CHAPTER VI


Then followed days and weeks that seemed to Clarence as a dream. At
first, an interval of hushed and awed restraint when he and Susy were
kept apart, a strange and artificial interest taken little note of by
him, but afterwards remembered when others had forgotten it; the burial
of Mrs. Silsbee beneath a cairn of stones, with some ceremonies that,
simple though they were, seemed to usurp the sacred rights of grief from
him and Susy, and leave them cold and frightened; days of frequent and
incoherent childish outbursts from Susy, growing fainter and rarer as
time went on, until they ceased, he knew not when; the haunting by night
of that morning vision of the three or four heaps of ragged clothes on
the ground and a half regret that he had not examined them more closely;
a recollection of the awful loneliness and desolation of the broken and
abandoned wagon left behind on its knees as if praying mutely when the
train went on and left it; the trundling behind of the fateful wagon
in which Mrs. Silsbee's body had been found, superstitiously shunned by
every one, and when at last turned over to the authorities at an outpost
garrison, seeming to drop the last link from the dragging chain of the
past. The revelation to the children of a new experience in that brief
glimpse of the frontier garrison; the handsome officer in uniform and
belted sword, an heroic, vengeful figure to be admired and imitated
hereafter; the sudden importance and respect given to Susy and himself
as "survivors"; the sympathetic questioning and kindly exaggerations
of their experiences, quickly accepted by Susy--all these, looking back