Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/53

 eyes were fixed on the blinding sun. Uncle Alf shot his hands aloft in a gesture of invocation.

"All right, dear God A'mighty, it 'll be my duty an' my pleasure to follow Your directions 'long these lines."

So fared these two—and that pitiful third—through the immensity of the brown and gold desert, under aloof heavens; a world raw from the wheel of the potter. And Hilma Ring drank deep of the grim doctrine of vengeance. At first the preacher's exhortations stirred her only by the sonorousness of word and phrase; his mighty voice played upon her ear as something potent to command. Then insensibly her sluggishness of perception—inheritance from the Danish blood—fell away, and her mind began to leap and tingle to the call of a blood reckoning. All her dull hatred of the cattle clan, hitherto formless and without definite inspiration, was coals for the fiery prophet to breathe upon. She saw herself bereft of a father, not by an individual but by that collective monster of Uncle Alf's conjuring. Not because she loved her father—for Hilma could not be sure she ever had—but because she had a right to a father and this