not think
about him, his cowardice was as unimportant to them in their mutual
engrossment as his body was to the indifferent self-sufficiency of the
landscape. They knew he was hastening that he might be first in the
camp to tell his own story and set himself right with the others before
they came. They did not care. They did not even laugh at it. They
would do that later when they had returned to the plane where life had
regained its familiar aspect.

Silently, hand in hand, they walked between the low bushes and across
the whitened patches of sandy soil. When the smoke was gone the pool
with the lone tree guided them, the surface now covered with a glaze of
gold. A deep content lay upon them. The shared peril had torn away a
veil that hung between them and through which they had been dodging to
catch glimpses of one another. Susan's pride in her ascendency was
gone. She walked docilely beside the man who, in the great moment, had
not failed. She was subdued, not by the recent peril, but by the fact
that the slave had shown himself the master. David's chance had come,
but the moment was too completely beautiful, the sudden sense of
understanding too lovely for him to break it with words. He wanted to
savor it, to take joy of its delicate sweetness. It was his
voluptuousness to delight in it, not brush its bloom away with a
lover's avowal. He was the idealist, moving in an unexpectedly
realized dream, too exquisite for words to intrude upon. So they
walked onward, looking across the long land, hand clasped in hand.

END OF PART I

PART II

The River

CHAPTER I

The Emigrant Trail struck the Platte at Grand Island. From the bluffs
that walled in the river valley the pioneers could look down on the
great waterway, a wide, thin current, hardly more than a glistening
veil, stretched over the sandy bottom. Sometimes the veil was split by
islands, its transparent tissue passing between them in sparkling
strands as if it were sewn with silver threads. These separated
streams slipped along so quietly, so without noise or hurry, they
seemed to share in the large unconcern of the landscape. It was a
still, unpeopled, spacious landscape, where there was no work and no
time and the morning and the evening made the day.

Many years ago the Frenchmen had given the river its name, Platte,
because of its lack of depths. There were places where a man could
walk across it and not be wet above the