"What then?"

"Then he said: If we but have the courage to step over the threshold......

"Go on."

"Well, the rest's for another day."

"Papa!" Maeve protested.

"You be proud, child. If not for you, we'd never have met Mr. Buddenbaum, and I believe our fortune changed the moment we did."

He had refused to be further drawn on the subject, but had instead turned the conversation to the matter of what trees might be planted on Everville's Main Street. Maeve knew better than to press him, but she thought much about dreams thereafter. She would wake sometimes in the middle of the night with the ragged scraps of a dream floating around her head, and lie watching the stars, thinking: was I at the door then? And was there something wonderful on the other side, that I've already forgotten ?

She became determined to keep these fragments from escaping her, and with a little practice she learned to snatch hold of them upon waking and describe them aloud to herself. Words held them, she found, however rudimentary. A few syllables were all that was needed to keep a dream from slipping away.

She kept the skill to herself (she didn't even mention it to her father), and it was a pleasant distraction for the long, dusty days of summer to sit in the wagon and sew pieces of remembered dreams together so that they made stories stranger than any to be found in her books.

As for the mellifluous Mr. Buddenbaum, his name was not mentioned again for some considerable time. When it was finally mentioned, however, it was in circumstances so strange Maeve would not forget them until the day she died.

they had been entering Idaho, and by the calculations of Dr. Hodder (who assembled the company every third evening and told them of their progress), there was a good prospect that they would be over the Blue Mountains and in sight of the fertile valleys of Oregon before the autumn had properly nipped the air.