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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Children of the Desert, by Louis Dodge
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Children of the Desert
+
+Author: Louis Dodge
+
+Release Date: September 7, 2008 [EBook #26550]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK CHILDREN OF THE DESERT ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Roger Frank and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net
+
+
+
+
+
+CHILDREN OF THE DESERT
+
+BY THE SAME AUTHOR
+
+BONNIE MAY. Illustrated by Reginald Birch.
+  12mo . . . . . . . . . . . . . net $1.35
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+CHILDREN OF THE DESERT
+
+BY
+LOUIS DODGE
+
+NEW YORK
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+1917
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+Copyright, 1917, by
+CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS
+
+Published March, 1917
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+TO
+THE FRIENDS OF EAGLE PASS AND
+PIEDRAS NEGRAS--IN THE
+GOOD OLD DAYS
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+CONTENTS
+
+PART                                     PAGE
+  I.  Harboro and Sylvia                    1
+ II.  The Time Of Flame                    65
+III.  Fectnor, The People's Advocate       99
+ IV.  The Horse With The Golden Dapples   177
+  V.  A Wind From The North               211
+ VI.  The Guest-chamber                   243
+VII.  Sylvia                              273
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART I
+
+HARBORO AND SYLVIA
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHILDREN OF THE DESERT
+
+CHAPTER I
+
+
+They were married in the little Episcopal church in Eagle Pass on a
+September day in the late eighties. The fact may be verified, I have no
+doubt, by any who will take the trouble to examine the records, for the
+toy-like place of worship still stands.
+
+The church structure is not, perhaps, so small as my imagination presents
+it to me; but I cannot see it save with the desert as a background--the
+desert austere and illimitable. You reach the prim little front door by
+climbing a street which runs parallel with the Rio Grande, and the church
+is almost the last structure you will pass before you set forth into a
+No-Man's land of sage and cactus and yucca and mesquite lying under the
+blazing sun.
+
+Harboro his name was. Of course, there was a Christian name, but he was
+known simply as Harboro from Piedras Negras to the City. She was Sylvia
+Little. Sylvia, people called her, both before and after her marriage. The
+Little might as well never have belonged to her.
+
+Although neither Harboro nor Sylvia really belonged to Eagle Pass, the
+wedding was an event. Both had become familiar figures in the life of the
+town and were pretty well known. Their wedding drew a large and interested
+audience. (I think the theatrical phrase is justified, as perhaps will be
+seen.) Weddings were not common in the little border town, unless you
+counted the mating of young Mexicans, who were always made one by the
+priest in the _adobe_ church closer to the river. Entertainment of any
+kind was scarce. But there were other and more significant reasons why
+people wanted to see the bride and the bridegroom, when Harboro gave his
+name to the woman of his choice.
+
+The young people belonging to some sort of church guild had decorated the
+church, and special music had been prepared. And indeed when Harboro and
+Sylvia marched up the aisle to the strains of the _Lohengrin_ march (the
+bridegroom characteristically trying to keep step, and Sylvia ignoring the
+music entirely), it was not much to be wondered at that people craned
+their necks to get the best possible view. For both Harboro and the woman
+were in a way extraordinary individuals.
+
+Harboro was forty, and seemed in certain aspects older than that. He was a
+big man, well built, and handsome after a fashion. He was swarthy, with
+dark eyes which seemed to meditate, if not to dream. His hair was
+raven-black, and he wore a heavy mustache which stopped just short of
+being unduly conspicuous. It was said of him that he talked little, but
+that he listened keenly. By trade he was a railroad man.
+
+He had been heard to remark on one occasion that he had begun as a
+brakeman, but there were rumors of adventurous days before he became a
+member of a train crew. It was said that he had gone prospecting into
+Mexico as a youth, and that he had spent years working at ends and odds of
+jobs about mines and smelters. Probably he had hoped to get into something
+in a big way.
+
+However, he had finally turned to railroading, and in the course of
+uncertain events had become an engineer. It was a year or two after he had
+attained this position that he had been required to haul a special train
+from Torreon to Piedras Negras. The General Manager of the Mexican
+International Railroad was on that train, and he took occasion to talk to
+the engineer. The result pleased him mightily. In his engine clothes
+Harboro looked every inch a man. There was something clean and level about
+his personality which couldn't have been hid under a _sarape_. He stood
+shoulder to shoulder with the General Manager, making the latter look like
+a manikin, and talked about his work and the condition of the road and the
+rolling stock. He talked easily and listened intelligently. He was grave
+in an easy fashion. He took no liberties, cracked no jokes.
+
+The General Manager got the idea that the big fellow would be a good man
+to stand shoulder to shoulder with in larger events than a special trip.
+
+When he got back to headquarters he made a casual inquiry or two, and
+discovered that Harboro wrote an exceptionally good hand, and that he
+spelled correctly. He assumed that he was an educated man--though this
+impression may have been largely due to the fact that Harboro was keenly
+interested in a great variety of things, and had a good memory.
+
+The General Manager waited for certain wheels to turn, and then he sent
+for Harboro and offered him a position as chief clerk in one of the
+headquarter departments.
+
+Harboro accepted the position, and said "Thank you," and proved to be
+uncommonly competent.
+
+The people of Piedras Negras took a liking to him; the women wanted to get
+acquainted with him. He was invited to places, and he accepted the
+invitations without either belittling or magnifying their importance. He
+got on rather well from the beginning.
+
+The social affairs of Piedras Negras were sometimes on a fairly large
+scale. The General Manager had his winter residence there--a meticulously
+cultivated demain which lay like a blue spot in a cloudy sky. There were
+grass and palms and, immediately beyond, the vast desert. At night (on
+occasion) there were Chinese lanterns to add their cheerful note to pretty
+revelries, while the stars lay low and big over all the desert expanse.
+The General Manager's wife had prominent social affiliations, and she used
+to bring winter guests from the north and east--from Chicago and New York
+and Boston. There were balls and musicales, and a fine place for
+conversation out on the lawn, with Mexican servants to bring cigars and
+punch, and with Mexican fiddlers to play the national airs under a
+fig-covered band-stand.
+
+The young people from Eagle Pass used to go over when the General
+Manager's wife was giving one of her less formal affairs. They were rather
+refreshing types: the Texas type, with a good deal of freedom of action
+and speech, once they were drawn out, and with plenty of vigor. On these
+occasions Eagle Pass merged itself into the Mexican town, and went home
+late at night over the Rio Grande bridge, and regarded life as a romance.
+
+These affairs and this variety of people interested Harboro. He was not to
+be drawn out, people soon discovered; but he liked to sit on the lawn and
+listen and take observations. He was not backward, but his tastes were
+simple. He was seemingly quite as much at ease in the presence of a
+Chicago poetess with a practised--a somewhat too practised--laugh or a
+fellow employee risen, like himself, to a point where society could see
+him.
+
+In due course Eagle Pass gave an entertainment (at the Mesquite Club) and
+invited certain railroad officials and employees from the other side of
+the river. Harboro was included among those invited, and he put on correct
+evening dress, and rode over in a coach, and became a favorite in Eagle
+Pass. He seemed rather big and serious for complete assimilation, but he
+looked well with the club settings as a background, and his name appeared
+later in the week in the Eagle Pass _Guide_, in the list headed "among
+those present."
+
+All of which he accepted without agitation, or without ceasing to be
+Harboro himself all over.
+
+He did not meet Sylvia Little at the Mesquite Club. If you had known
+Sylvia and the Mesquite Club, you would laugh at so superfluous a
+statement. Eagle Pass was pleasantly democratic, socially, but it could
+not have been expected to stand for Sylvia.
+
+People didn't know much about her (to her credit, at least) except that
+she was pretty. She was wonderfully pretty, and in a way which was all the
+more arresting when you came to consider her desert surroundings.
+
+She had come, with her father, from San Antonio. They had taken a low,
+homely little house, standing under its mesquite-tree, close to the
+government reservation, where the flagstaff stood, and the cannon boomed
+at sundown, and the soldiers walked their posts. Back of the house there
+was a thicket of mesquites, and through this a path ran down to the
+river.
+
+The first thing people mistrusted about Sylvia was her father. He had no
+visible means of support; and if his manner was amiable, his ways were
+furtive. He had a bias in favor of Mexican associates, and much of his
+time was spent down under the river bank, where a few small wine-shops and
+gambling establishments still existed in those days. There were also
+rumors of drinking and gambling orgies in the house under the
+mesquite-tree, and people said that many strange customers traversed that
+path through the mesquite, and entered Little's back door. They were
+soldiers and railroad men, and others of a type whose account in the bank
+of society nobody ever undertakes to balance. Sylvia was thought to be the
+torch which attracted them, and it was agreed that Sylvia's father knew
+how to persuade them to drink copiously of beverages which they paid for
+themselves, and to manipulate the cards to his own advantage in the games
+which were introduced after a sufficient number of drinks had been
+served.
+
+Possibly a good deal of this was rumor rather than fact: an uncharitable
+interpretation of pleasures which were inelegant, certainly, but possibly
+not quite vicious. Still, it seemed to be pretty well established that up
+to the time of Sylvia's marriage her father never worked, and that he
+always had money--and this condition, on any frontier, is always regarded
+with mistrust.
+
+Sylvia's prettiness was of a kind to make your heart bleed, everything
+considered. She was of a wistful type, with eager blue eyes, and lips
+which were habitually parted slightly--lips of a delicate fulness and
+color. Her hair was soft and brown, and her cheeks were of a faint, pearly
+rosiness. You would never have thought of her as what people of strictly
+categorical minds would call a bad woman. I think a wholly normal man must
+have looked upon her as a child looks at a heather-bell--gladly and
+gratefully, and with a pleased amazement. She was small and slight. Women
+of the majordomo type must have regarded her as still a child. Her breasts
+were little, her neck and shoulders delicate, and she had a trick of
+lifting her left hand to her heart when she was startled or regarded too
+shrewdly, as if she had some prescient consciousness of coming evil.
