Hers the Kingdom Read Online Free Page A

expectation—

of what, none of us were quite sure. It was enough that the patterns of our days changed, that the long sameness was broken. We were all affected, even sweet-mannered little Servia, the smallest of the boys, who walked around with a perplexed look on his face. We knew the purpose of Owen Reade's visit, though of course no one mentioned it.
         The older boys accepted Owen easily. They were anxious to ask him all about his travels in the West and he told them what they wanted to know. He tended to be self-deprecating, and he laughed at his own mistakes with ease. "Once," he said, "a small band of us were riding south of the Gila River in the Arizona territory, and we'd been told we could find shelter for a night at the home of a Señor Lopez. Well, we found the house all right—the hacienda, as they call it—and I saw a dark-skinned man and called out to him, in as good Spanish as I could muster, ' Señor Lopez, buenas dias! ' And this fellow calls back, 'The name's Gilligan, friend, and I'm from Baltimore.'"
         He was the kind of man who could be at ease anywhere. He seemed to have an uncanny ability to enter into the rhythm of a place, to become part of it, even when he was not actively a part.
         Bernie organized a footrace to be run on the course we had cut in the near pasture. Owen volunteered to check distances and call times, he was so much in the middle of things that we scarcely noticed he chose not to run. When Bernie beat Willa, decisively this time, and none of us seemed to know quite how we felt about it, it was Owen who said exactly the right thing. "Every champion," he announced in sonorous tones, "must make way for new, younger talent. There is always, must always be, the challenge."
         We all cheered and clapped and the Big Boys raised Willa to their shoulders and carried her around the running path. Willa waved her hat and made a fine, funny speech, after which Owen presented her with a bouquet of flowers which the Little Boys had hastily picked—roses and honeysuckle and flags—and we went to our beds that night feeling full and fine with ourselves.
         Something was happening and Owen was in the center of it all, moving, making the movement. Owen set the pace, he knew what he had to do and how long it was going to take. Time was his only limitation. He could not tolerate diversions and there was no place for mistakes because mistakes cost time. (Calculated risks, perhaps; when time was the critical factor, one would need to take calculated risks.)
         Owen created his own impetus. You could not be with him and fail to feel the energy—which was not physical, though he moved more briskly than others. It was deeper, more subtle. He had an aura that seemed always to say something important is about to happen. When this aura was coupled with Willa's energy, which was prodigious, the air fairly crackled; her yearnings were whetted by Owen's sense of the possible.
         Owen moved in a sphere that was new to us. His days were not bound by routine, his seasons not tied to the growing of crops. He ignored limitations which others embraced—in space as well as time. He had traveled to the south of France, to the Sandwich Islands, to the territories in the far West. He was, as yet, bound to no place, was without the geographical anchors so many of us find necessary. I think that Owen could not fathom the sense of peace some people get from familiar things. He had an appetite for change, for beginnings.
         Willa, no less, longed for change; she wanted nothing so much as to begin. Each was to be, for the other, an instrument to achieve a dream, though Willa's, at that time, was not fully shaped, but only lay in the far reaches of her mind, aching to find form.
         Though we could not then have known it, nor would we for a time, Owen had already developed a taste for power, and the sense of mission that was its corollary.
         My memory of those