FullReads

Daphne had left some necessary of her toilet at the ferry, and the driver of Mr. Withers’s team had gone back to ask the people at the ferry-house to find it. This was the cause of their waiting at the cross-roads. Mr. Withers and Daphne were on their devoted way like conscientious tourists, though both were deadly weary, to prostrate themselves before the stupendous beauty of the great lone falls at Shoshone. Thane, with Kinney’s team, was prosaically bound down the river to examine and report on a placer-mine. But before his business would be finished Mr. Withers and his niece would have returned by railroad via Bliss to Boise, and have left that city for the East; so this was likely to be a long good-by.

If anything could have come of Mr. Withers’s project of a memorial fountain at Pilgrim Station, there might have been a future to the acquaintance, for Thane was to have had charge of the execution of the design; but nature had lightly frustrated that fond, beneficent dream.

Mr. Kinney had offered the practical suggestion that the road should go to the fountain, since the fountain could not come to the road. Its course was a mere accident of the way the first wagon-wheels had gone. The wheels were few now, and with such an inducement might well afford to cross the gulch in a new place lower down. But Mr. Withers would have none of this dislocation of the unities. There was but one place–the dismal hollow itself, the scene of his heart’s tragedy–where his acknowledgment to God should stand; his mute “Thy will be done!”

Perhaps the whole conception had lost something of its hold on his mind by contact with such harsh realities as Daphne’s disavowals and his own consequent struggle with a father’s weakness. He had not in his inmost conscience quite done with that question yet.

Thane was touched by the meekness with which the old gentleman resigned his dream. The journey, he suspected, had been a disappointment in other ways,–had failed in impressiveness, in personal significance; had fallen at times below the level of the occasion, at others had overpowered it and swept it out of sight. Thane could have told him that it must be so. There was room for too many mourners in that primeval waste. Whose small special grief could make itself heard in that vast arid silence, the voice of which was God? God in nature, awful, inscrutable, alone, had gained a new meaning for Mr. Withers. Miles of desert, days of desert, like waves of brute oblivion had swept over him. Never before had he felt the oppression of purely natural causes, the force of the physical in conflict with the spiritual law. And now he was to submit to a final illustration of it, perhaps the simplest and most natural one of all.

Daphne was seated at a little distance on her camp-stool, making a drawing of the desert cross-roads with the twin sign-posts pointing separate ways, as an appropriate finish to her Snake River sketch-book. The sun was tremendous, the usual Snake River zephyr was blowing forty miles an hour, and the flinty ground refused to take the brass-shod point of her umbrella-staff. Mr. Kinney, therefore, sat beside her, gallantly steadying her heavy sketching-umbrella against the wind.

Mr. Withers, while awaiting the return of his own team from the ferry, had accepted a seat in Thane’s wagon. (It was a bag containing a curling-iron, lamp, and other implements appertaining to “wimples and crisping-pins,” that Daphne had forgotten, but she had not described its contents. One bag is as innocent as another, on the outside; it might have held her Prayer Book.)

Thane was metaphorically “kicking himself” because time was passing and he could not find words delicate enough in which to clothe an indelicate request,–one outrageous in its present connection, yet from some points of view, definitively his own, a most urgent and natural one.