Free Leave Her to Heaven by Ben Ames Williams

the cloudless sky; but it was so distant they heard no thunder rumble. ‘There’s rain north of us,’ Mrs. Robie doubtfully remarked.
    As she spoke, Robie joined them. ‘Ellen knows her way home, if she wants to come,’ he reminded her.
    Ruth added: ‘Yes. Don’t worry, please.’ She bade them good night and turned away, and Harland. noticed how pleasantly she moved. He was surprised to find that in the darkness she wore a beauty of which in the light of day he had never been conscious.
    After a moment Mis. Robie likewise said good night, and the lightning flashed again, and Harland said: ‘That must be an old roncher of a thunderstorm.’
    â€˜We get some terrors,’ Robie agreed. ‘Real cloudbursts. I’ve seen the brook rise three feet in an hour, even here where it has room to spread all over the canyon.’ He turned away. ‘Good night, old man.’

    Harland at last abandoned his vigil, telling himself he was a fool to be concerned; but he wondered whether he would hear Ellen’s horse if she returned during the night. He woke before sunrise and at once thought of her and dressed and went out. No one was stirring in the bunkhouse; but one of the men must already have gone to find and bring in the horses for the day’s use, and Harland walked up to the corral — a lonely milch cow, secured to one of the posts, was its sole occupant — and stayed there till he heard the clatter of hooves up the canyon. The horses came at a gallop, with tossing heads and flanks wet from the night’s fall of dew. Penned in the corral they circled excitedly, the cow shrinking and making herself small as they milled past her; and then Charlie Yates, who had brought them in, stopped to roll a cigarette and to exchange a word with Harland.
    â€˜She hasn’t come home yet,’ he said looking up the canyon trail; and after a moment he added: ‘She’s a hot one, always doing the damnedest things. You’d think she’d know Mrs. Robie would be upset.’
    Harland surprisingly resented this echo of his own criticism. ‘Can I have a horse?’ he asked stiffly. ‘I think I’ll ride to meet her.’
    â€˜Sure thing,’ Charlie agreed. ‘I’ll go along if you say so.’
    â€˜No need,’ Harland told him. ‘She’s all. right.’
    â€˜Sure,’ Charlie drawled. ‘She knows all the answers.’ Harland realized that even Charlie must be uneasy, to speak thus of a guest.
    When his horse was ready, Harland set out, at first at a foot pace to conceal his own eagerness; but once out of the other’s sight, he lifted his horse to a trot and then to a lope. The sun struck the ridges high above him; but here in the canyon the air lay damp and cool, and he rode in shadows while in the sky the level rays swept away some shredded skeins of golden cloud. When in due time he passed the bars and left the main trail and began to climb, he ascended into sunlight that came pouring over the heights behind him in a shining flood; and on the crest of the ridge he met Ellen face to face.

    The sun was in her eyes and the sun was all upon her, so that she seemed for an instant to wear a sort of incandescence. Hear-land imagined the stains of tears upon her cheeks, and the ravages of solitary grief in her countenance. Phrases formed themselves in his writer’s mind and he thought of a white-hot ingot coming from the fire, of molten gold in a bone-white crucible. Sorrow, the night long, had brayed her in a mortar, and her soul was swept and burnished.
    â€˜All right?’ he asked, hoarse and husky.
    She nodded, smiling radiantly. ‘Come,’ she said, and touched his hand, inviting him to share with her some pleasant prospect. ‘I’m ready now to return to the world again.’
    They rode back to the lodge, and till they left their horses — Charlie was there to take the reins — she did