days came back on me.
That halt in the cup of the hills was our limit; it was a moment of
life, an arrival, an end.

The sun was too low for further adventuring. We struck due west on as
straight a course as the rugged country permitted, thinking to reach the
Looking-glass creek, along which lay the beaten road of travel back to
mankind. An hour or two passed, and we saw a house in the distance to
which we drove,--a humble house, sod-built, like that we had made our
nooning in. We drove to the door, and called; it was long before any
answer came; but at last a woman opened the door, her face and figure
the very expression of dulled toil, hard work, bodily despair. Alone on
that prairie, one would have thought she would have welcomed a human
countenance; but she looked on us as if she wished we would be gone, and
hardly answered to our question of the road. She was the type of the
abandonment of human life. I did not speak to her; but I see her now, as
I saw her then, with a kind of surprise that a woman could come to be,
by human life, like that. There was no one else in the house; and she
shut the door upon us after one sullen look and one scant sentence, as
if we, and any other, were naught, and went back to her silence in that
green waste, now gilded by the level sun, miles on miles. 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