For Helen Rayner that brief, dark period of expulsion from her home had
become a thing of the past, almost forgotten.
Two months had flown by on the wings of love and work and the joy of
finding her place there in the West. All her old men had been only too
glad of the opportunity to come back to her, and under Dale and Roy
Beeman a different and prosperous order marked the life of the ranch.
Helen had made changes in the house by altering the arrangement of
rooms and adding a new section. Only once had she ventured into the old
dining-room where Las Vegas Carmichael had sat down to that fatal dinner
for Beasley. She made a store-room of it, and a place she would never
again enter.
Helen was happy, almost too happy, she thought, and therefore made
more than needful of the several bitter drops in her sweet cup of
life. Carmichael had ridden out of Pine, ostensibly on the trail of the
Mexicans who had executed Beasley's commands. The last seen of him
had been reported from Show Down, where he had appeared red-eyed and
dangerous, like a hound on a scent. Then two months had flown by without
a word.
Dale had shaken his head doubtfully when interrogated about the cowboy's
absence. It would be just like Las Vegas never to be heard of again.
Also it would be more like him to remain away until all trace of his
drunken, savage spell had departed from him and had been forgotten by
his friends. Bo took his disappearance apparently less to heart than
Helen. But Bo grew more restless, wilder, and more wilful than ever.
Helen thought she guessed Bo's secret; and once she ventured a hint
concerning Carmichael's return.
“If Tom doesn't come back pretty soon I'll marry Milt Dale,” retorted
Bo, tauntingly.
This fired Helen's cheeks with red.
“But, child,” she protested, half angry, half grave. “Milt and I are
engaged.”
“Sure. Only you're so slow. There's many a slip--you know.”
“Bo, I tell you Tom will come back,” replied Helen, earnestly. “I feel
it. There was something fine in that cowboy. He understood me better
than you or Milt, either.... And he was perfectly wild in love with
you.”
“Oh! WAS he?”
“Very much more than you deserved, Bo Rayner.”
Then occurred one of Bo's sweet, bewildering, unexpected
transformations. Her defiance, resentment, rebelliousness, vanished from
a softly agitated face.
“Oh, Nell, I know that.... You just watch me if I ever get another
chance at him!... Then--maybe he'd never drink again!”
“Bo, be happy--and be good. Don't ride off any more--don't tease the
boys. It'll all come right in the end.”
Bo recovered her equanimity quickly enough.
“Humph! You can afford to be cheerful. You've got a man who can't live
when you're out of his sight. He's like a fish on dry land.... And
you--why, once you were an old pessimist!”
Bo was not to be consoled or changed. Helen could only sigh and pray
that her convictions would be verified.
The first day of July brought an early thunder-storm, just at sunrise.
It roared and flared and rolled away, leaving a gorgeous golden cloud
pageant in the sky and a fresh, sweetly smelling, glistening green range
that delighted Helen's eye.
Birds were twittering in the arbors and bees were humming in the
flowers. From the fields down along the brook came a blended song of
swamp-blackbird and meadow-lark. A clarion-voiced burro split the air
with his coarse and homely bray. The sheep were bleating, and a soft baa
of little lambs came sweetly to Helen's ears. She went her usual rounds
with more than usual zest and thrill. Everywhere was color, activity,
life. The wind swept warm and pine-scented down from the mountain
heights, now black and bold, and the great green slopes seemed to call
to her.
At that very moment she came suddenly upon Dale, in his shirt-sleeves,
dusty and hot, standing motionless, gazing at the distant mountains.
Helen's greeting startled him.
“I--I was just looking away yonder,” he said, smiling. She thrilled at
the clear, wonderful light of his eyes.
“So was I--a moment ago,” she replied, wistfully. “Do you miss the
forest--very much?”
“Nell, I miss nothing. But I'd like to ride with you under the pines
once more.”
“We'll go,” she cried.
“When?” he asked, eagerly.
“Oh--soon!” And then with flushed face and downcast eyes she passed on.
For long Helen had cherished a fond hope that she might be married in
Paradise Park, where she had fallen in love with Dale and had realized
herself. But she had kept that hope secret. Dale's eager tone, his
flashing eyes, had made her feel that her secret was there in her
telltale face.
As she entered the lane leading to the house she encountered one of the
new stable-boys driving a pack-mule.
“Jim, whose pack is that?” she asked.