+
+She was standing by her front gate when Harboro first saw her--and when
+she first saw Harboro. The front gate commanded an unobstructed view of
+the desert. It was near sundown, and far across the earth's floor, which
+looked somewhat like a wonderful mosaic of opals and jade at this hour, a
+Mexican goatherd was driving his flock. That was the only sign of life to
+be seen or felt, if you except the noise of locusts in the mesquite near
+by and the spasmodic progress of a horned toad in the sand outside
+Sylvia's gate.
+
+Yet she was looking away to the vibrating horizon, still as hot as an
+oven, as yearningly as if at any moment a knight might ride over the rim
+of the desert to rescue her, or as if a brother were coming to put an end
+to the existence of a Bluebeard who, obviously, did not exist.
+
+And then Harboro appeared--not in the distance, but close at hand. He was
+passing Sylvia's gate. He had a natural taste for geology, it seemed, and
+he had chosen this hour to walk out beyond Eagle Pass to examine the rock
+formations which had been cast up to the surface of the desert by
+prehistoric cataclysms.
+
+He was close enough to Sylvia to touch her when her presence broke down
+his abstraction and drew his eyes away from whatever object they had been
+observing away on the horizon.
+
+He stopped as if he had been startled. That was a natural result of
+Sylvia's appearance here in this withered place. She was so delicately,
+fragilely abloom. Her setting should have been some region south of the
+Caucasus. Her period should have been during the foundations of mythology.
+She would have made you think of Eve.
+
+And because her hand went to her heart, and her lips parted tremulously,
+Harboro stopped. It was as if he felt he must make amends. Yet his words
+were the inevitable banalities.
+
+"You have a fine view here," he said.
+
+"A fine view!" she echoed, a little incredulously. It was plain that she
+did not agree with him. "There is plenty of sun and air," she conceded
+after a pause.
+
+He rested a heavy hand on the fence. When Harboro stopped you never had
+the feeling that some of his interests had gone on ahead and were
+beckoning to him. He was always all there, as if permanently.
+
+He regarded her intently. Her voice had something of the quality of the
+_Traeumerei_ in it, and it had affected him like a violin's _vibrato_,
+accompanying a death scene--or as a litany might have done, had he been a
+religious man.
+
+"I suppose you find it too much the same, one day after another," he
+suggested, in response to that mournful quality in her voice. "You live
+here, then?"
+
+She was looking across the desert. Where had the goatherd hidden himself?
+She nodded without bringing her glance to meet Harboro's.
+
+"I know a good many of the Eagle Pass people. I've never seen you
+before."
+
+"I thought you must be a stranger," she replied. She brought her glance to
+his face now and seemed to explore it affectionately, as one does a new
+book by a favorite author. "I've never seen you before, either."
+
+"I've been to several entertainments at the Mesquite Club."
+
+"Oh! ... the Mesquite Club. I've never been there."
+
+He looked at her in his steadfast fashion for a moment, and then changed
+the subject. "You have rather more than your share of shade here. I had no
+idea there was such a pretty place in Eagle Pass." He glanced at the old
+mesquite-tree in the yard. It was really quite a tree.
+
+"Yes," she assented. She added, somewhat falteringly: "But it seems
+dreadfully lonesome sometimes."
+
+(I do not forget that path which led from Sylvia's back door down to the
+Rio Grande, nor the men who traversed it; yet I believe that she spoke
+from her heart, and that her words were essentially true.)
+
+"Perhaps you're not altogether at home in Eagle Pass: I mean, this isn't
+really your home?"
+
+"No. We came from San Antonio a year ago, my father and I."
+
+His glance wandered up the brick walk to the cottage door, but if Sylvia
+perceived this and knew it for a hint, she did not respond.
+
+Harboro thought of other possibilities. He turned toward the desert.
+"There, the sun's dipping down beyond that red ridge," he said. "It will
+be cooler now. Won't you walk with me?--I'm not going far."
+
+She smiled happily. "I'd like to," she admitted.
+
+And so Sylvia and Harboro walked together out toward the desert. It was,
+in fact, the beginning of a series of walks, all taken quite as informally
+and at about the same hour each day.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER II
+
+
+Some of the cruder minds of Eagle Pass made a sorry jest over the fact
+that nobody "gave the bride away" when she went to the altar--either then
+or during the brief period of courtship. Her father went to the wedding,
+of course; but he was not the kind of person you would expect to
+participate conspicuously in a ceremony of that sort. He was so decidedly
+of the black-sheep type that the people who assumed management of the
+affair considered it only fair to Sylvia (and to Harboro) to keep him in
+the background. Sylvia had never permitted Harboro to come to the house to
+see her. She had drawn a somewhat imaginary figure in lieu of a father to
+present to Harboro's mind's eye. Her father (she said) was not very well
+and was inclined to be disagreeable. He did not like the idea of his
+daughter getting married. She was all he had, and he was fearfully
+lonesome at times.
+
+Harboro had accepted all this readily. He had asked no questions.
+
+And so Little went to the wedding. He went early so that he could get a
+seat over against the wall, where he wouldn't be too conspicuous. He
+looked decidedly like an outsider, and, as a matter of fact, a good many
+people did not recognize him as Sylvia's father. He was probably regarded
+as a stranger who had drifted into the church to enjoy the familiar yet
+interesting spectacle of a man and a maid bound together by a rite which
+was the more interesting because it seemed so ephemeral, yet meant so
+much.
+
+Several of the young women of Eagle Pass had aided Sylvia in getting ready
+to meet her husband-to-be at the altar. They were well-known girls, acting
+with the aid (and in the company) of their mothers. They did not admit
+even to one another what it was that separated Sylvia from their world.
+Perhaps they did not fully understand. They did know that Sylvia was not
+one of them; but they felt sorry for her, and they enjoyed the experience
+of arraying her as a bride and of constituting, for the moment, a pretty
+and irreproachable setting for her wistful person. They were somewhat
+excited, too. They had the feeling that they were helping to set a
+mouse-trap to catch a lion--or something like that.
+
+And after the wedding Mr. and Mrs. Harboro emerged from the church into
+the clear night, under the stars, and went afoot in the direction of their
+new home--an attractive structure which Harboro had had erected on what
+was called the Quemado Road.
+
+A good many of the guests looked after them, and then at each other, but
+of definite comment there was mighty little.
+
+Sylvia's father went back to his house alone. He was not seen in the
+Maverick Bar that night, nor for quite a number of succeeding nights. He
+had never had any experiences in Eagle Pass which proved him to be a
+courageous man--or to lack courage; but in all probability a sensation
+akin to fear bothered him more or less during those first days and nights
+after his daughter had got married.
+
+Perhaps it would have been better for Sylvia if he had brazened it out
+just at that time, for on the very night of the wedding there was talk in
+the Maverick Bar. Not open or general comment, certainly. The border folk
+were not loose of speech. But two young fellows whose social versatility
+included membership in the Mesquite Club, on the one side, and a free and
+easy acquaintance with habitues of the Maverick Bar on the other, sat over
+against the wall behind a card-table and spoke in lowered tones. They
+pretended to be interested in the usual movements of the place. Two or
+three cowboys from Thompson's ranch were "spending" and pressing their
+hospitality upon all and sundry. A group of soldiers from the post were
+present, and Jesus Mendoza, a Mexican who had accumulated a competency by
+corralling his inebriated fellow countrymen at election times, and knowing
+far more about the ticket they voted than they could ever have learned,
+was resting a spurred boot on the bar railing, and looking through dreamy
+eyes and his own cloud of cigarette smoke at the front door. Mendoza
+always created the impression of being interested in something that was
+about to happen, or somebody who was about to appear--but never in his
+immediate surroundings.
+
+"It's too bad somebody couldn't have told him," Blanchard, of the Eagle
+Pass bank, was saying to the other man behind the card-table. The
+conversation had begun by each asking the other why he wasn't up at the
+wedding.
+
+"Yes," assented Dunwoodie, the other man. He was a young lawyer whose
+father had recently died in Belfast, leaving him money enough to quench a
+thirst which always flourished, but which never resulted in even partial
+disqualification, either for business or pleasure. "Yes, but Harboro
+is.... Say, Blanchard, did you ever know another chap like Harboro?"
+
+"I can't say I know him very well."
+
+"Of course--that's it. Nobody does. He won't let you."
+
+"I don't see that, quite. I have an idea there just isn't much to know.
+His size and good looks mislead you. He doesn't say much, probably because
+he hasn't much to say. I've never thought of there being any mystery. His
+behavior in this affair proves that there isn't much of the right kind of
+stuff in him. He's had every chance. The railroad people pushed him right
+along into a good thing, and the women across the river--the best of
+them--were nice to him. I have an idea the--er--new Mrs. Harboro will
+recall some of us to a realization of a truth which we're rather proud of
+ignoring, down here on the river: I mean, that we've no business asking
+people about their antecedents."
+
+Dunwoodie shook his head. "I figure it out differently. I think he's
+really a big chap. He won all the fellows over in the railroad
+offices--and he was pushed over the heads of some of them when he was
+given that chief clerkship. And then the way he's got of standing up to
+the General Manager and the other magnates. And you'll notice that if you
+ever ask him a question he'll give you an answer that sets you to
+thinking. He seems to work things out for himself. His mind doesn't just
+run along the channel of traditions. I like him all the better because
+he's not given to small talk. If there was anything worth while to talk
+about, I'll bet you'd always find him saying something worth while."
+
+"You're right about his not being strong about traditions. There's the
+matter of his marriage. Maybe he knows all about Sylvia--and doesn't care.
+He _must_ know about her."
+
+"Don't make a mistake on that score. I've seen them together. He reveres
+her. You can imagine his wanting to spread a cloak for her at every
+step--as if she were too pure to come into contact with the earth."
+
+"But good God, man! There's a path to her back door, worn there by fellows
+who would tremble like a colt in the presence of a lady."
+
+Dunwoodie frowned whimsically. "Don't say a path. It must be just a
+trail--a more or less indistinct trail."
