her.  It was there; beside, inside, above, all round, an enveloping atmosphere to everything she thought and said and did.  She could not read; for while her eyes passed over the lines, that consciousness danced in flames between the lines.  She tried to forget herself in her work—­in the sorting of the littered shelves, in the mending for the ranch hands absent with her father in the Upper Pass; but It was there just the same, at her elbow; in behind the commonplace weaving rainbow mists, a shadowy deity of thought all pervasive as ether.  Before, she had been as one standing in front of the up-lifted veil.  Now, she knew she had passed in behind the veil, and could not if she would come out to the former place.  Life symbols empty of meaning before, suddenly became allegorical of eternity—­the bridal veil, the orange wreaths, the ring typical of the infinite, the vows of service, the angel of the drawn sword on the back trail.  Yet she knew she had promised to keep him resolute, standing strong to his work, unflinching because of her.

It was, perhaps, typical of those ancestral traits that fear for him never once entered her thoughts.  His work was on the firing line; and had she not once said that a life more or less did not matter?  That was before his life had become her life.  That is, fear for him did not enter her waking thoughts.  It was different when she slept.  Then the uncurbed thoughts hovered like the face in the picture of “the Sleeping Warrior.”  One night as she sat in the steamer chair, a cold wind came down from the Pass.  The cook explained it was because of the snow slide that had filled up the canyon.

“Calamity,” she called, “bring me out something to put round my shoulders; don’t bring a shawl:  I hate shawls!”

And Calamity, perfectly naturally, brought out Wayland’s coat.  Eleanor did not laugh; for she knew it was only since Calamity had stopped roving the Black Hills that she had exchanged male attire for the Indian woman’s insignia of good conduct, a shawl.  She waited till Calamity had pattered down to the basement.  Then, she slipped into the coat with a queer little laugh that would have played havoc with Wayland’s resolutions, and running her hands up the long dangling sleeve ends, lay back to a reverie that could hardly be called thought.  It was consciousness, delirious foolish consciousness, possible only to youth; and the consciousness slipped into a drowse between sleeping and waking.  It was—­where was it?  In the shadow realms of wonderful dream consciousness, his face, the face in “the Happy Warrior”; but not her face:  instead was the evil fellow seen that night in the storm on the Rim Rocks clubbing his gun at Fordie’s pinto pony through the mists; only he wasn’t clubbing it at Fordie; he was aiming at Wayland; and there was the white horse.  She wakened herself with her cry.  That happened to be the night Wayland had camped in the Desert arroyos.