We had agreed not to tell anybody where we were going; for that matter,
I didn't even tell Polly until after we had started. Turning southward
from Colorado Springs and stopping overnight in Trinidad, we took a
morning train on the Santa Fe and vanished into the westward void. A
day and a night beyond this we were debarking at Williams, Arizona, and
in due time reached our real hiding-place; a comfortable ranch house
within easy riding distance of that most majestic of immensities, the
Grand Canyon of the Colorado. It was Polly's idea; the choice of a
quiet retreat as against the social attractions of the great hotel on
the canyon's brink. We had each other, and that was sufficient.
Of that heavenly month, spent in a world far removed from all the
turmoil and distractions of modern civilization, there is nothing to be
here written down. For those who have drained a similar cup of
blissful happiness for themselves there is no need; and those who have
not would not understand. What I recall most vividly now is a single
unnerving incident; unnerving, I say, though at the time it was quickly
drowned in the flowing tide of joy.
It chanced upon a day toward the month's end when we had broken the
heavenly sequence of quiet days by riding a pair of our host's
well-broken cow ponies over to El Tovar for dinner. Since it was not
the tourist season there were not many guests in the great inn; but
one, a man who sat by himself in a far corner of the dining-room, gave
me a turn that made me sick and faint at my first sight of him. The
man was big and swarthy of face, and he wore a pair of drooping
mustaches. For one heart-stopping instant I made sure it was William
Cummings, the deputy prison warden who had so miraculously missed
seeing me in the dining-car of my train of escape. But since nothing
happened and he paid no manner of attention to us, I decided gratefully
that it was only a resemblance. There was no such name as Cummings on
the hotel register, which I examined after we left the dining-room, and
I saw no more of the man with the drooping mustaches.
Momentary as the shock had been, I found that Polly had remarked it.
She spoke of it on the ride back to our retreat at Carter's.
"Are you feeling entirely well, Jimmie, dear?" she asked; and before I
could reply: "You had a bad turn of some sort while we were at table.
I saw it in your face and eyes."
I hastened to assure her that there was nothing the matter with me;
that there couldn't be anything the matter with a man who had died and
gone to heaven nearly a month previous to the dinner at El Tovar.
"But the man has got to go back to earth again pretty soon, and take
the woman with him," she retorted, laughing. "Just think, Jimmie; it
has been nearly a month, as you say, and we haven't had a letter or a
telegram in all that time! Not that I'm regretting anything; I'm
happy, dearest--as happy as an angel with wings; but I want to see my
daddy."
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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