+
+Blanchard looked almost excited. "It's a _path_, I tell you!"
+
+And then both men laughed suddenly--though in Dunwoodie's laughter there
+was a note of deprecation and regret.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER III
+
+
+And so Harboro and Sylvia went home to the house on the Quemado Road
+without knowing that the town had washed its hands of them.
+
+Harboro had made certain arrangements which were characteristic of him,
+perhaps, and which nobody knew anything about. For example, he had
+employed the most presentable Mexican woman he could find, to make the
+house homelike. He had taken a little sheaf of corn-husks away from her so
+that she could not make any cigarettes for a day or two, and he had read
+her a patient lecture upon ways and means of making a lot of furniture
+look as if it had some direct relationship with human needs and pleasures.
+And he had advised and aided her in the preparation of a wedding supper
+for two. He had ordered grapes from Parras, and figs--black figs, a little
+withered, and candied _tunas._ And there was a roast of beef with herbs
+and chili sauce, and _enchalades._
+
+The electric lights were turned on up-stairs and down when they entered
+the house, and Sylvia had an alarmed moment when she pictured a lot of
+guests waiting for them. But there proved to be nobody in the house but
+just they two and the old Mexican woman. Antonia, her name was.
+
+Harboro took her by the hand and led her up-stairs to the door of her
+room. It didn't occur to him that Antonia might better have attended to
+this part of the welcoming. Antonia was busy, and she was not the sort of
+person to mother a bride, Harboro thought. She wouldn't have been asked to
+perform this task in any case. You would have thought that Harboro was
+dealing with a child rather than a woman--his wife. It seemed the most
+natural thing in the world for him to take complete charge of her from the
+beginning.
+
+She uttered a little cry when she entered the bedroom. There by the bed
+was her trunk, which she had left at home. She hadn't known anything about
+its having been transferred from one house to the other.
+
+"Who brought it?" she asked, startled.
+
+"I sent for it," explained Harboro. "I knew you'd want it the first
+thing."
+
+"You didn't go to the house?"
+
+"Oh, no. I sent the expressman to the house and instructed him to ask for
+your things. I suppose he met your father. It's all right."
+
+She looked at him curiously. There was a little furrow in her forehead.
+"Do you always do things--that way?" she asked.
+
+He didn't appear to understand what she meant. He had other things on his
+mind. He stood away from her, by the door. "If I were you I'd take off
+that--harness," he said. "It makes you look like a picture--or a
+sacrifice. Do you know the old Aztec legends? It would be nicer for you to
+look just like a little woman now. Put on one of the dresses you wore when
+we walked together. How does that strike you?"
+
+"Well, I will." She looked after him as if she were a little bewildered as
+he turned away, and closed the door. She heard him call back: "I'll see if
+there's anything I can do for Antonia. Supper will be ready when you come
+down."
+
+It seemed to her that his conduct was very strange for a lover. He was so
+entirely matter-of-fact. Yet everything about him seemed to be made up of
+kindness--to radiate comfort. She had never known any other man like this,
+she reflected. And then an unfamiliar light dawned upon her. She had had
+lovers before, certainly; but she realized now, with a deep and strange
+sensation, that she had never really been loved until Harboro came.
+
+She had some difficulty in getting out of her wedding-finery. There was a
+momentary temptation to call for help. But she thought better of this, and
+in the end she came down-stairs like a girl, in a light, clinging dress of
+Chinese silk, with a girdle and tassel at the waist, and a red ribbon
+woven into the throat. You might have thought she was seventeen or
+eighteen. As a matter of fact, she was only twenty-two.
+
+Harboro met her and kissed her, and led her to the table. He had a
+forceful manner. He was hungry, and it seemed that his efficiency extended
+to a knowledge of how a dinner should be served.
+
+He took his seat at the end of the table where the roast was, and the
+carving implements. At Sylvia's place there was a percolator, and the
+coffee-cups, and the sugar and cream.
+
+Antonia, wizened and dark, came and went silently. To the people of her
+race a wedding means a _fiesta_, a village hubbub, a dance, and varying
+degrees of drunkenness. She was not herself in this house of a wedding
+supper for two, and a prosaic attitude toward the one event in life when
+money ought to be spent freely, even in the face of impending bankruptcy.
+
+But Harboro speedily set her at ease. They were there to eat their
+supper--that was all there was to it. He wasn't drinking toasts, or making
+love. He seemed thoroughly contented; and it didn't occur to him, clearly,
+that there was any occasion for making a noise or simulating an excitement
+which he did not feel.
+
+Antonia regarded him furtively, from over his shoulder, as she waited for
+Sylvia's plate with its portion of the roast. He was a strange _hombre._
+Well, she had known big, quiet men before. They were like rocks. It was
+all very well for a woman if she stood behind such a man for protection as
+long as she remained quiet; but Heaven help her if she ever undertook to
+beat him with her fists. She would only break her hands and accomplish
+nothing else whatever.
+
+Sylvia was not in a mood, seemingly, to eat very heartily; but Harboro
+thought he understood that, and he made allowances. He did not urge her,
+unless reassuring tones and comfortable topics may be said to consist of
+urging.
+
+He regarded her with bright eyes when she poured the coffee; and when her
+hands trembled he busied himself with trifles so that he would not seem to
+notice. He produced a cigar and cut the end off with his penknife, and lit
+it deliberately.
+
+Only once--just before they got up from the table--did he assume the role
+of lover. He turned to Antonia, and with an air of pride and contentment,
+asked the old woman, in her own language:
+
+"Isn't she a beautiful child?"
+
+Sylvia was startled by his manner of speaking Spanish. Everybody along the
+border spoke the language a little; but Harboro's wasn't the canteen
+Spanish of most border Americans. Accent and enunciation were singularly
+nice and distinct. His mustache bristled rather fiercely over one or two
+of the words.
+
+Antonia thought very highly of the "child," she admitted. She was
+_bonisima_, and other superlatives.
+
+And then Harboro's manner became rather brisk again. "Come, I want to show
+you the house," he said, addressing his wife.
+
+He had taken a great deal of pride in the planning and construction of the
+house. There was a young Englishman in one of the shops--a draftsman--who
+had studied architecture in a London office, and who might have been a
+successful architect but for a downfall which had converted him,
+overnight, into a remittance-man and a fairly competent employee of the
+Mexican International. And this man and Harboro had put their heads
+together and considered the local needs and difficulties, and had finally
+planned a house which would withstand northers and lesser sand-storms, and
+the long afternoons' blazing sun, to the best advantage. A little garden
+had been planned, too. There was hydrant water in the yard. And there was
+a balcony, looking to the west, over the garden.
+
+She preceded him up-stairs.
+
+"First I want to show you your own room," said Harboro. "What do you call
+it? I mean the room in which the lady of the house sits and is
+contented."
+
+I can't imagine what there was in this description which gave Sylvia a
+hint as to his meaning, but she said:
+
+"A boudoir?"
+
+And Harboro answered promptly: "That's it!"
+
+The boudoir was at the front of the house, up-stairs, overlooking the
+Quemado Road. It made Sylvia's eyes glisten. It contained a piano, and a
+rather tiny divan in russet leather, and maple-wood furniture, and
+electric fixtures which made you think of little mediaeval lanterns. But
+the bride looked at these things somewhat as if she were inspecting a
+picture, painted in bold strokes: as if they would become obscure if she
+went too close--as if they couldn't possibly be hers to be at home among.
+
+It did not appear that Harboro was beginning to feel the absence of a
+spontaneous acceptance on the part of his wife. Perhaps he was rather full
+of his own pleasure just then.
+
+They closed the door of the boudoir behind them after they had completed
+their inspection, and at another door Harboro paused impressively.
+
+"This," he said, pushing the door open wide, "is the guest-chamber."
+
+It would have been small wonder if Sylvia had felt suddenly cold as she
+crossed that threshold. Certainly she seemed a little strange as she stood
+with her back to Harboro and aimlessly took in the capacious bed and the
+few other simple articles.
+
+"The guest-chamber?" she echoed presently, turning toward him.
+
+"We'll have guests occasionally--after a while. Friends of yours from San
+Antonio, perhaps, or fellows I've known all the way from here to the City.
+We shouldn't want them to go to a hotel, should we? I mean, if they were
+people we really cared for?"
+
+"I hadn't thought," she answered.
+
+She went to the window and looked out; but the gray sands, pallid under
+the night sky, did not afford a soothing picture. She turned to Harboro
+almost as if she were a stranger to him. "Have you many friends?" she
+asked.
+
+"Oh, no!--not enough to get in my way, you know. I've never had much of a
+chance for friendships--not for a good many years. But I ought to have a
+better chance now. I've thought you'd be able to help me in that way."
+
+She did not linger in the room, and Harboro got the idea that she did not
+like to think of their sharing their home with outsiders. He understood
+that, too. "Of course we're going to be by ourselves for a long time to
+come. There shall not be any guests until you feel you'd like to have
+them." Then, as her eyes still harbored a shadow, he exclaimed gaily:
+"We'll pretend that we haven't any guest-chamber at all!" And taking a
+bunch of keys from his pocket he locked the door with a decisive
+movement.
+
+On the way down the hall they passed their bedroom. "This room you've
+seen," he said, "our room. But you have not seen the balcony yet."
+
+He was plainly confident that the balcony would make a pleasant impression
+upon her. He opened yet another door, and they stepped out under the night
+sky.
+
+The thing had been planned with certain poetic or romantic values in mind.
+Standing on the balcony you were looking toward the Rio Grande--and
+Mexico. And you seemed pretty high. There was the dull silver of the
+river, and the line of lights along the bridge, and beyond the huddled,
+dark structures of Piedras Negras. You might have imagined yourself on the
+deck of a Mediterranean steamer, looking at a town in Algeria or Tunis.
+And beyond, under the low-hanging stars, was the Mexican desert--a blank
+page, with only here and there the obscurity of a garden, or a _hacienda_,
+or a mere speck which would be a lonely casa built of earth.
