Page:From the West to the West.djvu/87



"Susannah."

"What if she objects?"

She's already agreed to the change, if it suits you and the girls."

John Ranger laughed.

"So-long!" he cried, and galloped away to a point overlooking a bend in the river, where he loosened the reins and allowed the mare to nibble the tender herbage, which, tempted by the sunshine, was clothing the moist earth in a covering of grass and buttercups.

"O life," he cried," what a mystery you are! How puny, yet how mighty! The living rain comes down in silent majesty upon the sleeping earth; the living sunshine melts the ice and snow; and the living earth, awakening from her season of hibernation, answers back to rain and sun with a power of reproduction that defies the mighty law of gravitation, and sends outward and up toward the living sky the living vegetation that sustains the living man. O sky, all a-twinkle with your myriads of stars, how inscrutable you are in your infinitude! And how like a worm of the dust is man, who has no power to hold in the precious body of even the woman he loves the mystery of existence, of which Creation is the only master!"

Below him, so far away that it gleamed like a silver ribbon in the starlight, ran the muddy Missouri, carrying in its turbid waves the debris of the Mandan district, and bearing on its troubled breast the throng of river craft at whose little windows hundreds of lights were twinkling, like diamonds on parade. Beyond gleamed the moving steamers and their accompanying hosts of lesser boats, now nestling close to the water's edge, and now climbing in irregular fashion toward the uplands at the town of St. Joseph; and, far beyond, his mental eyes beheld the homes of his own and his Annie's beloved parents.

"I do wonder if it is really wrong for me to leave them