After thinking his way through it Sam felt a little better. It was pretty heavy moralizing for a mountain man, and after reaching a conclusion he felt tired. He did not perceive that his love of life was so inordinate and hungry that killing for pleasure was as alien to him as asceticism, its inseparable twin. He’d far rather sing than shoot; far rather lie on his back in a field of alpine lilies or an orchard of wild plum and syringas, breathing in the marvelous scents that filled the atmosphere and the earth, than ride away to kill some man who was coming forward with the hope of killing him. He’d rather stand on a mountain summit and shout into the heavens the concluding bars of Beethoven’s C minor than follow the bugles and Zachary Taylor to Resaca de la Palma and Buena Vista. In his moralizing Sam felt the outlines of a symphony. A day or two later he reached the core of it: he had lost a son and guessed he would never have a son now. He had lost one on the Little Snake and one in the river: Sam was unable to put away the face convulsed by passion and the black eyes hot with courage and hate; or the words which, among so many, his father had uttered aloud in troubled thought, "And where the slain are, there she is, the eagle-mother." He could not stop thinking of Kate, for where the slain were, there she was, in another world and another way. Still, he guessed there was not much difference between the eagle mother and the human mother, the human father and the wolf father. But over Kate’s passions had fallen a heavenly light that was like the eyes of morning, the light of the living. It was this that perplexed and troubled him. God had said—but he could no longer remember of what or whom—that a light did shine, and eyes were like the eyes of the morning; and Job had said, "l have heard of thee by
the hearing of the ear, but now mine eye seeth thee.”
After a week of hiding by day and making his way north Sam felt that at last his eyes were seeing Kate, as he sat astride his horse on a hilltop and looked over at her flowers. She had quite a garden this year; he saw that she had used some of the seeds he had given her. This indicated, surely, that she knew what she was doing, or that God was guiding her hand. Approaching, he thought her flowers lovely, though he preferred the wild ones—the columbines and lilies and gilias and a hundred more. It looked to him as if she had planted a few columbines; if she had, the glory of their spurred petals would look as out of place in this arid and lonely region as the blond curls and laughing blue eyes of a girl child.
Kate now came in sight out of the river woods, the pail in her hand. While she came up the hill he studied her garden. She surely was making a loveliness of bloom and fragrance above her children, with the tallest flowers to the north and the others stepping down to the south. On the north side there was an open spot; it was there, he supposed, that she sat when she talked to her children or read from the book. When she came up with the pail he called her Mrs. Bowden and asked how she was but she did not look at him. She was like a woman who, having only a small measure of awareness, gave it all to her Bowers and her children. Telling her that he had cleaned and oiled and polished her rifle, he set it by the cabin door. He then quickly framed her face and kissed her forehead, saying, "I’ll get this pailful"; but when he tried to take the pail from her hand she made a wild—female movement, and Sam stepped back. He studied her as she went down the hill; each year she looked smaller and frailer and grayer. When she vanished into river brush he looked over at the cairn; then at her sage plants and flowers; and at last at the long knife and heavy revolver hanging from his waist.
This evening while smoking a pipeful he saw the moon come up; soon she would be in the garden, talking to her angels. It was too bad she didn’t have some trees up there. He wondered if he ought to transplant a river willow or serviceberry or aspen. If she had a grove of aspens she could listen to the marvelous music of the leaves when the soft winds whispered over them and find the joy in their golds and yellows in the fall.
He guessed at last that he ought to go up and sit with her. She was by the flowers at the north edge, facing the sage plants, the book in her lap. Sam would have been amazed if he had known what she was thinking—for she was telling herself that not until this moment had she known how handsome her sons were, or how lovely her daughter. They had not grown at all since that night when they came out of heaven to kneel before her. But she had not thought about that. She might have said that angels did not grow but were always the same. Because the moon was full, and golden like a melon, her daughter was exquisite in her loveliness, as she smiled and nodded at her mother across the sage foliage. She wore a heavenly filmy stuff
as delicate as spider gossamer, that no one had ever seen on earth, for it was not there. Kate could not see the shoulders of her sons but she knew they were gowned in a silken radiance i that was not of the earth.
She read first to them Isaiah’s words, " '. . . they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint.’ ” All day while carrying water up the hill she had murmured the words over and over, for she was waiting on the Lord as well as she knew how, and she was not weary. In her soul with these words had been the others, "The wilderness and the solitary place shall be glad for them; and the desert shall rejoice, and blossom as the rose." Sam stood behind her, pulling his pipe and hearing her words: that the tongue of the dumb would sing, and in the wilderness, waters would break out and flow away into the desert. A path would be there and no killing beasts would be found there; and all sorrow and sighing would go away.
The daughter and the sons smiled at her, and all the flowers were softly nodding; and after a while the mother began to hum an old song that mothers in all lands sang to their little ones; and behind her a mouth harp was soft and low. Sam had backed away and now leaned against the cabin, his rifle at his side. Did she, he wondered, think the music was from heaven? Who could say it was not? After a few minutes he took the lead and played the simple themes that his mother had sung to her children; and in a low tired voice Kate carried the words to his music. For almost two hours he played and she sang, and not once did she turn to look at him or seem to know that he was there. He then slipped silently out of her sight.