+
+"Do you like it?" he asked. He had seated himself with a sigh of
+contentment. His outstretched arms lay along the back of the settee, and
+he was looking at her eagerly.
+
+Yes, she said, it was nice.... "It is strange that he should be thinking
+of the view just now," she was saying to herself. A painful turmoil raged
+within her; but outwardly she was so calm that Harboro was puzzled. To
+him, too, that view became a negative thing for the moment. "I suspect
+that house down under the mesquite-tree was a bit shabby," he was
+thinking. "She's oppressed by so many new things." He gave her time to
+find her bearings. That was a thing she would do better by being left
+alone.
+
+And out of the chaos in Sylvia's mind there came the clear realization
+that Harboro was not living for the moment, but that he was looking
+forward, planning for a lifetime, and not for a swift, passing storm of
+passion. There was something static in his nature; there was a stability
+in the house he had provided and furnished. Her experiences with him were
+not to be like a flame: sanctioned, yet in all other respects like other
+experiences she had had in the past.
+
+The silence between them had become uncomfortable--inappropriate; and
+Harboro put a gentle arm about her and drew her closer to him. "Sit down
+by me," he said.
+
+He was dismayed by the result of that persuasive movement. The hand he had
+taken into his trembled, and she would not yield to the pressure of his
+arm. She hung her head as if desolate memories were crowding between him
+and her, and he saw that moisture glistened in her eyes.
+
+"Eh?" he inquired huskily, "you're not afraid of me?"
+
+She allowed him to draw her closer, and he felt the negative movement of
+her head as it lay on his shoulder; but he knew that she _was_ afraid,
+though he did not gauge the quality of her fear. "You mustn't be afraid,
+you know." He continued the pressure of his arm until she seemed to relax
+wholly against him. He felt a delicious sense of conquest over her by
+sympathy and gentleness. He was eager for that moment to pass, though he
+held it precious and knew that it would never return again. Then he felt
+her body tremble as it lay against his.
+
+"That won't do!" he chided gently. "Look!" He stood her on her feet before
+him, and took her arms at the elbows, pinioning them carefully to her
+sides. Then he slowly lifted her above him, so that he had to raise his
+face to look into hers. The act was performed as if it were a rite.
+
+"You mean ... I am helpless?" She checked the manifestation of grief as
+abruptly as a child does when its mind has been swiftly diverted.
+
+"God bless me, no! I mean anything but that. That's just what I _don't_
+mean. I mean that you're to have all the help you want--that you're to
+look to me for your strength, that you are to put your burdens on me." He
+placed her on the seat beside him and took one of her hands in both his.
+"There, now, we'll talk. You see, we're one, you and I. That isn't just a
+saying of the preachers. It's a fact. I couldn't harm you without harming
+myself. Don't you see that? Nobody could harm you without harming me,
+too."
+
+He did not notice that her hand stiffened in his at those words.
+
+"When we've been together awhile we'll both realize in wonderful ways what
+it means really to be united. When you've laid your head on my shoulder a
+great many times, or against my heart, the very blood in my veins will be
+the blood in your veins. I can't explain it. It goes beyond physiology.
+We'll belong to each other so completely that wherever you go I shall be
+with you, and when I go to work I shall have only to put my hand on my
+breast to touch you. I'll get my strength from you, and it shall be yours
+again in return. There, those are things which will come to us little by
+little. But you must never be afraid."
+
+I would rather not even try to surmise what was in Sylvia's mind when,
+following those words of his, she swiftly took his face in her hands with
+unsuspected strength and hungrily kissed him. But Harboro read no dark
+meaning into the caress. It seemed to him the natural thing for her to
+do.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IV
+
+
+Harboro adopted the plan, immediately after his marriage, of walking to
+his work in the morning and back to his home in the evening. It was only a
+matter of a mile or so, and if you kept out of the sun of midday, it was a
+pleasant enough form of exercise. Indeed, in the morning it was the sort
+of thing a man of varied experiences might have been expected to enjoy:
+the walk through Eagle Pass, with a glimpse of the Dolch hotel bus going
+to meet the early train from Spofford Junction, and a friendly greeting
+from an occasional merchant, and then the breezy passage across the Rio
+Grande bridge, spanning the meandering waters which never bore vessels of
+any sort to the far-off sea, and finally the negotiation of the narrow
+street in Piedras Negras, past the plaza and the bull-ring, and countless
+little wine-shops, and the market, with its attractively displayed fruits
+and vegetables from nobody knew where.
+
+But it is not to be denied that his practice of making this journey to and
+fro afoot was not without its prejudicial result. The people of quality of
+either side of the river rarely ever set foot on the bridge, or on those
+malodorous streets of Piedras Negras which lay near the river. Such people
+employed a _cochero_ and drove, quite in the European style, when business
+or pleasure drew them from their homes. There was an almost continuous
+stream of _peones_ on the bridge in the mornings and evenings: silent,
+furtive people, watched closely by the customs guard, whose duties
+required him on occasion to examine a suspicious-appearing Mexican with
+decidedly indelicate thoroughness. And all this did not tend to make the
+bridge a popular promenade.
+
+But Harboro was not squeamish, nor did he entertain slavish thoughts of
+how people would feel over a disregarded custom. He liked simplicity, and
+moreover he felt the need of exercise now that his work kept him inactive
+most of the time. He was at an age when men take on flesh easily.
+
+Nevertheless, people weren't favorably impressed when they looked down
+from their old-fashioned equipages on their ride between the two
+republics, and caught a glimpse of the chief clerk marching along the
+bridge railing--often, as likely as not, in company with some chance
+laborer or wanderer, whose garb clearly indicated his lowly estate.
+
+And when, finally, Harboro persuaded Sylvia to accompany him on one of
+these walks of his, the limits of his eccentricity were thought to have
+been reached. Indeed, not a few people, who might have been induced to
+forget that his marriage had been a scandalous one, were inclined for the
+first time to condemn him utterly when he required the two towns to
+contemplate him in company with the woman he had married, both of them
+running counter to all the conventions.
+
+The reason for this trip of Harboro's and Sylvia's was that Harboro wanted
+Sylvia to have a new dress for a special occasion.
+
+It happened that two or three weeks after his marriage Harboro came upon
+an interesting bit of intelligence in the Eagle Pass _Guide_, the town's
+weekly newspaper. It was a Saturday afternoon (the day of the paper's
+publication), and Harboro had gone up to the balcony overlooking the
+garden. He had carried the newspaper with him. He did not expect to find
+anything in the chronicles of local happenings, past or prospective, that
+would interest him. But there was always a department of railroad
+news--consisting mainly of personal items--which had for him the quality
+of a letter from home.
+
+Sylvia was down-stairs at work in the dining-room, directing the efforts
+of old Antonia. Perhaps I should say that she was extraordinarily happy. I
+doubt very much if she had come to contemplate the married state through
+Harboro's eyes; but she seemed to have feared that an avalanche would
+fall--and none had fallen. Harboro had manifested an unswerving gentleness
+toward her, and she had begun to "let down," as swimmers say, with
+confidence in her ability to find bottom and attain the shore.
+
+When at length she went up to the balcony to tell Harboro that supper was
+ready, she stood arrested by the pleasantly purposeful expression in his
+eyes. She had learned, rather creditably, to anticipate him.
+
+"You are to have a new dress," he announced.
+
+"Yes.... Why?"
+
+"I see here"--he tapped the paper on his knee--"that they're getting ready
+for their first dance of the winter at the Mesquite Club."
+
+She forgot herself. "But _we're_ not invited!" she said, frankly
+incredulous.
+
+"Why no, not yet. But we shall be. Why shouldn't we be?"
+
+Her hand went to her heart in the old wistful way. "I don't know ... I
+just thought we shouldn't be. Those affairs are for ... I've never thought
+they would invite me to one of their dances."
+
+"Nonsense! They've invited me. Now they'll invite _us_. I suppose the best
+milliners are across the river, aren't they?"
+
+She seemed unwilling to meet his eyes. "I believe some women get their
+dresses made over there, and wear them back to this side--so they needn't
+pay any duty. That is, if they're to be handsome dresses."
+
+"Well, this is going to be a handsome dress."
+
+She seemed pleased, undeniably; yet she changed the subject with evident
+relief. "Antonia will be cross if we don't go right down. And you must
+remember to praise the _enchalades_. She's tried with them ever so hard."
+This wasn't an affectation on Sylvia's part. She was a good-hearted girl.
+
+"It's to be a handsome dress," repeated Harboro an hour later, when they
+had returned to the balcony. It was dusk now, and little tapers of light
+were beginning to burn here and there in the desert: small, open fires
+where Mexican women were cooking their suppers of dried goat's meat and
+_frijoles_.
+
+Said Sylvia: "If only.... Does it matter so much to you that they should
+invite us?"
+
+"It matters to me on your account. Such things are yours by right. You
+wouldn't be happy always with me alone. We must think of the future."
+
+Sylvia took his hand and stroked it thoughtfully. There _were_ moments
+when she hungered for a bit of the comedy of life: laughter and other
+youthful noises. The Mexican _bailes_ and their humble feasts were
+delightful; and the song of the violins, and the odor of smoke, and the
+innocent rivalries, and the night air. But the Mesquite Club....
+
+"If only we could go on the way we are," she said finally, with a sigh of
+contentment--and regret.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER V
+
+
+Harboro insisted upon her going across the river with him the next day, a
+Sunday. It was now late in October, but you wouldn't have realized it
+unless you had looked at the calendar. The sun was warm--rather too warm.
+The air was extraordinarily clear. It was an election year and the town
+had been somewhat disorderly the night before. Harboro and Sylvia had
+heard the noises from their balcony: singing, first, and then shouting.
+And later drunken Mexicans had ridden past the house and on out the
+Quemado Road. A Mexican who is the embodiment of taciturnity when afoot,
+will become a howling organism when he is mounted.
+
+Harboro had telephoned to see if an appointment could be made--to a madame
+somebody whose professional card he had found in the _Guide_. And he had
+been assured that monsieur would be very welcome on a Sunday.
