“We're not. Thrue for you.”
“If you feel like having a wake over the Mormons, why don't you get more torches and make a procession down the Galilee road? You've done about all you can on Mount Pisgah.”
As they began to trail away at this suggestion and to hail him with parting shouts, Ludlow shut the window and laughed in the dark room.
“I'd like to start them chasing the fox around all the five lakes on Beaver. But they may change their minds before they reach the sand-hills. We'd better load the boat right off, Jim.”
In the hurrying Rosanne came down-stairs and found Elizabeth waiting at the foot. They could see each other only by starlight. They were alone, for the others had gone out to the boat.
“Are you willing for me to go, Rosanne?” spoke Elizabeth. Her sweet voice was of a low pitch, unhurried and steady. “James says he'll build me a little house in your yard.”
“Oh, Elizabeth!”
Rosanne did not cry, “I cannot hate you!” but she threw herself into the arms of the larger, more patient woman whom she saw no longer as a rival, and who would cherish her children. Elizabeth kissed her husband's wife as a little sister.
The lights on Beaver, sinking to duller redness, shone behind Elizabeth like the fires of the stake as she and Cecilia walked after the others to the boat. Cecilia wondered if her spirit rose against the indignities of her position as an undesired wife, whose legal rights were not even recognized by the society into which she would be forced. The world was not open to her as to a man. In that day it would have stoned her if she ventured too far from some protected fireside. Fierce envy of squaws who could tramp winter snows and were not despised for their brief marriages may have flashed through Elizabeth like the little self-protecting blaze a man lighted around his own cabin when the prairie was on fire. Why in all the swarming centuries of human experience had the lot of a creature with such genius for loving been cast where she was utterly thrown away?
Solitary and carrying her passion a hidden coal she walked in the footsteps of martyrs behind the pair of reunited lovers.