Arizona -- Fiction; Grand Canyon (Ariz.) -- Fiction; Western stories
"Ah!" said Enoch, and fell silent. Diana, in her favorite attitude,
hands clasping her knees, watched the fire. At last Enoch roused
himself.
"Shall you come to Washington this winter, Diana?"
"I ought to, but I may not. I may go into the Havesupai country for
two months, after you go East, and put Washington off until late
spring."
"Don't fear that I shall disturb you, when you come, dear." Enoch
looked at Diana with troubled eyes.
She looked at him, but said nothing, and again there was silence.
Enoch emptied his pipe and put it in his pocket.
"After you have finished this work for the President, then what, Diana?"
She shook her head. "There is plenty of time to plan for that. If I
go into the angle of the children's games and their possible relations
to religious ceremonies, there's no telling when I shall wind up! Then
there are their superstitions that careful study might separate clearly
from their true spiritism. The great danger in work like mine is that
it is apt to grow academic. In the pursuit of dry ethnological facts
one forgets the artistry needed to preserve it and present it to the
world."
"Whew!" sighed Enoch. "I'm afraid you're a fearful highbrow, Diana!
Hello, Jonas, what can I do for you?"
"We all are going down the desert a piece with Wee-tah. They's a charm
down there he knows about. They think we'll be gone about an hour.
But don't worry about us."
"Don't let the ghosts get you, old man,", said Enoch. "After all
you've lived through, that would be too simple."
Jonas grinned, and followed the Indians out into the darkness.
"Now," inquired Enoch, "is that tact or superstition?"
"Both, I should say," replied Diana. "We'll have to agree that Na-che
and Jonas are doing all they can to make the match. I gather from what
Na-che says that they're working mostly on love charms for us."
"More power to 'em," said Enoch grimly. "Diana, let's walk out under
the stars for a little while. The fire dims them."
They rose, and Enoch put his arm about the girl and said, with a
tenderness in his beautiful voice that seemed to Diana a very part of
the harmony of the glowing stars:
"Diana! Oh, Diana! Diana!"
She wondered as they moved slowly away from the fire, if Enoch had any
conception of the beauty of his voice. It seemed to her to express the
man even more fully than his face. All the sweetness, all the
virility, all the suffering, all the capacity for joy that was written
in Enoch's face was expressed in his voice, with the addition of a
melodiousness that only tone could give. Although she never had heard
him make a speech she knew how even his most commonplace sentence must
wing home to the very heart of the hearer.
They said less, in this hour alone together, than they said in any
evening of their journey. And yet they both felt as if it was the most
nearly perfect of their hours.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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