+
+Sylvia was glad that it was not on a weekday, and that it was in the
+forenoon, when she would be required to make her first public appearance
+with her husband. The town would be practically deserted, save by a few
+better-class young men who might be idling about the drug-store. They
+wouldn't know her, and if they did, they would behave circumspectly.
+Strangely enough, it was Sylvia's conviction that men are nearly all good
+creatures.
+
+As it fell out it was Harboro and not Sylvia who was destined to be
+humiliated that day--a fact which may not seem strange to the discerning.
+
+They had got as far as the middle of the Rio Grande bridge without
+experiencing anything which marred the general effect of a stage set for a
+Passion Play--but with the actors missing; and then they saw a carriage
+approaching from the Mexican side.
+
+Harboro knew the horses. They were the General Manager's. And presently he
+recognized the coachman. The horses were moving at a walk, very slowly;
+but at length Harboro recognized the General Manager's wife, reclining
+under a white silk sunshade and listening to the vivacious chatter of a
+young woman by her side. They would be coming over to attend the services
+in the Episcopal church in Eagle Pass, Harboro realized. Then he
+recognized the young woman, too. He had met her at one of the affairs to
+which he had been invited. He recalled her as a girl whose voice was too
+high-pitched for a reposeful effect, and who created the impression that
+she looked upon the social life of the border as a rather amusing
+adventure.
+
+You might have supposed that they considered themselves the sole occupants
+of the world as they advanced, perched on their high seat; and this,
+Harboro realized, was the true fashionable air. It was an instinct rather
+than a pose, he believed, and he was pondering that problem in psychology
+which has to do with the fact that when people ride or drive they appear
+to have a different mental organism from those who walk.
+
+Then something happened. The carriage was now almost at hand, and Harboro
+saw the coachman turn his head slightly, as if to hear better. Then he
+leaned forward and rattled the whip in its place, and the horses set off
+at a sharp trot. There was a rule against trotting on the bridge, but
+there are people everywhere who are not required to observe rules.
+
+Harboro paused, ready to lift his hat. He liked the General Manager's
+wife. But the occupants of the carriage passed without seeing him. And
+Harboro got the impression that there was something determined in the
+casual air with which the two women looked straight before them. He got an
+odd feeling that the most finely tempered steel of all lies underneath the
+delicate golden filigree of social custom and laws.
+
+He was rather pleased at a conclusion which came to him: people of that
+kind really _did_ see, then. They only pretended not to see. And then he
+felt the blood pumping through the veins in his neck.
+
+"What is it?" asked Sylvia, with that directness which Harboro
+comprehended and respected.
+
+"Why, those ladies ... they didn't seem quite the type you'd expect to see
+here, did they?"
+
+"Oh, there's every type here," she replied lightly. She turned her eyes
+away from Harboro. There was something in his face which troubled her. She
+could not bear to see him with that expression of wounded sensibilities
+and rebellious pride in his eyes. And she had understood everything.
+
+She did not break in upon his thoughts soon. She would have liked to
+divert his mind, but she felt like a culprit who realizes that words are
+often betrayers.
+
+And so they walked in silence up that narrow bit of street which connects
+the bridge with Piedras Negras, and leads you under the balcony of what
+used to be the American Consul's house, and on past the _cuartel_, where
+the imprisoned soldiers are kept. Here, of course, the street broadens and
+skirts the plaza where the band plays of an evening, and where the town
+promenades round and round the little square of palms and fountains, under
+the stars. You may remember that a little farther on, on one side of the
+plaza, there is the immense church which has been building for a century,
+more or less, and which is still incomplete.
+
+There were a few miserable-looking soldiers, with shapeless, colorless
+uniforms, loitering in front of the _cuartel_ as Harboro and Sylvia
+passed.
+
+The indefinably sinister character of the building affected Sylvia. "What
+is it?" she asked.
+
+"It's where the republic keeps a body of its soldiers," explained Harboro.
+"They're inside--locked up."
+
+They were both glad to sit down on one of the plaza benches for a few
+minutes; they did so by a common impulse, without speaking.
+
+"It's the first time I ever thought of prisoners having what you'd call an
+honorable profession," Sylvia said slowly. She gazed at the immense, low
+structure with troubled eyes. Flags fluttered from the ramparts at
+intervals, but they seemed oddly lacking in gallantry or vitality.
+
+"It's a barbarous custom," said Harboro shortly. He was still thinking of
+that incident on the bridge.
+
+"And yet ... you might think of them as happy, living that way."
+
+"Good gracious! Happy?"
+
+"They needn't care about how they are to be provided for--and they have
+their duties."
+
+"But they're _prisoners_, Sylvia!"
+
+"Yes, prisoners.... Aren't we all prisoners, somehow? I've sometimes
+thought that none of us can do just what we'd like to do, or come or go
+freely. We think we're free, as oxen in a treadmill think of themselves as
+being free, I suppose. We think we're climbing a long hill, and that we'll
+get to the top after a while. But at sundown the gate is opened and the
+oxen are released. They've never really gotten anywhere."
+
+He turned to her with the stanch optimism she had grown accustomed to in
+him. "A pagan doctrine, that," he said spiritedly.
+
+"A pagan doctrine.... I wonder what that means."
+
+"Pagans are people who don't believe in God. I am not speaking of the God
+of the churches, exactly. I mean a good influence."
+
+"Don't they believe in their own gods?"
+
+"No doubt. But you might call their own gods bad influences, as often as
+not."
+
+"Ah--perhaps they're just simple folk who believe in their own
+experiences."
+
+He had the troubled feeling that her intuitions, her fatalistic leanings,
+were giving her a surer grasp of the subject than his, which was based
+upon a rather nebulous, logical process that often brought him to
+confusion.
+
+"I only know that I am free," he declared doggedly.
+
+The sun had warmed her to an almost vagrant mood. Her smile was delicate
+enough, yet her eyes held a gentle taunt as she responded: "Not a bit of
+it; you have a wife."
+
+"A wife--yes; and that gives me ten times the freedom I ever had before. A
+man is like a bird with only one wing--before he finds a wife. His wife
+becomes his other wing. There isn't any height beyond him, when he has a
+wife."
+
+She placed her hands on her cheeks. "Two wings!" she mused.... "What's
+between the wings?"
+
+"A heart, you may say, if you will. Or a soul. A capacity. Words are
+fashioned by scholars--dull fellows. But you know what I mean."
+
+From the hidden depths of the _cuartel_ a silver bugle-note sounded, and
+Sylvia looked to see if the soldiers sitting out in front would go away;
+but they did not do so. She arose. "Would you mind going into the church a
+minute?" she asked.
+
+"No; but why?"
+
+"Oh, anybody can go into those churches," she responded.
+
+"Anybody can go into _any_ church."
+
+"Yes, I suppose so. What I mean is that these old Catholic churches seem
+different. In our own churches you have a feeling of being--what do you
+say?--personally conducted. As if you were a visitor being shown
+children's trinkets. There is something impersonal--something
+boundless--in churches like this one here. The silence makes you think
+that there is nobody in them--or that perhaps ... God isn't far away."
+
+He frowned. "But this is just where the trinkets are--in these churches:
+the images, the painted figures, the robes, the whole mysterious
+paraphernalia."
+
+"Yes ... but when there isn't anything going on. You feel an influence. I
+remember going into a church in San Antonio once--a Protestant chapel, and
+the only thing I could recall afterward was a Yankee clock that ticked too
+fast and too loud. I never heard of anything so horribly inappropriate.
+Time was what you thought of. Not eternity. You felt that the people would
+be afraid of wasting a minute too much--as if their real concerns were
+elsewhere."
+
+Harboro was instinctively combating the thought that was in her mind, so
+far as there was a definite thought, and as far as he understood it. "But
+why shouldn't there be a clock?" he asked. "If people feel that they ought
+to give a certain length of time to worship, and then go back to their
+work again, why shouldn't they have a clock?"
+
+"I suppose it's all right," she conceded; and then, with a faint smile:
+"Yes, if it didn't tick too loud."
+
+She lowered her voice abruptly on the last word. They had passed across
+the doorless portal and were in the presence of a group of silent,
+kneeling figures: wretched women whose heads were covered with black
+cotton _rebozos_, who knelt and faced the distant altar. They weren't in
+rows. They had settled down just anywhere. And there were men: swarthy,
+ill-shapen, dejected. Their lips moved noiselessly.
+
+Harboro observed her a little uneasily. Her sympathy for this sort of
+thing was new to him. But she made none of the customary signs of
+fellowship, and after a brief interval she turned and led the way back
+into the sunshine.
+
+He was still regarding her strangely when she paused, just outside the
+door, and opened a little hand-bag which depended from her arm. She was
+quite intently devoted to a search for something. Presently she produced a
+coin, and then Harboro observed for the first time that the tortured
+figure of a beggar sat in the sun outside the church door.
+
+Sylvia leaned over with an impassive face and dropped the coin into the
+beggar's cup.
+
+She chanced to glance at Harboro's face an instant later, and she was
+dismayed a little by its expression: that of an almost violent distaste.
+What did it mean? Was it because she had given a coin to the beggar? There
+could have been no other reason. But why should he look as if her action
+had contaminated her in some fashion--as if there had been communication
+between her and the unfortunate _anciano_? As if there had been actual
+contact?
+
+"You wouldn't have done that?" she said.
+
+"No, I shouldn't have done it," he replied.
+
+"I can't think why. The wretched creature--I should have felt troubled if
+I'd ignored him."
+
+"But it's a profession. It's as much a part of the national customs as
+dancing and drinking."
+
+"Yes, I know. A profession ... but isn't that all the more reason why we
+should give him a little help?"
+
+"A reason why you should permit yourself to be imposed upon?"
+
+"I can't help thinking further than that. After all, it's he and his kind
+that must have been imposed upon in the beginning. It's being a profession
+makes me believe that all the people who might have helped him, who might
+have given him a chance to be happy and respectable, really conspired
+against him in some way. You have to believe that it's the rule that some
+must be comfortable and some wretched."