“Ma'am, I dunno, but I heard him tell Roy he reckoned his name was mud,”
replied the boy, smiling.
Helen's heart gave a quick throb. That sounded like Las Vegas. She
hurried on, and upon entering the courtyard she espied Roy Beeman
holding the halter of a beautiful, wild-looking mustang. There was
another horse with another man, who was in the act of dismounting on the
far side. When he stepped into better view Helen recognized Las Vegas.
And he saw her at the same instant.
Helen did not look up again until she was near the porch. She had
dreaded this meeting, yet she was so glad that she could have cried
aloud.
“Miss Helen, I shore am glad to see you,” he said, standing bareheaded
before her, the same young, frank-faced cowboy she had seen first from
the train.
“Tom!” she exclaimed, and offered her hands.
He wrung them hard while he looked at her. The swift woman's glance
Helen gave in return seemed to drive something dark and doubtful out of
her heart. This was the same boy she had known--whom she had liked so
well--who had won her sister's love. Helen imagined facing him thus was
like awakening from a vague nightmare of doubt. Carmichael's face was
clean, fresh, young, with its healthy tan; it wore the old glad smile,
cool, easy, and natural; his eyes were like Dale's--penetrating, clear
as crystal, without a shadow. What had evil, drink, blood, to do
with the real inherent nobility of this splendid specimen of Western
hardihood? Wherever he had been, whatever he had done during that
long absence, he had returned long separated from that wild and savage
character she could now forget. Perhaps there would never again be call
for it.
“How's my girl?” he asked, just as naturally as if he had been gone a
few days on some errand of his employer's.
“Bo? Oh, she's well--fine. I--I rather think she'll be glad to see you,”
replied Helen, warmly.
“An' how's thet big Indian, Dale?” he drawled.
“Well, too--I'm sure.”
“Reckon I got back heah in time to see you-all married?”
“I--I assure you I--no one around here has been married yet,” replied
Helen, with a blush.
“Thet shore is fine. Was some worried,” he said, lazily. “I've been
chasin' wild hosses over in New Mexico, an' I got after this heah blue
roan. He kept me chasin' him fer a spell. I've fetched him back for Bo.”
Helen looked at the mustang Roy was holding, to be instantly delighted.
He was a roan almost blue in color, neither large nor heavy, but
powerfully built, clean-limbed, and racy, with a long mane and tail,
black as coal, and a beautiful head that made Helen love him at once.
“Well, I'm jealous,” declared Helen, archly. “I never did see such a
pony.”
“I reckoned you'd never ride any hoss but Ranger,” said Las Vegas.
“No, I never will. But I can be jealous, anyhow, can't I?”
“Shore. An I reckon if you say you're goin' to have him--wal, Bo 'd be
funny,” he drawled.
“I reckon she would be funny,” retorted Helen. She was so happy that
she imitated his speech. She wanted to hug him. It was too good to be
true--the return of this cowboy. He understood her. He had come back
with nothing that could alienate her. He had apparently forgotten the
terrible role he had accepted and the doom he had meted out to her
enemies. That moment was wonderful for Helen in its revelation of the
strange significance of the West as embodied in this cowboy. He was
great. But he did not know that.
Then the door of the living-room opened, and a sweet, high voice pealed
out:
“Roy! Oh, what a mustang! Whose is he?”
“Wal, Bo, if all I hear is so he belongs to you,” replied Roy with a
huge grin.
Bo appeared in the door. She stepped out upon the porch. She saw the
cowboy. The excited flash of her pretty face vanished as she paled.
“Bo, I shore am glad to see you,” drawled Las Vegas, as he stepped
forward, sombrero in hand. Helen could not see any sign of confusion in
him. But, indeed, she saw gladness. Then she expected to behold Bo run
right into the cowboys's arms. It appeared, however, that she was doomed
to disappointment.
“Tom, I'm glad to see you,” she replied.
They shook hands as old friends.
“You're lookin' right fine,” he said.
“Oh, I'm well.... And how have you been these six months?” she queried.
“Reckon I though it was longer,” he drawled. “Wal, I'm pretty tip-top
now, but I was laid up with heart trouble for a spell.”
“Heart trouble?” she echoed, dubiously.
“Shore.... I ate too much over heah in New Mexico.”
