"You have trampled your place among the thorns," said Rhetta.
"It looks like I've pulled a good deal down with me," he returned, viewing the seat of fire with a softening of pity in his grave face.
"All that deserves to rise will rise again," she said in confidence. "It's a good thing it burned—it's purged of its old shame and old monuments of corruption. I'm glad it's gone."
There was a quiet over the place, as if the heart of turbulence had been broken and its spirit had taken flight. In the southwest, in the faces of the two watchers at the margin of this ruin, a vast dark cloud stood like a landfall rising in the mariner's eye out of the sea. It had been visible since four o'clock, seeming to hesitate as if nature intended again to deny this parched and suffering land the consolation of rain. Now it was rising, already it had overspread the sunset glow, casting a cool shadow full of promise over the thirsting prairie wastes.
"It will rain this time," Rhetta prophesied. "It always comes up slowly that way when it rains a long time."
"A rain will work wonders in this country," he said, his face lifted to the promise of the cloud.
"And wisdom and faith will do more," she told him, her voice tender and low.
"And love," said he, voice solemn as a prophet's, yet gentle as a dove's.
"And love," she whispered, the wind, springing like an inspiration before the rain, lifting her shadowy hair.
Joe Lynch came driving into the stricken square down the road beside them, bringing a load of bones.
"Had to burn the town to fetch a rain, huh?" said Joe, his ghostly dry old face tilted to catch the savor of the wind. So saying, he drove on, and paused not in his labor of off-bearing the waste of failure that must be cleared for the new labor of wisdom, faith, and love.
* * *
Thirty years will do for a cottonwood what two centuries will do for an oak. Thirty years had built the cottonwoods of great girth, and lifted them in dignity high above the roof of Calvin Morgan's white farmhouse, his great barns and granaries. Elm trees, bringing their blessings of wide-spreading branch more slowly, led down a broad avenue to the white manse with its Ionian portico. Over the acres of smooth, luxuriant green lawn, the long shadows of closing day reached like the yearning of men's unfinished dreams.
Before the house a broad roadway, smooth as a city boulevard, ran straight to the bright, clean, populous city where Ascalon, with its forgotten shame and tragedies, once stood. And far and away, over the swell of gentle ridge, into the dip of gracious valley, spread the benediction of growing wheat. Wisdom and faith and love had worked their miracle. This land had become the nation's granary; it was a land redeemed.
* * *
Under the giant cottonwoods, gray-green of leaf as the desert grasses were gray-green in the old cattle days, the brown walls, the low roof, of a sod house stood, the lawn clipped smooth around its humble door, lilac clumps green beside its walls, sweet honeysuckle clambering over its little porch. And there came, in the tender last beams of the setting sun, a man and woman to its door.
Not old, not bent, not gnarled by the rack of blind-groping, undirected toil, for such of the chosen out of nature's nobility are never old. Hair once dark as woodland shadows was shot with the sunlight of many years; hair once bright as the mica tossed by joyous waves upon a sunny beach was whitened now by the unmelting snows of winters numbered swiftly in the brief calendar of man. But shoulders were unbent by the burdens which they had borne joyously, and their feet went quickly as lovers' to a tryst.
This little sod house stood with all its old-time furnishings, like a shrine, and on this day, which seemed to be an anniversary, it had been brightened with vases of flowers. This man and this woman, not old, indeed, entered and stood within its door, where the light was dimming through the little window high in the thick wall. The man crossed the room, and stood where a belt with holsters hung upon the wall. She drew near him, and lifted his great hand, and nestled it against her cheek.
"Old Seth Craddock's guns," he said, musing as on a recurring memory.
"His guns!" she murmured, drawing closer into the shadow of his strength.
Transcriber's Notes
The author's consistent use of a lower-case letter following an exclamation point or a question mark inside quoted dialect has been retained.
Other punctuation has been normalized to contemporary standards.
Obvious typographical errors have been corrected.
* * *
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Trails End Page 26
