“There was one morning when I had been watching beside her bed all night, thinking, as she slept, how pinched and thin and shadowy she had grown. We were young then, if you can think of us as that, young like your Aunt Anna and John Herrick, with years to dream of still before us. And that night it seemed as though it all was coming to an end. I can remember how the dawn came in at the windows and how Miriam opened her eyes to look up at me and smile. I believe she was thinking that she would rather die here in the clean, empty quiet than in that roaring, smoke-filled town that we called home.
“But it was no place of peace for me. I called the nurse and flung myself out of the house; I tramped away up the mountain, crushing the roses and forget-me-nots under foot with a savage pleasure that I can still recall. I stood on the highest ridge at last, looked out over the valley and the dark hills with their summits bathed in sunshine, at the winding silver thread of the river, and I held up my arms and opened my lips to curse them all.
“The words I meant to say were never spoken. I heard a footstep on the trail behind me and, as I looked around, a man passed by me and went down the mountain. He was old, far older than I am now, his face was so weather-beaten, his long hair so grizzled, and his back so bent that he might have passed for Father Time himself. He said no word, but he gave me one look that seemed to read every thought within me, a glance of complete and utter scorn. Some old prospector he was, a man who had spent his life trudging over the barren hillsides, looking for new mines, disappointed a thousand times, seeking fortune and never finding it. Others who followed him had prospered by his discoveries, had found the riches that he could not keep; for the man who prospects is seldom the man who gathers wealth. He gathers other things, however; forbearance, understandings, and a strange, deep patience, born of lonely valleys, endless trails, and wide starry skies. It was no wonder he scorned me and my pitiful little anger with the mountains he called his.
“I never saw him again. He stepped into my life and out of it again, and we did not even exchange a word. Yet I have never forgotten the lesson his one look taught me. I went down the hill after a little, and the nurse met me at the door.