Soon I should be called wife again, but by lips I loved,
and to whose language my heart thrilled. The past, always vague,
would soon be no more than a forgotten dream - an episode quite
closed. I could afford from this moment on to view life like other
girls and rejoice in my youth and the love which every day was
becoming more and more to me.
"But God had His eye upon me, and in the midst of my happiness and
the hurry of our final preparations His bolt fell. It struck me
while I was at the - don't laugh; rather shudder - at the
dressmaker's shop in Fourteenth Street. I was leaning over a table,
chattering like a magpie over the way I wanted a gown trimmed, when
my eye fell on a scrap of newspaper in which something had come
rolled to madame. It was torn at the edge, but on the bit lying
under my eyes I saw my husband's name, William Pfeiffer, and that
the paper was a Denver one. There was but one William Pfeiffer
in Denver - and he was my husband. And I read - feeling nothing.
Then I read again, and the world, my world, went from under my feet;
for the man who had fallen dead in the camp at Nome was Wallace,
William's brother, and not William himself. William had been left
behind on the road by his more energetic brother, who had pushed
on for succor through the worst storm and under the worst conditions
possible even in that God-forsaken region.
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