Theodore Winthrop

“ If she did not love him, — this man of all men most lovable, this feminine soul in the body of a hero, this man who had spilled his blood for her, whose whole history had trained him for those crowning hours of a chivalric life when the lover led our Gallop of Three; if she did not love him, she must be, I thought, some bloodless creature of a type other than human, an angel and no woman, a creature not yet truly embodied into the body of love we seemed to behold. ”

“ She grew more beautiful daily. Those weary days when, mile after dreary mile, the listless march of the Mormon caravan bore her farther and farther away into hopeless exile, were gone forever. She breathed ruddy hope now. Before, she had filtered hope from every breath and only taken the thin diet of pale endurance. All future possibility of trial, after her great escape, seemed nothing. She was confident of Brent’s instant recovery, with repose, and a surgeon more skilful than she, at Fort Laramie. ”

“ Every day he grew a little weaker in body; but every day the strong spirit lifted the body to its work. He must live to be our guide, that he felt. He must be cheerful, gay even, lest the lady he had saved should too bitterly feel that her safety was daily paid for by his increasing agony. ”