The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

The Freebooters of the Wilderness eBook

This eBook from the Gutenberg Project consists of approximately 400 pages of information about The Freebooters of the Wilderness.

CHAPTER VI

WHEREIN ONE PLAYS AN UNCONSCIOUS PART

Watch a snow flake as it falls!  Gentle is too rough a word for the motion.  It floats, a crystal cob-web shot with the glint of sun-jewels; tangible but melting to your touch, evanescent and translucent as light; conceived of the wind that bloweth where it listeth and the gossamer clouds of a vague somewhere.

Waveringly, noiselessly, so noiselessly it comes that you do not catch the rustling flutter with your ear, but with a sixth sense of motion.  And it transforms, bewitches, beautifies what it touches.  I suppose if such an evanescent thing were told that it and it alone had been the age-old, time-immemorial sculptor of the granite rocks; that it and it alone—­to paraphrase the words of the scientists—­had rolled away the door from the sepulchers of the eternal rocks and turned a planet into a sensate earth pulsing with growth—­I suppose if a snow flake were told such heresy, it would die of its own amaze.

This, apropos of nothing in particular, unless you happen to understand from the catagory of your own experiences.

It was her first love-letter; and, because she did not know she was writing a love-letter she wrote out of the fulness of an overflowing heart.  Also the hour was the precise hour when consciousness of her presence had gone over Wayland in flood tides of fierce tenderness.  That may have been a mere coincidence.  I set it down because such coincidences daily touch life.

Here is the letter.

Twelve O’clock.

Are you a ‘vision fugitive,’ O Ranger Man?  Do you know that I have seen you less than ten times and really known you less than a month?  Is it a dream?  What happened?  I did not mean to do it.  I did not want it.  I did not ask it.  Why has it come?  You said ’best gifts came unasked; perhaps, they also go unsent!’ This one can never go, Dick.  I’ve been weaving it in and out for three whole hours, (no, not thinking, I think of other people,) weaving it in and out of every strand of me.  I know now I have been waiting for it a billion years; ages and ages ago when you and I were cave people or desert runners like the 20,000 B. C. skeleton in the British Museum; and in the shuffle of atoms, we got apart.  We shall never stray again; for I have locked last night in my heart.  Yesterday I could look up at the Mountain, and what I saw was the snow cross, cold and far away.  To-night I look up.  The Mountain is still there but not the same—­what I feel is—­you; and you are not far away.  I am warm with happiness, delirious when I let myself stop thinking.

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The Freebooters of the Wilderness from Project Gutenberg. Public domain.