more wakeful than the pale, tired girl who watched all the changes from
dark to dawn at the stage window.

Once or twice she caught a glimpse of distant camp-fires burning and knew
that some cattle outfit was camped there for the night; and once they
drove so close that she could hear the cow-boys’ voices, enriched and
mellowed by distance, borne to them on the cool, evening wind. It gave a
sense of security to know that these big-hearted, manly lads were within
call, and she watched the dwindling spark of their camp-fires and strained
her ears to catch the last note of their singing, with something of the
feeling of severed comradeship. Range cattle, startled from sleep by the
stage, scrambled to their feet and bolted headlong in the blind impulse of
panic, their horns and the confused massing of their bodies showing in
sharp silhouette against the horizon for a moment, then all would settle
into quiet again. There was no moon that night, but the stars were sown
broadcast—softly yellow stars, lighting the darkness with a shaded luster,
like lamps veiled in pale-yellow gauze. The chill electric glitter of the
stars, as we know it from between the roofs of high houses, this world of
far-flung distance knows not. There the stars are big and still, like the
eyes of a contented woman.

The hoofs of the horses beat the night away as regularly as the ticking of
a clock. It grew darker as the night wore on, and sometimes a coyote would
yelp from the fringe of willows that bordered a creek in a way that made
Mary recall tales of banshees. And once, when the first pale streak of
dawn trembled in the east and the mountains looked like jagged rocks
heaved against the sky and in danger of toppling, the whole dread picture
brought before her one of Vedder’s pictures that hung in the shabby old
library at home.