“It's no news to me--where your heart's located,” laughed Bo. Then she
ran off the porch to see the blue mustang. She walked round and round
him, clasping her hands in sheer delight.
“Bo, he's a plumb dandy,” said Roy. “Never seen a prettier hoss. He'll
run like a streak. An' he's got good eyes. He'll be a pet some day. But
I reckon he'll always be spunky.”
“Bo ventured to step closer, and at last got a hand on the mustang, and
then another. She smoothed his quivering neck and called softly to him,
until he submitted to her hold.
“What's his name?” she asked.
“Blue somethin' or other,” replied Roy.
“Tom, has my new mustang a name?” asked Bo, turning to the cowboy.
“Shore.”
“What then?”
“Wal, I named him Blue-Bo,” answered Las Vegas, with a smile.
“Blue-Boy?”
“Nope. He's named after you. An' I chased him, roped him, broke him all
myself.”
“Very well. Blue-Bo he is, then.... And he's a wonderful darling horse.
Oh, Nell, just look at him.... Tom, I can't thank you enough.”
“Reckon I don't want any thanks,” drawled the cowboy. “But see heah, Bo,
you shore got to live up to conditions before you ride him.”
“What!” exclaimed Bo, who was startled by his slow, cool, meaning tone,
of voice.
Helen delighted in looking at Las Vegas then. He had never appeared to
better advantage. So cool, careless, and assured! He seemed master of
a situation in which his terms must be accepted. Yet he might have been
actuated by a cowboy motive beyond the power of Helen to divine.
“Bo Rayner,” drawled Las Vegas, “thet blue mustang will be yours, an'
you can ride him--when you're MRS. TOM CARMICHAEL!”
Never had he spoken a softer, more drawling speech, nor gazed at Bo
more mildly. Roy seemed thunderstruck. Helen endeavored heroically to
restrain her delicious, bursting glee. Bo's wide eyes stared at her
lover--darkened--dilated. Suddenly she left the mustang to confront the
cowboy where he lounged on the porch steps.
“Do you mean that?” she cried.
“Shore do.”
“Bah! It's only a magnificent bluff,” she retorted. “You're only in fun.
It's your--your darned nerve!”
“Why, Bo,” began Las Vegas, reproachfully. “You shore know I'm not the
four-flusher kind. Never got away with a bluff in my life! An' I'm jest
in daid earnest aboot this heah.”
All the same, signs were not wanting in his mobile face that he was
almost unable to restrain his mirth.
Helen realized then that Bo saw through the cowboy--that the ultimatum
was only one of his tricks.
“It IS a bluff and I CALL you!” declared Bo, ringingly.
Las Vegas suddenly awoke to consequences. He essayed to speak, but she
was so wonderful then, so white and blazing-eyed, that he was stricken
mute.
“I'll ride Blue-Bo this afternoon,” deliberately stated the girl.
Las Vegas had wit enough to grasp her meaning, and he seemed about to
collapse.
“Very well, you can make me Mrs. Tom Carmichael to-day--this
morning--just before dinner.... Go get a preacher to marry us--and
make yourself look a more presentable bridegroom--UNLESS IT WAS ONLY A
BLUFF!”
Her imperiousness changed as the tremendous portent of her words seemed
to make Las Vegas a blank, stone image of a man. With a wild-rose color
suffusing her face, she swiftly bent over him, kissed him, and flashed
away into the house. Her laugh pealed back, and it thrilled Helen, so
deep and strange was it for the wilful sister, so wild and merry and
full of joy.
It was then that Roy Beeman recovered from his paralysis, to let out
such a roar of mirth as to frighten the horses. Helen was laughing, and
crying, too, but laughing mostly. Las Vegas Carmichael was a sight for
the gods to behold. Bo's kiss had unclamped what had bound him. The
sudden truth, undeniable, insupportable, glorious, made him a madman.
“Bluff--she called me--ride Blue-Bo saf'ternoon!” he raved,
reaching wildly for Helen. “Mrs.--Tom--Carmichael--before
dinner--preacher--presentable bridegroom!... Aw! I'm drunk again! I--who
swore off forever!”
“No, Tom, you're just happy,” said Helen.
Between her and Roy the cowboy was at length persuaded to accept the
situation and to see his wonderful opportunity.
“Now--now, Miss Helen--what'd Bo mean by pre--presentable bridegroom?...
Presents? Lord, I'm clean busted flat!”
