lsbee beneath a cairn of stones, with some ceremonies that,
simple though they were, seemed to usurp the sacred rights of grief from
him and Susy, and leave them cold and frightened; days of frequent and
incoherent childish outbursts from Susy, growing fainter and rarer as
time went on, until they ceased, he knew not when; the haunting by night
of that morning vision of the three or four heaps of ragged clothes on
the ground and a half regret that he had not examined them more closely;
a recollection of the awful loneliness and desolation of the broken and
abandoned wagon left behind on its knees as if praying mutely when the
train went on and left it; the trundling behind of the fateful wagon
in which Mrs. Silsbee's body had been found, superstitiously shunned by
every one, and when at last turned over to the authorities at an outpost
garrison, seeming to drop the last link from the dragging chain of the
past. The revelation to the children of a new experience in that brief
glimpse of the frontier garrison; the handsome officer in uniform and
belted sword, an heroic, vengeful figure to be admired and imitated
hereafter; the sudden importance and respect given to Susy and himself
as "survivors"; the sympathetic questioning and kindly exaggerations
of their experiences, quickly accepted by Susy--all these, looking back
upon them afterwards, seemed to have passed in a dream.

No less strange and visionary to them seemed the real transitions they
noted from the moving train. How one morning they missed the changeless,
motionless, low, dark line along the horizon, and before noon found
themselves among the rocks and trees and a swiftly rushing river.
How there suddenly appeared beside them a few days later a great gray
cloud-covered ridge of mountains that they were convinced was that same
dark line that they had seen so often. How the men laughed at them, and
said that for the last three days they had been CROSSING that dark line,
and that it was HIGHER than the great gray-clouded range before them,
which it had always hidden from their view! How Susy firmly believed
that these changes took place in her sleep, when she always "kinder felt
they were crawlin' up," and how Clarence, in the happy depreciation of
extreme youth, expressed his conviction that they "weren't a bit high,
after all." How the weather became cold, though it was already summer,
and at night the camp fire was a necessity, and there was a stove in
the tent