+
+"A beggar is a beggar," said Harboro. "And he was filthy."
+
+"But don't you suppose he'd rather be the proprietor of a wine-shop, or
+something of that sort, if he had had any choice?"
+
+"Well.... It's not a simple matter, of course. I'm glad you did what you
+felt you ought to do." It occurred to Harboro that he was setting up too
+much opposition to her whims--whims which seemed rooted in her principles
+as well as her impulses. It was as if their minds were of different
+shapes: hers circular, his square; so that there could be only one point
+of contact between them--that one point being their love for each other.
+There would be a fuller conformity after a while, he was sure. He must try
+to understand her, to get at her odd point of view. She might be right
+occasionally, when they were in disagreement.
+
+He touched her lightly on the shoulder. "I'm afraid we ought to be getting
+on to the madame's," he said.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VI
+
+
+Harboro would have made you think of a bear in a toy-shop when he sat down
+in the tiny front room of Madame Boucher's millinery establishment. He was
+uncomfortably, if vaguely, conscious of the presence of many hats,
+displayed on affairs which were like unfinished music-racks.
+
+He had given Madame Boucher certain instructions--or perhaps liberties
+would be a better word. Mrs. Harboro was to be shown only the best
+fabrics, he told her; and no pains were to be spared to make a dress which
+would be a credit to madame's establishment. Madame had considered this,
+and him, and had smiled. Madame's smile had impressed him curiously. There
+had been no co-operation between lips and eyes. The eyes had opened a
+little wider, as if with a stimulated rapaciousness. The lips had opened
+to the extent of a nicely achieved, symmetrical crescent of teeth. It made
+Harboro think of a carefully constructed Jack-o'-Lantern.
+
+Sylvia had asked him if he wouldn't help in making a choice, but he had
+looked slightly alarmed, and had resolutely taken a seat which afforded a
+view of the big _Casa Blanca_ across the way: an emporium conducted on a
+big scale by Germans. He even became oblivious to the discussion on the
+other side of the partition, where Sylvia and madame presently entered
+upon the preliminaries of the business in hand.
+
+The street was quite familiar to him. There had been a year or so, long
+ago, when he had "made" Piedras Negras, as railroaders say, twice a week.
+He hadn't liked the town very well. He saw its vice rather than its
+romance. He had attended one bullfight, and had left his seat in disgust
+when he saw a lot of men and women of seeming gentility applauding a silly
+fellow whose sole stock in trade was an unblushing vanity.
+
+His imagination travelled on beyond the bull-pen, to the shabby
+dance-halls along the river. It was a custom for Americans to visit the
+dance-halls at least once. He had gone into them repeatedly. Other
+railroaders who were his associates enjoyed going into these places, and
+Harboro, rather than be alone in the town, had followed disinterestedly in
+their wake, and had looked on with cold, contemplative eyes at the
+disorderly picture they presented: unfortunate Mexican girls dancing with
+cowboys and railroaders and soldiers and nondescripts. Three Mexicans,
+with harp, violin, and 'cello had supplied the music: the everlasting
+national airs. It seemed to Harboro that the whole republic spent half its
+time within hearing of _Sobre las Olas_, and _La Paloma_, and _La
+Golondrina_. He had heard so much of the emotional noises vibrating across
+the land that when he got away from the throb of his engine, into some
+silent place, it seemed to him that his ears reverberated with flutes and
+strings, rather than the song of steam, which he understood and respected.
+He had got the impression that music smelled bad--like stale wine and
+burning corn-husks and scented tobacco and easily perishable fruits.
+
+He remembered the only woman who had ever made an impression upon him down
+in those dance-halls: an overmature creature, unusually fair for a
+Mexican, who spoke a little English, manipulating her lips quaintly, like
+a child. He recalled her favorite expression: "My class is very fine!" She
+had told him this repeatedly, enunciating the words with delicacy. She had
+once said to him, commiseratingly: "You work very hard?" And when he had
+confessed that his duties were onerous, she had brightened. "Much work,
+much money," she had said, with the avidity of a boy who has caught a
+rabbit in a trap. And Harboro had wondered where she had got such a
+monstrously erroneous conception of the law of industrialism.
+
+The picture of the whirling figures came back to him: the vapor of dust in
+the room, the loud voices of men at the bar, trying to be heard above the
+din of the music and the dancing. There came back to him the memory of a
+drunken cowboy, nudging the violinist's elbow as he played, and shouting:
+"Give us _Dixie_--give us a white man's tune"--and the look of veiled
+hatred in the slumbrous eyes of the Mexican musician, who had inferred the
+insult without comprehending the words.
+
+He recalled other pictures of those nights: the Indian girls who might be
+expected to yell in the midst of a dance if they had succeeded in
+attracting the attention of a man who usually danced with some one else.
+And there were other girls with a Spanish strain in them--girls with a
+drop of blood that might have been traced back a hundred years to Madrid
+or Seville or Barcelona. Small wonder if such girls felt like shrieking
+too, sometimes. Not over petty victories, and with joy; but when their
+hearts broke because the bells of memory called to them from away in the
+barred windows of Spain, or in walled gardens, or with the shepherd lovers
+of Andalusia.
+
+If you danced with one of them you paid thirty cents at the bar and got a
+drink, while the girl was given a check good for fifteen cents in the
+trade of the place. The girls used to cash in their checks at the end of a
+night's work at fifty cents a dozen. It wasn't quite fair; but then the
+proprietor was a business man.
+
+"My class is very fine!" The words came back to Harboro's mind. Good
+God!--what had become of her? There had been a railroad man, a fellow
+named Peterson, who was just gross enough to fancy her--a good chap, too,
+in his way. Courageous, energetic, loyal--at least to other men. He had
+occasionally thought that Peterson meant to take the poor, pretentious
+creature away from the dance-halls and establish her somewhere. He had not
+seen Peterson for years now.
+
+... Sylvia emerged from behind the thin partition, sighing and smiling.
+"Did it seem very long?" she asked. "It's hard to make up your mind. It's
+like taking one color out of the rainbow and expecting it to look as
+pretty as the whole rainbow. But I'm ready now."
+
+"Remember, a week from Wednesday," called Madame Boucher, as Harboro and
+Sylvia moved toward the door.
+
+Harboro looked at Sylvia inquiringly.
+
+"For the try-on," she explained. "Yes, I'll be here." She went out,
+Harboro holding the door open for her.
+
+Out on the sidewalk she almost collided with a heavy man, an American--a
+gross, blond, good-natured creature who suddenly smiled with extreme
+gratification. "Hello!--_Sylvia!_" he cried. He seized her by the hand and
+drew her close.
+
+Harboro stood on the door-step and looked down--and recognized Peterson.
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART II
+
+THE TIME OF FLAME
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VII
+
+
+Peterson felt the dark shadow of Harboro immediately. He looked up into
+the gravely inquiring face above him, and then he gave voice to a new
+delight. "Hello!--HARBORO!" He dropped Sylvia's hand as if she no longer
+existed. An almost indefinable change of expression occurred in his ruddy,
+radiant face. It was as if his joy at seeing Sylvia had been that which we
+experience in the face of a beautiful illusion; and now, seeing Harboro,
+it was as if he stood in the presence of a cherished reality. He grasped
+Harboro's hand and dragged him down from the step. "Old Harboro!" he
+exclaimed.
+
+"You two appear to have met before," remarked Harboro, looking with quiet
+inquiry from Sylvia to Peterson, and back to Sylvia.
+
+"Yes, in San Antonio," she explained. It had been in Eagle Pass, really,
+but she did not want Harboro to know.
+
+The smile on Peterson's face had become curiously fixed. "Yes, in San
+Antonio," he echoed.
+
+"He knew my father," added Sylvia.
+
+"A particular friend," said Peterson. And then, the lines of mirth on his
+face becoming a little less rigid and the color a little less ruddy, he
+added to Sylvia: "Doesn't your father occasionally talk about his old
+friend _Peterson?_"
+
+Harboro interrupted. "At any rate, you probably don't know that she is
+Mrs. Harboro now."
+
+Peterson appeared to be living entirely within himself for the moment. He
+might have made you think of the Trojan Horse--innocuous without, but
+teeming with belligerent activity within. He seemed to be laughing
+maliciously, though without movement or noise. Then he was all frank
+joyousness again. "Good!" he exclaimed. He smote Harboro on the shoulder.
+"Good!" He stood apart, vigorously erect, childishly pleased. "Enjoying a
+holiday?" he asked.
+
+And when Harboro nodded he became animated again. "You're both going to
+take dinner with me--over at the _Internacional_. We'll celebrate. I've
+got to take my train out in an hour--I've got a train now, Harboro."
+(Harboro had noted his conductor's uniform.) "We'll just have time. We can
+have a talk."
+
+Harboro recalled a score of fellows he had known up and down the line,
+with most of whom he had gotten out of touch. Peterson would know about
+some of them. He realized how far he had been removed from the spontaneous
+joys of the railroad career since he had been in the office. And Peterson
+had always been a friendly chap, with lots of good points.
+
+"Should you like it, Sylvia?" he asked.
+
+She had liked Peterson, too. He had always been good-natured and generous.
+He had seemed often almost to understand.... "I think it would be nice,"
+she replied. She was afraid there was a note of guilt in her voice. She
+wished Harboro had refused to go, without referring the matter to her.
+
+"I could telephone to Antonia," he said slowly. It seemed impossible to
+quicken his pulses in any way. "She needn't get anything ready."
+
+"I could do it," suggested Sylvia. She felt she'd rather not be left alone
+with Peterson. "I could use Madame Boucher's telephone."
+
+But Harboro had already laid his hand on the door. "Better let me," he
+said. "I can do it quicker." He knew that Antonia would want to
+remonstrate, to ask questions, and he wanted Sylvia to enjoy the occasion
+whole-heartedly. He went back into the milliner's shop.
