"I don't know any more about them than you," he answered her thoughts. "But there they are and here we are." He said nothing about the bodies evidently carried away by those who had brought the ponies. "It's all a mystery--a mystery of the plains. I haven't unraveled the very first thread of--it. What's the use? The western way is to take what comes, isn't it, whether northers or ponies? There's a much bigger mystery than all that filling my mind." "What is that?" "You." She bent over the sandwich with heightened color. "Poor Brick!" she murmured as if to divert his thoughts. But his sympathy just then was not for Brick. "Lahoma, you said that this is a subject a man should bring up." She looked at him brightly, still flushing. "Well?" "I'm bringing it up, Lahoma." "But we must be planning to save Brick from arrest." "I'm hoping we'll get home in time--note that I say HOME, Lahoma. I refer to the cove. I'm hoping we'll reach home in time to forestall Red Kimball. We've lost a great deal of time, but Brick doubtless is safely hiding. And when we get to the journey's end--Lahoma, do you know what naturally comes at the journey's end?" "A marriage." "I thought that was what you meant." "Will you marry me at the journey's end?" Lahoma turned very red and laid down the sandwich. Then she laughed. Then she started up. "Let's get on the ponies!" she cried. CHAPTER XXII JOURNEY'S END The snow, that morning, lay in drifts from five to eight inches across the trail, and to the height of several feet up against those rock walls raising, as on vast artificial tables, the higher stretches of the Kiowa country. But by noon the plain was scarcely streaked with white and when the sun set there was nothing to suggest that a snowflake had ever fallen in that sand-strewn world. The interminable reaches, broken only by the level uplands marked from the plain by their perpendicular walls, and the Wichita Mountains, as faint and unsubstantial to the eye as curved images of smoke against the sky--these dreary monotonies and remotenesses naturally oppress the traveler with a sense of his insignificance. The vast silences, too, of brooding, treeless wastes, sun-baked river-beds, shadowless brown squares standing for miles at a brief height above the shadowless brown floor of the plain--silences amidst which only the wind finds a voice--these, too, insist drearily on the nothingness of man. But Wilfred and Lahoma were not thus affected. The somethingness of man had never to them been so thrillingly evident. They saw and heard that which was not, except for those having eyes and ears to apprehend--roses in the sand, bird-song in the desert. And when the rude cabins and hasty tents of the last stage-station in Greer County showed dark and white against the horizon of a spring-like morning, Wilfred cried exultantly: "The end of the journey!"