ld see the rock, rising
like the clumsy form of a dismantled galleon from the waters of a
darkling sea. For a space she stood, her hand arched above her eyes,
then snatched the kerchief from her neck and, straining an arm aloft,
waved it. The white and scarlet rag flapped with a languid motion, an
infinitesimal flutter between the blaze of the sky and the purpling
levels of the earth. Her arm dropped, her signal fallen futile on the
plain's ironic indifference.

During the next day's march she constantly looked back, and several
times halted, her hand demanding silence as if she were listening for
pursuing footsteps. Courant hid a growing irritation, which once
escaped him in a query as to whether she thought David, if he got away
from the Indians, could possibly catch them up. She answered that if
he had escaped with a horse he might, and fell again to her listening
and watching. At the night camp she ordered Daddy John to build the
beacon fire higher than ever, and taking a rifle moved along the
outskirts of the light firing into the darkness. Finally, standing
with the gun caught in the crook of her arm, she sent up a shrill call
of "David." The cry fell into the silence, cleaving it with a note of
wild and haunting appeal. Courant went after her and brought her back.
When they returned to the fire the old man, who was busy with the
cooking, looked up to speak but instead gazed in silence, caught by
something unusual in their aspect, revivifying, illuminating, like the
radiance of an inner glow. It glorified the squalor of their clothing,
the drawn fatigue of their faces. It gave them the fleeting glamour of
spiritual beauty that comes to those in whom being has reached its
highest expression, the perfect moment of completion caught amid life's
incompleteness.

In the following days she moved as if the dust cloud that inclosed her
was an impenetrable medium that interposed itself between her and the
weird setting of the way. She was drugged with the wine of a new life.
She did not think of sin, of herself in relation to her past, of the
breaking with every tie that held her to her old self. All her
background was gone. Her conscience that, in her dealings with David,
had been so persistently lively, now, when it came to herself, was
dead. Question of right or wrong, secret communings, self judgment,
had no place in the exaltation of her mood. To look at her conduct and
reason of it, to do anything b