+
+"_Peterson_," said the man who remained on the sidewalk with Sylvia.
+
+"I remember," she replied, her lips scarcely moving, her eyes avoiding his
+burning glance. "And ... in San Antonio."
+
+They were rather early for the midday meal when they reached the
+_Internacional_; indeed, they were the first to enter the dining-room.
+Nevertheless the attitudes of the Mexican waiters were sufficient
+assurance that they might expect to be served immediately.
+
+Peterson looked at his watch and compared it with the clock in the
+dining-room. "The train from Spofford is late," he said. "It's due now."
+He pitched his head up like a dog. "There she is!" he exclaimed. There was
+the rumble of a train crossing the bridge. "They'll be coming in right
+away." He indicated the empty tables by a glance.
+
+Harboro knew all about the train schedules and such matters. He knew that
+American tourists bound for Mexico would be coming over on that train, and
+that they would have an hour for dinner while their baggage was passing
+through the hands of the customs officials.
+
+They had given their orders and were still waiting when the train pulled
+in at the station, close at hand, and in a moment the dining-room became
+noisy.
+
+"Travel seems pretty light," commented Peterson. He appeared to be trying
+to make conversation; he was obviously under some sort of constraint.
+Still, he had the genuine interest of the railroader in the subjects he
+mentioned.
+
+Harboro had not observed that there was not even one woman among the
+travellers who entered; but Peterson noted the fact, mentioning it in the
+tone of one who has been deprived of a natural right. And Harboro wondered
+what was the matter with a man who saw the whole world, always, solely in
+relation to women. He sensed the fact that Peterson was not entirely
+comfortable. "He's probably never grown accustomed to being in the company
+of a decent woman," he concluded. He tried to launch the subject of old
+associates. It seemed that Peterson had been out in Durango for some time,
+but he had kept in touch with most of the fellows on the line to the City.
+He began to talk easily, and Harboro was enjoying the meeting even before
+the waiter came back with their food.
+
+Sylvia was ill at ease. She was glad that Harboro and Peterson had found
+something to talk about. She began to eat the amber-colored grapes the
+waiter had placed before her. She seemed absent-minded, absorbed in her
+own thoughts. And then she forgot self in the contemplation of a man and a
+child who had come in and taken a table at the other end of the
+dining-room. The man wore a band of crape around his arm. The child, a
+little girl of five or six, had plainly sobbed herself into a condition
+verging upon stupor. She was not eating the dinner which had been brought
+to her, though she occasionally glanced with miserable eyes at one dish or
+another. She seemed unable to help herself, and at intervals a dry sob
+shook her tiny body.
+
+Sylvia forgot the grapes beside her plate; she was looking with womanly
+pity at that little girl, and at the man, who seemed sunk into the depths
+of despair.
+
+Peterson followed her compassionate glance. "Ah," he explained, "it's a
+chap who came up from Paila a little while back. He had his wife with him.
+She was dying, and she wanted to be buried in Texas. I believe he's in
+some sort of business down in Paila."
+
+The spirit of compassion surrounded Sylvia like a halo. She had just noted
+that the little girl was making a stupendous effort to conquer her sobs,
+to "be good," as children say. With a heroic resolve which would have been
+creditable to a Joan of Arc, the little thing suddenly began to try to eat
+from one of the dishes, but her hands trembled so that she was quite
+helpless. Her efforts seemed about to suffer a final collapse.
+
+And then Sylvia pushed her chair back and arose. There was a tremulous
+smile on her lips as she crossed the room. She paused by that man with
+crape on his sleeve. "I wonder if you won't let me help," she said. Her
+voice would have made you think of rue, or of April rain. She knelt beside
+the child's chair and possessed herself of a tiny hand with a persuasive
+gentleness that would have worked miracles. Her face was uplifted, soft,
+beaming, bright. She was scarcely prepared for the passionate outburst of
+the child, who suddenly flung forth eager hands with a cry of surrender.
+Sylvia held the convulsed body against her breast, tucking the distorted
+face up under her chin. "There!" she soothed, "there!" She carried her
+charge out of the room without wasting words. She had observed that when
+the child came to her the man had seemed on the point of surrender, too.
+With an effort he had kept himself inert, with a wan face. He had the
+dubious, _sounding_ expression of one who stands at a door with his back
+to the light and looks out into the dark.
+
+Before she had brought the child back, washed and comforted, to help her
+with her food, Peterson had forgotten the interruption entirely. Taking
+advantage of Sylvia's absence (as if she had been an interfering factor in
+the meeting, but scarcely a third person), he turned keen eyes upon
+Harboro. "Old Harboro!" he said affectionately and musingly. Then he
+seemed to be swelling up, as if he were a mobile vessel filled with water
+that had begun to boil. He became as red as a victim of apoplexy. His eyes
+filled with an unholy mirth, his teeth glistened. His voice was a mere
+wheeze, issuing from a cataclysm of agonized mirth.
+
+"_And so you've come to it at last!_" he managed to articulate.
+
+"Come to what?" inquired Harboro. His level glance was disconcerting.
+
+Peterson was on the defensive immediately. "You used not to care for
+women--or you claimed you didn't."
+
+"Oh! I didn't understand. I used not to care for--a certain class of
+women. I don't yet."
+
+The threatened boiling-over process was abruptly checked, as if a lid had
+been lifted. "Oh!" said Peterson weakly. He gazed at a fragment of roast
+beef on his plate. It might have been some sort of strange insect. He
+frowned at it. And then his eyes blazed steadily and brightly. He did not
+look at Harboro again for a long time.
+
+Sylvia came back, moving a little shyly, and pushing a strand of hair back
+into its place. She looked across the dining-room to where the child was
+talking with old-fashioned sedateness to her father. She had forgotten her
+tragedy--for the moment. The man appeared to have forgotten, too.
+
+But Peterson's dinner turned out to be a failure, after all. Conversation
+became desultory, listless.
+
+They arose from their places at last and left the room. On the street they
+stood for a moment, but nothing was said about another meeting. Harboro
+thought of inviting Peterson over to the house; but he fancied Sylvia
+wouldn't like it; and besides, the man's grossness was there, more patent
+than ever, and it stood between them.
+
+"Well, good-by," said Peterson. He shook hands with Harboro and with
+Sylvia. But while he shook hands with Sylvia he was looking at Harboro.
+All that was substantial in the man's nature was educed by men, not by
+women; and he was fond of Harboro. To him Sylvia was an incident, while
+Harboro was an episode. Harboro typified work and planning and the rebuffs
+of the day. Sylvia meant to him only a passing pleasure and the relaxation
+of the night or of a holiday.
+
+As he went away he seemed eager to get around a corner somewhere. He
+seemed to be swelling up again. You might have supposed he was about to
+explode.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER VIII
+
+
+Sylvia's dress made its appearance in due course in the house on the
+Quemado Road.
+
+Sylvia could not understand why Harboro should have arranged to have it
+delivered according to routine, paying the duty on it. It seemed to her a
+waste of money, a willingness to be a victim of extortion. Why should the
+fact that the river was there make any difference? It was some scheme of
+the merchants of Eagle Pass, probably, the purpose of which was to compel
+you to buy from them, and pay higher prices, and take what you didn't
+want.
+
+The dress was a wonderful affair: a triumph of artful simplicity. It was
+white, with a suggestion of warmth: an effect produced by a second fabric
+underlying the visible silk. It made Sylvia look like a gentle queen of
+marionettes. A set of jewelry of silver filigree had been bought to go
+with it: circles of butterflies of infinite delicacy for bracelets, and a
+necklace. You would have said there was only wanting a star to bind in her
+hair and a wand for her to carry.
+
+But the Mesquite Club ball came and went, and the Harboros were not
+invited.
+
+Harboro was stunned. The ball was on a Friday night: and on Saturday he
+went up to the balcony of his house with a copy of the _Guide_ clutched in
+his hand. He did not turn to the railroad news. He was interested only in
+the full-column, first-page account of the ball at the Mesquite Club.
+There was the customary amount of fine writing, including a patent
+straining for new adjectives to apply to familiar decorations. And then
+there was a list of the names of the guests. Possibly Piedras Negras
+hadn't been included--and possibly he was still regarded as belonging to
+the railroad offices, and the people across the river.
+
+But no, there were the names: heads of departments and the usual
+presentable clerks--young Englishmen with an air. The General Manager, as
+Harboro knew, was on a trip to Torreon; but otherwise the list of names
+was sufficient evidence that this first ball of the season had been a
+particularly ambitious affair.
+
+Sylvia was standing alone in the dining-room while Harboro frowned darkly
+over the list of names before him. The physical Sylvia was in the
+dining-room; but her mind was up on the balcony with Harboro. She was
+watching him as he scowled at the first page of the _Guide_. But if
+chagrin was the essence of the thing that bothered Harboro, something far
+deeper caused Sylvia to stand like a slim, slumbering tree. She was
+frightened. Harboro would begin to ask why? And he was a man. He would
+guess the reason. He would begin to realize that mere obscurity on the
+part of his wife was not enough to explain the fact that the town refused
+to recognize her existence. And then...?
+
+Antonia spoke to her once and again without being heard. Would the senora
+have the roast put on the table now, or would she wait until the senor
+came down-stairs? She decided for herself, bringing in the roast with an
+entirely erroneous belief that she was moving briskly. An ancient Mexican
+woman knows very well what the early months of marriage are. There is a
+flame, and then there are ashes. Then the ashes must be removed by mutual
+effort and embers are discovered. Then life is good and may run along
+without any annoyances.
+
+When the senor went up-stairs with scarcely a word to the senora, Antonia
+looked within, seeming to notice nothing. But to herself she was saying:
+"The time of ashes." The bustle of the domestic life was good at such a
+time. She brought in the roast.
+
+Harboro, with the keen senses of a healthy man who is hungry, knew that
+the roast had been placed on the table, but he did not stir. The _Guide_
+had slipped from his knee to the floor, and he was looking away to the
+darkening tide of the Rio Grande. He had looked at his problem from every
+angle, and now he was coming to a conclusion which did him credit.
