At Pinneys Ranch | Page 6

must
believe that he could do this thing, or he surely could not. To question
it was to surrender his wife; to despair was to abandon her to her fate.
So, as a wrestler strains against a mighty antagonist, his will strained
and tugged in supreme stress against the impalpable obstruction of
space, and, fighting despair with despair, doggedly held to its purpose,
and sought to keep his faculties unremittingly streaming to one end.
Finally, as this tremendous effort, which made minutes seem hours,
went on, there came a sense of efficiency, the feeling of achieving
something. From this consciousness was first born a faith, no longer
desperate, but rational, that he might succeed, and with faith came an
instantaneous tenfold multiplication of force. The overflow of energy
lost the tendency to dissipation and became steady. The will appeared
to be getting the mental faculties more perfectly in hand, if the
expression may be used, not only concentrating but fairly fusing them
together by the intensity with which it drove them to their object. It was
time. Already, perhaps, Mary was about to utter the vows that would

give her to another. Lansing's lips moved. As if he were standing at her
side, he murmured with strained and labored utterance ejaculations of
appeal and adjuration.
Then came the climax of the stupendous struggle. He became aware of
a sensation so amazing that I know not if it can be described at all,--a
sensation comparable to that which comes up the mile-long
sounding-line, telling that it touches bottom. Fainter far, as much finer
as is mind than matter, yet not less unmistakable, was the thrill which
told the man, agonizing on that lonely mountain of Colorado, that the
will which he had sent forth to touch the mind of another, a thousand
miles away, had found its resting-place, and the chain between them
was complete. No longer projected at random into the void, but as if it
sent along an established medium of communication, his will now
seemed to work upon hers, not uncertainly and with difficulty, but as if
in immediate contact. Simultaneously, also, its mood changed. No
more appealing, agonizing, desperate, it became insistent, imperious,
dominating. For only a few moments it remained at this pitch, and then,
the mental tension suddenly relaxing, he aroused to a perception of his
surroundings, of which toward the last he had become oblivious. He
was drenched with perspiration and completely exhausted. The iron
horseshoe which he had held in his hands was drawn halfway out.
Thirty-six hours later, Lansing, accompanied by Pinney, climbed down
from the stage at the railroad station. During the interval Lansing had
neither eaten nor slept. If at moments in that time he was able to
indulge the hope that his tremendous experiment had been successful,
for the main part the overwhelming presumption of common sense and
common experience against such a notion made it seem childish folly
to entertain it.
At the station was to be sent the dispatch, the reply to which would
determine Mary's fate and his own. Pinney signed it, so that, if the
worst were true, Lansing's existence might still remain a secret; for of
going back to her in that case, to make her a sharer of his shame, there
was no thought on his part. The dispatch was addressed to Mr.
Davenport, Mary's minister, and merely asked if the wedding had taken

place.
They had to wait two hours for the answer. When it came, Lansing was
without on the platform, and Pinney was in the office. The operator
mercifully shortened his suspense by reading the purport of the
message from the tape: "The dispatch in answer to yours says that the
wedding did not take place."
Pinney sprang out upon the platform. At sight of Lansing's look of
ghastly questioning, the tears blinded him, and he could not speak, but
the wild exultation of his face and gestures was speech enough.
The second day following, Lansing clasped his wife to his breast, and
this is the story she told him, interrupted with weepings and
shudderings and ecstatic embraces of reassurance. The reasons which
had determined her, in disregard of the dictates of her own heart, to
marry again, have been sufficiently intimated in her letter to Mrs.
Pinney. For the rest, Mr. Whitcomb was a highly respectable man,
whom she esteemed and believed to be good and worthy. When the
hour set for the marriage arrived, and she took her place by his side
before the minister and the guests, her heart indeed was like lead, but
her mind calm and resolved. The preliminary prayer was long, and it
was natural, as it went on, that her thoughts should go back to the day
when she had thus stood by another's side.