“Pilgrim’s Progress,” Gale murmured. “Perhaps we are pilgrims on some great quest.” She spoke more wisely than she knew, but this quest was to have a strange ending.
Gale was one of those persons whose mind is driven to thoughts of wild determination as she walked rapidly or climbed some steep hill. The steeper the path became, the deeper the shadows, the more fiercely her mind worked on the problem that she knew lay very close at hand. Would she, or would she not go forward with the colonel and his men as they retraced the steps he had taken in retreat?
“I’ll beard him in his den,” she whispered fiercely. “I’ll say to him, ‘Colonel, all my people have been fighters,—five generations that we know about. Dad was in the World War; Grandfather in the Spanish-American War, and my great grandfather in the Civil War. I have no brothers so my father sent me. You just must let me go with you on your march back to victory!’”
She closed her eyes for a moment and fell over a stone, nearly cracking a kneecap. She had been seeing Sheridan on his black charger shouting to his men, “Turn boys! We’re going back!”
“Turn boys! We’re going back!” she exclaimed as she picked herself up.
“Why?” Isabelle stared. “Why should we turn back? Look. There’s light at the end of the trail. I’m dying to see what’s up there.”
“Light at the end of the trail,” murmured Gale. “Oh! Oh! Yes—by all means, let’s go on. I—I must have been dreaming.”
“I’ll say you were!” Isabelle exclaimed.
Hurrying forward they at last burst out into a little world all aglow with golden sunset. Just before them were beds of flowers—such flowers as they had never before dreamed of—flowers and tall graceful palm trees. Back of all this was a temple. It was not large, but set as it was, a mass of red stone in the midst of a gorgeous garden of flowers, and contrasting so strangely with the shadows that lay behind them, it set the two girls back on their heels.
“Isabelle!” Gale murmured softly. “Did you ever see anything more wonderful?”