and God looking in a little book to see if he got all the words right.”
“Anyway, I’m glad you weren’t baptised, after what Father said to-day.”
“You’ll be gladder still when you get out there where they got a full-grown man’s God.”
They talked on of many things, chiefly of the wonder of their love—that each should actually be each and the two have come together—until a full yellow moon came up, seemingly from the farther side of the hill in front of them. When at last its light flooded the road so that it lay off to the north like a broad, gray ribbon flung over the black land, they set out again, galloping side by side mile after mile, scanning sharply the road ahead and its near sides.
Down out of Pine Valley they went, and over more miles of gray alkali desert toward a line of hills low and black in the north.
They came to these, followed the road out of the desert through a narrow gap, and passed into the Mountain Meadows, reining in their horses as they did so.
Before them the Meadows stretched between two ranges of low, rocky hills, narrow at first but widening gradually from the gap through which they had come. But the ground where the long, rich grass had once grown was now barren, gray and ugly in the moonlight, cut into deep gullies and naked of all but a scant growth of sage-brush which the moon was silvering, and a few clumps of shadowy scrub-oak along the base of the hills on either side.
Instinctively they stopped, speaking in low tones. And then there came to them out of the night’s silence a strange, weird beating; hollow, muffled, slow, and rhythmic, but penetrating and curiously exciting, like another pulse cunningly playing upon their own to make them beat more rapidly. The girl pulled her horse close in by his, but he reassured her.
“It’s Indians—they must be holding the funeral of some chief. But no matter—these Indians aren’t any more account than prairie-dogs.”
They rode on slowly, the funeral-drum sounding nearer as they went.