“She meant you must dress up in your best, of course,” replied Helen.
“Where 'n earth will I get a preacher?... Show Down's forty miles....
Can't ride there in time.... Roy, I've gotta have a preacher.... Life or
death deal fer me.”
“Wal, old man, if you'll brace up I'll marry you to Bo,” said Roy, with
his glad grin.
“Aw!” gasped Las Vegas, as if at the coming of a sudden beautiful hope.
“Tom, I'm a preacher,” replied Roy, now earnestly. “You didn't know
thet, but I am. An' I can marry you an' Bo as good as any one, an'
tighter 'n most.”
Las Vegas reached for his friend as a drowning man might have reached
for solid rock.
“Roy, can you really marry them--with my Bible--and the service of my
church?” asked Helen, a happy hope flushing her face.
“Wal, indeed I can. I've married more 'n one couple whose religion
wasn't mine.”
“B-b-before--d-d-din-ner!” burst out Las Vegas, like a stuttering idiot.
“I reckon. Come on, now, an' make yourself pre-senttible,” said Roy.
“Miss Helen, you tell Bo thet it's all settled.”
He picked up the halter on the blue mustang and turned away toward the
corrals. Las Vegas put the bridle of his horse over his arm, and seemed
to be following in a trance, with his dazed, rapt face held high.
“Bring Dale,” called Helen, softly after them.
So it came about as naturally as it was wonderful that Bo rode the blue
mustang before the afternoon ended.
Las Vegas disobeyed his first orders from Mrs. Tom Carmichael and rode
out after her toward the green-rising range. Helen seemed impelled to
follow. She did not need to ask Dale the second time. They rode swiftly,
but never caught up with Bo and Las Vegas, whose riding resembled their
happiness.
Dale read Helen's mind, or else his own thoughts were in harmony with
hers, for he always seemed to speak what she was thinking. And as they
rode homeward he asked her in his quiet way if they could not spare a
few days to visit his old camp.
“And take Bo--and Tom? Oh, of all things I'd like to'” she replied.
“Yes--an' Roy, too,” added Dale, significantly.
“Of course,” said Helen, lightly, as if she had not caught his meaning.
But she turned her eyes away, while her heart thumped disgracefully and
all her body was aglow. “Will Tom and Bo go?”
“It was Tom who got me to ask you,” replied Dale. “John an' Hal can look
after the men while we're gone.”
“Oh--so Tom put it in your head? I guess--maybe--I won't go.”
“It is always in my mind, Nell,” he said, with his slow seriousness.
“I'm goin' to work all my life for you. But I'll want to an' need to go
back to the woods often.... An' if you ever stoop to marry me--an' make
me the richest of men--you'll have to marry me up there where I fell in
love with you.”
“Ah! Did Las Vegas Tom Carmichael say that, too?” inquired Helen,
softly.
“Nell, do you want to know what Las Vegas said?”
“By all means.”
“He said this--an' not an hour ago. 'Milt, old hoss, let me give you a
hunch. I'm a man of family now--an' I've been a devil with the wimmen
in my day. I can see through 'em. Don't marry Nell Rayner in or near the
house where I killed Beasley. She'd remember. An' don't let her remember
thet day. Go off into the woods. Paradise Park! Bo an' me will go with
you.”
Helen gave him her hand, while they walked the horses homeward in the
long sunset shadows. In the fullness of that happy hour she had time for
a grateful wonder at the keen penetration of the cowboy Carmichael. Dale
had saved her life, but it was Las Vegas who had saved her happiness.
Not many days later, when again the afternoon shadows were slanting low,
Helen rode out upon the promontory where the dim trail zigzagged far
above Paradise Park.
Roy was singing as he drove the pack-burros down the slope; Bo and Las
Vegas were trying to ride the trail two abreast, so they could hold
hands; Dale had dismounted to stand beside Helen's horse, as she gazed
down the shaggy black slopes to the beautiful wild park with its gray
meadows and shining ribbons of brooks.
It was July, and there were no golden-red glorious flames and blazes of
color such as lingered in Helen's memory. Black spruce slopes and green
pines and white streaks of aspens and lacy waterfall of foam and dark
outcroppings of rock--these colors and forms greeted her gaze with all
the old enchantment. Wildness, beauty, and loneliness were there, the
same as ever, immutable, like the spirit of those heights.
