The snow,that morning,lay in drifts from five to eight inches across the trail,and to the height of several feet up against those rock walls raising,as on vast artificial tables,the higher stretches of the Kiowa country.But by noon the plain was scarcely streaked with white and when the sun set there was nothing to suggest that a snowflake had ever fallen in that sand-strewn world.The interminable reaches,broken only by the level uplands marked from the plain by their perpendicular walls,and the Wichita Mountains,as faint and unsubstantial to the eye as curved images of smoke against the sky--these dreary monotonies and remotenesses naturally oppress the traveler with a sense of his insignificance.The vast silences,too,of brooding,treeless wastes,sun-baked river-beds,shadowless brown squares standing for miles at a brief height above the shadowless brown floor of the plain--silences amidst which only the wind finds a voice--these,too,insist drearily on the nothingness of man.
But Wilfred and Lahoma were not thus affected.The somethingness of man had never to them been so thrillingly evident.They saw and heard that which was not,except for those having eyes and ears to apprehend--roses in the sand,bird-song in the desert.And when the rude cabins and hasty tents of the last stage-station in Greer County showed dark and white against the horizon of a spring-like morning,Wilfred cried exultantly:
The end of the journey!
And Lahoma,suddenly showing in her cheeks all the roses that had opened in her dreams,repeated gaily,yet a little brokenly:
The end of the journey!
The end of the journey meant a wedding.The plains blossom with endless flower-gardens and the mountains sing together when the end of the journey means a wedding.
Leaving Lahoma at the small new hotel from whose boards the sun began boiling out resin as soon as it was well aloft,Wilfred hurried after a fresh horse to carry him at once to the cove,ten miles away.Warning must be given to Brick Willock first of all.Lahoma even had a wild hope that