Sally
understood, and came and laughingly grasped his arm.
"Oh, Jim," she said playfully, "you are getting muscles like steel. You
hadn't these when you were colonel of the Kentucky Carbineers!"
"I guess I need them now," he said, smiling, and with the child still in
his arms drew her to a window looking northward. As far as the eye could
see, nothing but snow, like a blanket spread over the land. Here and
there in the wide expanse a tree silhouetted against the sky, a tracery
of eccentric beauty, and off in the far distance a solitary horseman
riding towards the postriding hard.
"It was root, hog, or die with me, Sally," he continued, "and I rooted
. . . I wonder--that fellow on the horse--I have a feeling about him. See,
he's been riding hard and long-you can tell by the way the horse drops
his legs. He sags a bit himself. . . . But isn't it beautiful, all that
out there--the real quintessence of life."
The air was full of delicate particles of frost on which the sun
sparkled, and though there was neither bird nor insect, nor animal, nor
stir of leaf, nor swaying branch or waving grass, life palpitated in the
air, energy sang its song in the footstep that crunched the frosty
ground, that broke the crusted snow; it was in the delicate wind that
stirred the flag by the barracks away to the left; hope smiled in the
wide prospect over which the thrilling, bracing air trembled.
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