Through the window, at the back of the store, she saw the old man standing with his back to her. She thought of going in and asking to sit down—she wanted to sit down—but perhaps he would say something cross to her—he was such a queer looking old man—and she knew she would cry if anything cross was said to her. That he had watched for her each night, that he had tried and tried to think of a way of finding her, that he would have been more glad to see her than to see anyone in the world, would have been kinder to her than anyone on earth would have been—those were the things she did not know. And so—more lonely than she had ever been before—she turned away.
On Monday she felt she could wait no longer. It did not seem that it would be safe. She got ready to go to see Mr. Osborne, but the getting ready tired her so that she sat a long time resting, looking out at the high brick wall beyond which there was nothing at all. She was counting the blocks, thinking of how many times she would have to cross the street. But just then it occurred to her that she could telephone.
When she came back upstairs she crept up on the bed and lay there very still. The boy had said that Mr. Osborne was away and would be gone two weeks. No one in the office had heard him say anything about her transportation.
All through the day she lay there, and what she saw before her was a narrow alley and a high brick wall. She had lost her mountains and her forests and her rivers and her lakes. She tried to go out to them in the same old way—but she could not get beyond the high brick wall. She was shut in. She tried to draw them to her, but they could not come across the wall. It shut them out. She tried to pray to the great mountain which one could see from Portland. But even prayers could get no farther than the wall.
Late that afternoon, because she was so shut in that she was choking, because she was consumed with the idea that she must claim her country now or lose it forever, she got up and started for the picture. It was a long, long way to go, and dreadful things were in between—people who would bump against her, hot, uneven streets, horses that might run over her—but she must make the journey. She must make it because the things that she lived on were slipping from her—and she was choking—sinking down—and all alone.
Step by step, never knowing just how her foot was going to make the next step, sick with the fear that people were going to run into her—the streets going up and down, the buildings round and round, she did go; holding to the window casings for the last few steps—each step a terrible chasm which she was never sure she was going to be able to cross—she was there at last. And in the window as she stood there, swayingly, was a dark, blurred thing which might have been anything at all. She tried to remember why she had come. What was it—? And then she was sinking down into an abyss.
That the hemorrhage came then, that the old man came out and found her and tenderly took her in, that he had her taken where she should have been taken long before, that the doctors said it was too late, and that soon their verdict was confirmed—those are the facts which would seem to tell the rest of the story. But deep down beneath facts rests truth, and the truth is that this is a story with the happiest kind of a happy ending. What facts would call the breeze from an electric fan was in truth the gracious breath of the pines. And when the nurse said “She's going,” she was indeed going, but to a land of great spaces and benign breezes, a land of deep shadows and rushing waters. For a most wondrous thing had happened. She had called to the mountain, and the mountain had heard her voice; and because it was so mighty and so everlasting it drew her to itself, across high brick walls and past millions of hurrying, noisy people—oh, a most triumphant flight! And the mountain said—“I give you this whole great land. It is yours because you have loved it so well. Hills and valleys and rivers and forests and lakes—it is all for you.” Yes, the nurse was quite right; she was going: going for a long sweet sleep beneath trees of many shadows, beside clear waters which had come from distant snows—really going “Out There.”