Page:Ritchie - Trails to Two Moons.djvu/63

 long road. From the distant mound of earth to the photograph and back to the mound once more Hilma's eyes traveled. She was stirred to depths never before plumbed; some deep-lying, half-sensed sympathy struggled for a form of thought to clothe itself. Life: Hilma Ring never before had glimpsed it subjectively. Life, with its promise of joy and high hopes, life, which buffeted and scarred its creatures yet held inexorably to the road of obstacles, to fall and to rise again, to fall at last into the long rest; for the driven creatures on this road of life rather than concretely for the twain of the photograph was Hilma Ring's sympathy awakened.

For the first time in her nineteen years the daughter of the sheepman of Teapot Creek recognized herself kin with that high blue rampart of the Broken Horns, kin with the blue-bonnets that blossomed just beyond the beaten 'dobe of the dooryard. Just a pencil dot in a vast chart.

Catching at only the penumbra of this truth, sensing it vaguely as some indefinable overtone of the life that was Hilma Ring, first the girl was appalled, then blind battle lust of her Norse forefathers claimed her all its own.