The frontier had been a refuge for others like him and like this woman. People such as they broke with the east; they reared a life as tall and succulent as the upland reeds around their homes, and as unstable. Life in the prairie country had little of the toiling triteness which symbolized these Pennsylvania farms: the very solitude and wonder of the pillowed clouds made a pathway into something fresh and luring … you slept soundly at night, you fancied cobalt castles amid the gum-weed, you ate hungrily.

Just as a wise man had said, the soil would breed poverty and ignorance; no paradise could withstand them. But before people put their noses into the furrows there were open years when every windy ridge abounded in exultant madness, and those were the years Dan Bale saw himself spending with this woman.

Such a passion, he had come to believe, must have more than the body behind it. It would be rounded, all-embracing … these books we will share, we will laugh over this carded wool, over oatmeal and axes, and each will listen when the geese and pelicans ride the sky to the north, and will say: Hear them, hear them? Even our rages and the human squabbles curling between us will have the mutual brand; good and evil, the magnificent and the more frequent trivial, both will be ours.

He did not know how to importune or persuade with forethought. The first joustings, brief as they were, had been only a pretense to hide their instant eagerness, the hearty instinct to blend their bodies and see what it would be like. She had whispered and confessed as he had; both of them knew; nothing was covert, and even in this sodden fear there was no flavor of suspicion.

Wants to talk to me about Tyler. Well, by God, he said—by God—