The tents and the wagons were behind her and back of them the long green splendors of the prairie. Flecks of sun danced over her figure, shot back and forth from her skirt to her hair as whiffs of wind caught the upper branches of the cotton woods. She had been sitting on the mess chest, but when the reading of the Litany began she slipped to her knees, and with head inclined answered the responses, her hands lightly clasped resting against her breast.

David, who had been looking at her, dropped his eyes as from a sight no man should see. To admire her at this moment, shut away in the sanctuary of holy thoughts, was a sacrilege. Men and their passions should stand outside in that sacred hour when a woman is at prayer. Leff had no such high fancies. He only knew the sight of Susan made him dumb and drove away all the wits he had. Now she looked so aloof, so far removed from all accustomed things, that the sense of her remoteness added gloom to his embarrassment. He twisted a blade of grass in his freckled hands and wished that the service would soon end.

The cotton-wood leaves made a light, dry pattering as if rain drops were falling. From the picketed animals, looping their trail ropes over the grass, came a sound of low, continuous cropping. The hum of insects swelled and sank, full of sudden life, then drowsily dying away as though the spurt of energy had faded in the hour's discouraging languor. The doctor's voice detached itself from this pastoral chorus intoning the laws that God gave Moses when he was conducting a stiff-necked and rebellious people through a wilderness:

"Thou shalt do no murder.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery.

"Thou shalt not steal."

And to each command Susan's was the only voice that answered, falling sweet and delicately clear on the silence:

"Lord have mercy upon us and incline our hearts to keep this law."

Susan praying for power to resist such scarlet sins! It was fantastic and David wished he dared join his voice to hers and not let her kneel there alone as if hers was the only soul that needed strengthening. Susan, the young, the innocent-eyed, the pure.

He had come again the next Sunday - Leff went hunting that morning - and felt that some day, not so far distant, he would dare to kneel too and respond. He thought of it when alone, another port that his dreams were taking him to - his voice and Susan's, the bass and the treble, strength and sweetness, symbol of the male and the female, united in one harmonious strain that would stream upward to the throne of the God who, watching over them, neither slumbered nor slept.

It was on the afternoon of this Sunday, that David started out to walk to an Indian village, of which a passing emigrant had told him, lying in a hollow a mile to the westward. He left the camp sunk in the somnolence of its seventh-day rest, Susan not to be seen anywhere, Leff asleep under the wagon, the doctor writing his diary in the shade of the cotton-woods, and Daddy John lying on the grass among the whiteness of the week's wash. The hour was hot and breathless, the middle distance quivering through a heat haze, and the remoter reaches of the prairie an opalescent blur.