Helen would fain have lingered longer, but the others called, and Ranger
impatiently snorted his sense of the grass and water far below. And she
knew that when she climbed there again to the wide outlook she would be
another woman.
“Nell, come on,” said Dale, as he led on. “It's better to look up.”
The sun had just sunk behind the ragged fringe of mountain-rim when
those three strong and efficient men of the open had pitched camp and
had prepared a bountiful supper. Then Roy Beeman took out the little
worn Bible which Helen had given him to use when he married Bo, and as
he opened it a light changed his dark face.
“Come, Helen an' Dale,” he said.
They arose to stand before him. And he married them there under the
great, stately pines, with the fragrant blue smoke curling upward, and
the wind singing through the branches, while the waterfall murmured its
low, soft, dreamy music, and from the dark slope came the wild, lonely
cry of a wolf, full of the hunger for life and a mate.
“Let us pray,” said Roy, as he closed the Bible, and knelt with them.
“There is only one God, an' Him I beseech in my humble office for the
woman an' man I have just wedded in holy bonds. Bless them an' watch
them an' keep them through all the comin' years. Bless the sons of
this strong man of the woods an' make them like him, with love an'
understandin' of the source from which life comes. Bless the daughters
of this woman an' send with them more of her love an' soul, which must
be the softenin' an' the salvation of the hard West. O Lord, blaze the
dim, dark trail for them through the unknown forest of life! O Lord,
lead the way across the naked range of the future no mortal knows! We
ask in Thy name! Amen.”
When the preacher stood up again and raised the couple from their
kneeling posture, it seemed that a grave and solemn personage had left
him. This young man was again the dark-faced, clear-eyed Roy, droll and
dry, with the enigmatic smile on his lips.
“Mrs. Dale,” he said, taking her hands, “I wish you joy.... An' now,
after this here, my crownin' service in your behalf--I reckon I'll claim
a reward.”
Then he kissed her. Bo came next with her warm and loving felicitations,
and the cowboy, with characteristic action, also made at Helen.
“Nell, shore it's the only chance I'll ever have to kiss you,” he
drawled. “Because when this heah big Indian once finds out what kissin'
is--!”
Las Vegas then proved how swift and hearty he could be upon occasions.
All this left Helen red and confused and unutterably happy. She
appreciated Dale's state. His eyes reflected the precious treasure
which manifestly he saw, but realization of ownership had not yet become
demonstrable.
Then with gay speech and happy laugh and silent look these five partook
of the supper. When it was finished Roy made known his intention to
leave. They all protested and coaxed, but to no avail. He only laughed
and went on saddling his horse.
“Roy, please stay,” implored Helen. “The day's almost ended. You're
tired.”
“Nope. I'll never be no third party when there's only two.”
“But there are four of us.”
“Didn't I just make you an' Dale one?... An', Mrs. Dale, you forget I've
been married more 'n once.”
Helen found herself confronted by an unanswerable side of the argument.
Las Vegas rolled on the grass in his mirth. Dale looked strange.
“Roy, then that's why you're so nice,” said Bo, with a little devil in
her eyes. “Do you know I had my mind made up if Tom hadn't come around I
was going to make up to you, Roy.... I sure was. What number wife would
I have been?”
It always took Bo to turn the tables on anybody. Roy looked mightily
embarrassed. And the laugh was on him. He did not face them again until
he had mounted.
“Las Vegas, I've done my best for you--hitched you to thet blue-eyed
girl the best I know how,” he declared. “But I shore ain't guaranteein'
nothin'. You'd better build a corral for her.”
“Why, Roy, you shore don't savvy the way to break these wild ones,”
drawled Las Vegas. “Bo will be eatin' out of my hand in about a week.”
Bo's blue eyes expressed an eloquent doubt as to this extraordinary
claim.
“Good-by, friends,” said Roy, and rode away to disappear in the spruces.
Thereupon Bo and Las Vegas forgot Roy, and Dale and Helen, the camp
chores to be done, and everything else except themselves. Helen's first
wifely duty was to insist that she should and could and would help her
husband with the work of cleaning up after the sumptuous supper. Before
they had finished a sound startled them. It came from Roy, evidently
high on the darkening slope, and was a long, mellow pealing halloo, that
rang on the cool air, burst the dreamy silence, and rapped across
from slope to slope and cliff to cliff, to lose its power and die away
hauntingly in the distant recesses.
