Page:History of Oregon Literature.djvu/357

 The Dalles to attend school. Soon afterwards he visited her there, and they agreed to forget the past and each other—it was the end between them.

It was indeed the end but in a way that sanctified his love for her and placed her in his dreams forever. It was in the latter part of January, 1886, a winter calendared in the memories of pioneers, for its cold, that Genevra Whitcomb was taken ill with pneumonia at The Dalles. In a few days the little community of Lyle was shocked to hear that she was dead. The first impact of these tragic tidings still did not make him realize the fullness of his bereavement. He received the news while at an evening church service. On the way home he said to his sister: "This proves to me that I did not love Genevra, as I am saddened only as I would be by the loss of any other friend."

From The Dalles through the vast stretches towards its headwaters the great Columbia was flowing through freezing temperatures. The pull of the mighty current kept it from being frozen over between The Dalles and Lyle, but it was full of broken ice being rushed down toward the sea.

All regular transportation was tied up by the cold. Men coated against the weather bore the dead girl to the bank of the river and placed her in a rowboat pulled loose from the frost that gripped it upon the pebbly shore. It was pushed into the ice-filled current, and the cloaked and silent men rowed it ten miles downstream to Lyle.

In that region in the 80's ministers were far remote from one another. Because of the cold and the locked-up transportation, another preacher could not