The whole town was a welter of barbaric colour. Streamers stretched across from building to building, and “spielers” for side shows bawled the merits of their attraction. Everywhere one met the loud gaiety of youth on a frolic. Young as the night was, merrymakers were surging up and down the streets tossing confetti and blowing horns.
In the crowded streets, after they had found something to eat in a vacant store where the ladies of the Baptist church were serving a supper, McCoy and Miss Trovillion became separated from their friends. Hours later they wandered from the crowd toward the suburb where the young woman and the Flanders family had found rooms.
Unaccountably their animation ebbed when they were alone under the stars. They had been full of laughter and small talk so long as the crowd jostled them. Now they could find neither. In every fibre of him Rowan was aware of the slight, dainty figure moving by his side so lightly. The delicate, penetrating fragrance of her personality came to him with poignant sweetness.
Once his hand crept out and touched her white gown in the darkness. If she knew, she gave no sign.
Her eyes were on the hills which rose sheer back of the town high into the sky line. They seemed to press in closely and to lift her vision to the heavens, to shut out all the little commonplace things of life.
“Do you suppose God made them to wash sin out of the hearts of people?” she asked.
“A night like this does give a fellow queer feelings,” he answered in a low voice. “Have you ever camped in the high hills with the wind blowin’ kinda soft through the pines? I have, alone, often. Makes a fellow feel as though he’d like to begin again with a clean page.”
She nodded. “Yes. I’ve felt it, too, though I never camped alone of course. As though something fine and wonderful and all-powerful was whispering to me and drawing me nearer to eternal things. It must be something in ourselves, don’t you think? It can’t be that the mountains at night are really a kind of Holy of Holies.”
“I reckon,” he agreed. He had never before tried or heard anybody else try to put into words the strange influence of the shadowy range at night upon one camped in the hollow of a draw, an influence which at the same time seemed to reduce one to an atom in an ocean of space and to lift one into the heights of the everlasting verities. He was shy of any expression of his emotions.
They fell into silence, and presently she turned reluctantly back toward the town. He fell into step beside her. Soon now, he knew, they would be caught again into the spirit of the commonplace.