She put out her hand
impulsively to him, but Pierre, shaking his head, looked away. Shon put
his hand gently on her arm. "No, no," he said in a whisper, "there can
be no touch of hands between us."
And Pierre, looking up, added: "C'est vrai. That is the truth. You go--
home. I got to hide. So--so." And he turned and went into the hut.
The others set their faces northward, and Father Corraine walked beside
Mary Callen's horse, talking quietly of their future life, and speaking,
as he would never speak again, of days in that green land of their birth.
At length, upon a dividing swell of the prairie, he paused to say
farewell.
Many times the two turned to see, and he was there, looking after them;
his forehead bared to the clear inspiring wind, his grey hair blown back,
his hands clasped. Before descending the trough of a great landwave,
they turned for the last time, and saw him standing motionless, the one
solitary being in all their wide horizon.
But outside the line of vision there sat a man in a prairie hut, whose
eyes travelled over the valley of blue sky stretching away beyond the
morning, whose face was pale and cold. For hours he sat unmoving, and
when, at last, someone gently touched him on the shoulder, he only shook
his head, and went on thinking. He was busy with the grim ledger of his
life.
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