I have often
thought of her since, and what life was to her there, and found some
image of other solitudes--and men and women in them--as expansive, as
alienating as the wild prairie, where life hides itself, grows
dehumanized, and dies.
We drove on, with some word of this; and, eating what we had with us in
case of famine, made our supper from biscuit and flask; and, before
darkness fell, we struck the creek road, and turned southward,--a
splendour of late sunset gleaming over the untravelled western bank, and
dying out in red bloom and the purple of slow star-dawning overhead; and
on we drove, with a hard road under us, having far to go. At the first
farmhouse we watered the willing ponies, who had long succumbed to our
control, and who went as if they could not tire, steadily and evenly,
under the same strong hand and kindly voice they had felt day-long. It
was then I took the reins for an easy stretch, giving my friend a
change, and felt what so unobservably he had been doing all day with
wrist and eye, while he listened. So we drove down, and knew the moon
was up by the changed heavens, though yet unseen behind the bluffs of
the creek upon our left; and far away southward, in the evening light,
lay the long valley like a larger river.
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