Air pilots -- Fiction; Mesas -- Fiction; Older men -- Fiction; Short stories; West (U.S.) -- Fiction
He strode frenziedly. A glance about as I stripped myself of
incumbrances showed me that we were isolated. The mesa dropped abruptly
on all sides; by a running start we might soar from an edge like a
seaplane from the platform of a battleship. And I noted also that
without doubt we should have to depend upon our own resources, for if
this was a country God forgot it moreover seemed to be a country by man
forgotten, granted that man ever before had known it. All furrowed and
washed and castlemented, it was a region where we might remain pancaked
and unremarked, as insignificant as a beetle.
* * * * *
I was hunting our engine trouble, when on a sudden he called, and
beckoned.
“Here, you! What’s this?”
I went over. Something quickened me, electric and prickling as when
one’s flesh crawls in contact with a presence unseen. Skull and
skeleton lay eery and mysterious, whitely gleaming, bleached by many
weathers. He stooped----
“Great God!” he stammered.
“You’ve found it?” I asked: and I knew that he had, even while he was
polishing it against his sleeve.
“I don’t know, I don’t know. Look at it. Tell me. I can’t see. What is
it?”
His hand shook as with palsy as he extended it to me; then the half of
a silver coin, plucked from the loosened grip of skeleton fingers; the
date----
“Give it to me,” he cried, and snatched at it.
The date, 1866; and the legend, upon the side less tarnished, “--Till
We Meet Again.” He fumbled in his pocket. The two halves matched
sufficiently--“God Be With You Till We Meet Again.”
“What you’ve been looking for?” I prompted.
He stared dazedly at me.
“Looking for! A thousand times. A thousand years. No, no; not that
long, but more than fifty years. Denver, Cheyenne, Salt Lake, San
Francisco, Los Angeles, Helena, Laramie, Creede, Deadwood, Leadville,
Dodge City--wherever men and women of her kind gathered in her day and
his I’ve searched again and again. Not for her! She must be dead, and
long dead. But for word of this; for this, or trace of this. It was
mine. I gave it. And now, here! How came it here? Those bones won’t
speak.” He angrily kicked them. “Speak! What were you doing with this
half coin? Where was she? Were you man or woman?”
“Woman, Mr. Brown,” said I.
His jaw tautened as he faced me full.
“You say woman? How do you know? What woman?”
“I know,” said I. “And what woman? A young woman, a girl, somebody’s
wife who was supposed to have run away with a breed on the Overland
Trail fifty odd years ago--but didn’t.”
He recoiled a step, tottering, countenance blanched.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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