spending it as a guest of the last farmer with whom I bargained. I was at that time neither very imaginative nor oversentimental; but the spell of the prairie was stronger than my will, and, yielding to it, I rode dreamily, so it seemed, beyond the reach of petty troubles and the clamor of our sordid strife into a shadowy land of peace which, defying the centuries, had retained unchanged its solemn stillness. The stars alone sufficed to call up the fancy, for there being neither visible heavens nor palpable atmosphere, only a blue transparency, the eye could follow the twinkling points of flame far backwards from one to another through the unknown spaces beyond our little globe. Nothing seemed impossible on such a night, and only the touch of the bridle and the faint jingle of metal material.
It was in this mood that I became conscious of a shadow object near the foot of a rise. It did not seem a natural portion of the prairie, and when I had covered some distance it resolved itself into a horse and a dismounted man. His broad hat hung low in his hand, his head was bent, and he stood so intent that I had almost ridden up to him before he turned and noticed me. Then, as I checked my horse, I saw that it was Boone.
"What has brought you here?" I asked.
"That I cannot exactly tell you when we know so little of the influences about us on such a night as this. It is at least one stage of a pilgrimage I must make," he said.
Had this answer been given me in the sunlight I should have doubted the speaker's mental balance, but one sets up a new standard of sanity on the starlit prairie on a night of spring, and I saw only that the spell was also upon him. He held a great bunch of lilies (which do not grow on the bare Western levels) in one hand, and his face was changed. Even in Boone's reckless humor there had been a sardonic vein which sometimes added a sting to the jest, and I knew what the shadow was that accounted for his fits of silent grimness. Now he seemed strangely calm, but rather reverent than sad.
"I cannot understand you," I said.
"No?" he answered quietly. "How soon you have forgotten; but you helped me once. Come, and I will show you."
He tethered his horse to an iron peg, beckoned me to do the same, and then, moving forward until we stood on the highest of the rise, pointed to something that rose darkly from the grass. Then I remembered, and swung my hat to my knee, as my eyes rested on a little wooden cross. Following the hand he stretched out, I could read the rude letters cut on it—"Helen Boone."