Dale shook his head as if he did not care to attempt a reply to that
beautiful call. Silence once again enfolded the park, and twilight
seemed to be born of the air, drifting downward.
“Nell, do you miss anythin'?” asked Dale.
“No. Nothing in all the world,” she murmured. “I am happier than I ever
dared pray to be.”
“I don't mean people or things. I mean my pets.”
“Ah! I had forgotten.... Milt, where are they?”
“Gone back to the wild,” he said. “They had to live in my absence. An'
I've been away long.”
Just then the brooding silence, with its soft murmur of falling water
and faint sigh of wind in the pines, was broken by a piercing scream,
high, quivering, like that of a woman in exquisite agony.
“That's Tom!” exclaimed Dale.
“Oh--I was so--so frightened!” whispered Helen.
Bo came running, with Las Vegas at her heels.
“Milt, that was your tame cougar,” cried Bo, excitedly. “Oh, I'll never
forget him! I'll hear those cries in my dreams!”
“Yes, it was Tom,” said Dale, thoughtfully. “But I never heard him cry
just like that.”
“Oh, call him in!”
Dale whistled and called, but Tom did not come. Then the hunter stalked
off in the gloom to call from different points under the slope. After
a while he returned without the cougar. And at that moment, from far
up the dark ravine, drifted down the same wild cry, only changed by
distance, strange and tragic in its meaning.
“He scented us. He remembers. But he'll never come back,” said Dale.
Helen felt stirred anew with the convictions of Dale's deep knowledge of
life and nature. And her imagination seemed to have wings. How full and
perfect her trust, her happiness in the realization that her love and
her future, her children, and perhaps grandchildren, would come under
the guidance of such a man! Only a little had she begun to comprehend
the secrets of good and ill in their relation to the laws of nature.
Ages before men had lived on the earth there had been the creatures of
the wilderness, and the holes of the rocks, and the nests of the trees,
and rain, frost, heat, dew, sunlight and night, storm and calm, the
honey of the wildflower and the instinct of the bee--all the beautiful
and multiple forms of life with their inscrutable design. To know
something of them and to love them was to be close to the kingdom of
earth--perhaps to the greater kingdom of heaven. For whatever breathed
and moved was a part of that creation. The coo of the dove, the lichen
on the mossy rock, the mourn of a hunting wolf, and the murmur of the
waterfall, the ever-green and growing tips of the spruces, and the
thunderbolts along the battlements of the heights--these one and all
must be actuated by the great spirit--that incalculable thing in the
universe which had produced man and soul.
And there in the starlight, under the wide-gnarled pines, sighing low
with the wind, Helen sat with Dale on the old stone that an avalanche
of a million years past had flung from the rampart above to serve as
camp-table and bench for lovers in the wilderness; the sweet scent of
spruce mingled with the fragrance of wood-smoke blown in their faces.
How white the stars, and calm and true! How they blazed their single
task! A coyote yelped off on the south slope, dark now as midnight. A
bit of weathered rock rolled and tapped from shelf to shelf. And the
wind moaned. Helen felt all the sadness and mystery and nobility of this
lonely fastness, and full on her heart rested the supreme consciousness
that all would some day be well with the troubled world beyond.
“Nell, I'll homestead this park,” said Dale. “Then it'll always be
ours.”
“Homestead! What's that?” murmured Helen, dreamily. The word sounded
sweet.
“The government will give land to men who locate an' build,” replied
Dale. “We'll run up a log cabin.”
“And come here often.... Paradise Park!” whispered Helen.
Dale's first kisses were on her lips then, hard and cool and clean, like
the life of the man, singularly exalting to her, completing her woman's
strange and unutterable joy of the hour, and rendering her mute.
Bo's melodious laugh, and her voice with its old mockery of torment,
drifted softly on the night breeze. And the cowboy's “Aw, Bo,” drawling
his reproach and longing, was all that the tranquil, waiting silence
needed.
Paradise Park was living again one of its romances. Love was no stranger
to that lonely fastness. Helen heard in the whisper of the wind through
the pine the old-earth story, beautiful, ever new, and yet eternal.
She thrilled to her depths. The spar-pointed spruces stood up black
and clear against the noble stars. All that vast solitude breathed and
waited, charged full with its secret, ready to reveal itself to her
tremulous soul.