Sam couldn’t sleep. Before long, he got up and walked around aimlessly. He walked under the moonlight to where Cindy and Armen were sleeping, to verify that everything was fine. They were both there, breathing rhythmically in the moonlight. Strange. Cindy was beautiful sleeping under the moon. He looked at her face and hair, and he tried to remember the dream rider. He puzzled. Had it been her? He recalled the girl in the mirror. Who was she? He still did not know. He suddenly realized that he was hovering, and he didn’t want to get caught, so he headed back to the fire ring. Feeling a need for company, he rekindled the campfire.
Diana, Talbot Hughes (1904)
Just after Sam left, Armen’s eyes opened, and the stars—as before—descended upon him. He remembered the words of an ancient Greek he’d encountered in a library somewhere:
The brightest of these flames, and the hottest, is the light of the sun; for that all the other stars are farther off from the earth; and that on this account, they give less light and warmth; …
Armen wondered how hard or easy it might have been for that Greek to imagine all the stars to be suns and the sun to be a mere star. “A mere star,” he whispered up into the dome. They were tiny—tiny enough to seem dimensionless—but they were not mere. Their lack of dimension pierced his consciousness. What was it about these pinpoints of fire?
The next morning, Sam was carrying firewood into the camp when he saw the cowboy and Cindy sitting next to each other. The cowboy seemed to be describing something at length. Sam looked at Cindy, trying to get some fresh perspective on her face., then he grabbed his pole and went down to the river to try to catch some lunch. A little later, Armen took his gear down to the next pool in the stream and cast his line there. When Armen wandered upstream a little later, Sam was wading in the water, up to his chest.
“Cold?” Armen greeted.
“Really cold,” Sam confirmed.
“Better you than me.”
The kids stayed at Walker’s camp another day, then they bade the cowboy goodbye and returned to the Hockett Trail, which they followed to Trout Meadows. They then followed the Jordan Trail back to the trailhead, and pushed on from there, over the Western Divide, and down to the Ponderosa Lodge.
It was time to start the school year. Armen’s nose continued to be lodged in books and maps as usual. He burrowed into the city library, and he even visited the city and university libraries in Fresno when he got a chance.
Sam went back to football. This fall, Sue was mercifully absent. Having graduated, she’d gone off to attend Cal Poly. But Sue’s taunts wouldn’t likely have been so oppressive this year, given the fact that Sam now had someone else to occupy his attention.