Author's note: Back in the days when I wrote Rocinante, I never thought there would be a long series of Spearfish Lake books. I wrote an epilogue, which cleaned up a couple loose ends in the story, and had the lead to a possible future story.

Well, I was wrong. There are a lot of Spearfish Lake stories, and there are more to come. When I decided to post Rocinante, I decided to not include the epilogue, mostly because I felt it didn't add very much to the story. But, when I pulled Rocinante together to post on Beyond the Far Horizon, I goofed up and included the epilogue. A number of people have called me on that over the past couple years, so I decided to go ahead and post the epilogue as a short. Maybe this will interest some of you in going back and reading Rocinante again.

In spite of a lot of words run through various computers since 1992, when I first wrote Rocinate on a Tandy 1000-EX with a 5 1/2" floppy drive and a green-on-black screen, it remains one of my favorites. More than any other of my stories, it can take me back to when I was young and my life was different.

-- WB

It would be a lie to say that Mark and Jackie lived happily ever after, for everybody has their ups and downs; but "the best honeymoon a couple could have" kept echoing down through their lives. Every now and then, something would remind them of the trip, or they would hear something that would fill them in on a bit or a piece of unfinished business.

Three magazine stories over the years stood out in those days that brought their trip back to them.

The first came only three or four years later, when Mark picked up a Sky and Telescope and read a story about a former Buddhist monk, John Dobson, and how he traveled around the country with his low-tech telescopes, showing the sky to people. Not surprisingly, the photo of the story was of their friend, John. By then, Mark had his own telescope that roughly followed Dobson’s design. It was a little smaller -- 16 inches -- and for years, it was one of the biggest in the region.

But the seeds that John Dobson planted had taken root. By ten years after meeting him at the Texas Star Party, the "Dobsonian" telescope had more than taken root; it had revolutionized amateur astronomy. The time would not be far off when Mark’s 16-inch telescope would be an average size, and telescopes the size of Dobson’s 24-inch "Delphinium," or even larger would not be uncommon. The Dobsonian telescopes that spread around the country opened many people’s eyes to the wonders of the night sky impossible to appreciate in the relatively small telescopes that had been standard up until then.

The mystery of the sleepless night at Misery Hole took longer to solve.

It was almost twenty years to the day after that night of worry near Carlsbad Caverns when Mark kept a dentist’s appointment. The dentist was running late, so Mark thumbed through an old National Geographic to discover the answer to the mystery that he had long wondered about.

Down at the bottom of Misery Hole was a pile of rock rubble. One day, many years after that night in 1971, some amateur cave explorers rappelled down to the bottom of the hole and found a breeze blowing out of the rocks. Curious, they began to excavate the rock, to see what lay underneath. It was a big job, and it took a long time before they moved away the last rock, and then the man who moved it was almost sucked into the hole beneath -- the only known opening to the largest previously unknown cave discovered since Carlsbad Caverns itself. The moaning was from air blowing into and out of the cave at speeds of up to 70 miles per hour as the outside air pressure changed. The spelunkers had been exploring what they called Lechuguilla Cave for several years now, had charted over sixty miles of passages, and were still finding more. Mark thumbed through the pictures taken of the wild and virgin cave, marveling at the wonders beneath Jackie and him that night as they lay awake under the New Mexico sky.

Perhaps the magazine story that touched them the most came not long after Mark discovered what the moaning at Misery Hole was about.

One Friday in July of 1992, Mark and Jackie were packing their bags for a weekend at a friend's cottage. Mark knew that the weekend would involve a lot of lying around in the sun, and he didn’t have the tan to deal with that, so he knew he’d be sitting in the shade. He packed a book to read and a couple of trade magazines from the phone company to catch up on what was happening.

The next morning, Mark was sitting under the shade of a poplar tree, reading Independent Telephone News, when a story brought the years flooding back over him. "Jackie, come look at this," Mark called to her.

Jackie came over and joined her husband in the shade. He handed her the article, and she read:

There weren’t a lot of Iraqi planes knocked down by fighters in the Persian Gulf War, since most of them ran and hid. But several were knocked from the sky, and America’s top scorer said he would have never made it to the cockpit if it weren’t for the help of independent telephone company employees and owners.

"My God," Jackie said. "Is that our little E.J.?"

"Couldn’t be anybody else." Mark said. "Does this ever bring the memories back! I remember sitting in Rocinante with him, telling him that if he worked hard, he could be anything he wanted to be. It’s just like it was yesterday."

"I guess he listened to you," Jackie said. "You know, except for the Christmas cards that we get from the Pittengers, I’ve often wondered if we did anything worthwhile on the trip, or whether we were just playing."

Mark nodded. "I remember Brother Erasmus saying ‘The Lord works in mysterious ways.’ He does, indeed."