+
+... They had not been invited to the ball. Well, what had he done that
+people who formerly had gone out of their way to be kind to him should
+ignore him? (It did not occur to him for an instant that the cause lay
+with Sylvia.) He was not a conceited man, but ... an eligible bachelor
+must, certainly, be regarded more interestedly than a man with a wife,
+particularly in a community where the young women were blooming and
+eligible men were scarce. They had drawn him into their circle because
+they had regarded him as a desirable husband for one of their young women.
+He remembered now how the processes of the social mill had brought him up
+before this young woman and that until he had met them all: how, often, he
+had found himself having a _tete-a-tete_ with some kindly disposed girl
+whom he never would have thought of singling out for special attention. He
+hadn't played their game. He might have remained a bachelor and all would
+have been well. There would always have been the chance of something
+happening. But he had found a wife outside their circle. He had, in
+effect, snubbed them before they had snubbed him. He remembered now how
+entirely absorbed he had been in his affair with Sylvia, and how the
+entire community had become a mere indistinct background during those days
+when he walked with her and planned their future. There wasn't any
+occasion for him to feel offended. He had ignored the town--and the town
+had paid him back in his own coin.
+
+He had conquered his black mood entirely when Sylvia came up to him. She
+regarded him a moment timidly, and then she put her hand on his shoulder.
+He looked up at her with the alert kindliness which she had learned to
+prize.
+
+"I'm afraid you're fearfully disappointed," she said.
+
+"I was. But I'm not now." He told her what his theory was, putting it into
+a few detached words. But she understood and brightened immediately.
+
+"Do you suppose that's it?" she asked.
+
+"What else could it be?" He arose. "Isn't Antonia ready?"
+
+"I think so. And there are so many ways for us to be happy without going
+to their silly affairs. Imagine getting any pleasure out of sitting around
+watching a girl trying to get a man! That's all they amount to, those
+things. We'll get horses and ride. It's ever so much more sensible."
+
+She felt like a culprit let out of prison as she followed him down into
+the dining-room. For the moment she was no longer the fatalist, foreseeing
+inevitable exposure and punishment. Nothing had come of their meeting with
+Peterson--an incident which had taken her wholly by surprise, and which
+had threatened for an instant to result disastrously. She had spent
+wakeful hours as a result of that meeting; but the cloud of apprehension
+had passed, leaving her sky serene again. And now Harboro had put aside
+the incident of the Mesquite Club ball as if it did not involve anything
+more than a question of pique.
+
+She took her place at the end of the table, and propped her face up in her
+hands while Harboro carved the roast. Why shouldn't she hope that the
+future was hers, to do with as she would--or, at least, as she could? That
+her fate now lay in her own hands, and not in every passing wind of
+circumstance, seemed possible, even probable. If only....
+
+A name came into her mind suddenly; a name carved in jagged, sinister
+characters. If only Fectnor would stay away off there in the City.
+
+She did not know why that name should have occurred to her just now to
+plague her. Fectnor was an evil bird of passage who had come and gone.
+Such creatures had no fixed course. He had once told her that only a fool
+ever came back the way he had gone. He belonged to the States, somewhere,
+but he would come back by way of El Paso, if he ever came back; or he
+would drift over toward Vera Cruz or Tampico.
+
+Fectnor was one of those who had trod that path through the mesquite to
+Sylvia's back door in the days which were ended. But he was different from
+the others. He was a man who was lavish with money--but he expected you to
+pick it up out of the dust. He was of violent moods; and he had that
+audacity--that taint of insanity, perhaps--which enables some men to
+maintain the reputation of bad men, of "killers," in every frontier. When
+Fectnor had come he had seemed to assume the right of prior possession,
+and others had yielded to him without question. Indeed, it was usually
+known when the man was in town, and during these periods none came to
+Sylvia's door save one. He even created the impression that all others
+were poachers, and that they had better be wary of him. She had been
+afraid of him from the first; and it had seemed to her that her only cross
+was removed when she heard that Fectnor had got a contract down in the
+interior and had gone away. That had happened a good many months ago; and
+Sylvia remembered now, with a feeling as of an icy hand on her heart, that
+if her relationships with many of the others in those old days were
+innocent enough--or at best marred only by a kindly folly--there had been
+that in her encounters with Fectnor which would forever damn her in
+Harboro's eyes, if the truth ever reached him. He would have the right to
+call her a bad woman; and if the word seemed fantastic and unreal to her,
+she knew that it would not seem so to Harboro.
+
+If only Fectnor....
+
+She winked quickly two or three times, as if she had been dreaming.
+Antonia had set her plate before her, and the aroma of the roast was in
+her nostrils. Harboro was regarding her serenely, affectionately.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+
+They were happier than ever, following that adjusting episode.
+
+Harboro felt that his place had been assigned to him, and he was
+satisfied. He would have to think of ways of affording diversion for
+Sylvia, of course; but that could be managed, and in the meantime she
+seemed disposed to prolong the rapturous and sufficient joys of their
+honeymoon. He would be on the lookout, and when the moment of reaction
+came he would be ready with suggestions. She had spoken of riding. There
+would be places to go. The _bailes_ out at the Quemado; weddings far out
+in the chaparral. Many Americans attended these affairs in a spirit of
+adventure, and the ride was always delightful. There was a seduction in
+the desert winds, in the low-vaulted skies with their decorative schemes
+of constellations.
+
+He was rather at a loss as to how to meet the people who had made a fellow
+of him. There was Dunwoodie, for example. He ran into Dunwoodie one
+morning on his way to work, and the good fellow had stopped him with an
+almost too patent friendliness.
+
+"Come, stop long enough to have a drink," said Dunwoodie, blushing without
+apparent cause and shaking Harboro awkwardly by the hand. And then, as if
+this blunt invitation might prove too transparent, he added: "I was in a
+game last night, and I'm needing one."
+
+There was no need for Dunwoodie to explain his desire for a drink--or his
+disinclination to drink alone. Harboro saw nothing out of the ordinary in
+the invitation; but unfortunately he responded before he had quite taken
+the situation into account.
+
+"It's pretty early for me," he said. "Another time--if you'll excuse me."
+
+It was to be regretted that Harboro's manner seemed a trifle stiff; and
+Dunwoodie read uncomfortable meanings into that refusal. He never repeated
+the invitation; and others, hearing of the incident, concluded that
+Harboro was too deeply offended by what the town had done to him to care
+for anybody's friendship any more. The thing that the town had done to
+Harboro was like an open page to everybody. Indeed, the people of Eagle
+Pass knew that Harboro had been counted out of eligible circles
+considerably before Harboro knew it himself.
+
+As for Sylvia, contentment overspread her like incense. She was to have
+Harboro all to herself, and she was not to be required to run the gantlet
+of the town's too-knowing eyes. She felt safe in that house on the Quemado
+Road, and she hoped that she now need not emerge from it until old menaces
+were passed, and people had come and gone, and she could begin a new
+chapter.
+
+She was somewhat annoyed by her father during those days. He sent messages
+by Antonia. Why didn't she come to see him? She was happy, yes. But could
+she forget her old father? Was she that kind of a daughter? Such was the
+substance of the messages which reached her.
+
+She would not go to see him. She could not bear to think of entering his
+house. She had been homesick occasionally--that she could not deny. There
+had been moments when the new home oppressed her by its orderliness, by
+its strangeness. And she was fond of her father. She supposed she ought
+not to be fond of him; he had always been a worthless creature. But such
+matters have little to do with the law of cause and effect. She loved
+him--there was the truth, and it could not be ignored. But with every
+passing day the house under the mesquite-tree assumed a more terrible
+aspect in her eyes, and the house on the Quemado Road became more
+familiar, dearer.
+
+Unknown to Harboro, she sent money to her father. He had intimated that if
+she could not come there were certain needs ... there was no work to be
+obtained, seemingly.... And so the money which she might have used for her
+own pleasure went to her father. She was not unscrupulous in this matter.
+She did not deceive Harboro. She merely gave to her father the money which
+Harboro gave her, and which she was expected to use without explaining how
+it was spent.
+
+With the passing of days she ceased to worry about those messages of her
+father--she ceased to regard them as reminders that the tie between her
+old life and the new was not entirely broken. And following the increased
+assurances of her safety in Harboro's house and heart, she began to give
+rein to some of the coquetries of her nature.
+
+She became an innocent siren, studying ways of bewitchment, of endearment.
+She became a bewildering revelation to him, amazing him, delighting him.
+After he had begun to conclude that he knew her she became not one woman,
+but a score of women: demure, elfin, pensive, childlike, sedate, aloof,
+laughing--but always with her delight in him unconcealed: the mask she
+wore always slipping from its place to reveal her eagerness to draw closer
+to him, and always closer.
+
+The evenings were beginning to be cool, and occasionally she enticed him
+after nightfall into the room he had called her boudoir. She drew the
+blinds and played the infinitely varied game of love with him. She asked
+him to name some splendid lover, some famous courtier. Ingomar? Very well,
+he should be Ingomar. What sort of lover was he?... And forthwith her
+words, her gestures and touches became as chains of flowers to lead him to
+do her bidding. Napoleon? She saluted him, and marched prettily before
+him--and halted to claim her reward in kisses. He was Antony and Leander.
+
+When she climbed on his knees with kisses for Leander he pretended to be
+surprised. "More kisses?" he asked.
+
+"But these are the first."
+
+"And those other kisses?"
+
+"They? Oh, they were for Antony."
+
+"Ah, but if you have kissed Antony, Leander does not want your kisses."
+
+Her face seemed to fade slightly, as if certain lights had been
+extinguished. She withdrew a little from him and did not look at him.
+"Why?" she asked presently. The gladness had gone out of her voice.
+
+"Well ... kisses should be for one lover; not for two."
+
+She pondered, and turned to him with an air of triumph. "But you see,
+these are new kisses for Leander. They are entirely different. They've
+never been given before. They've got nothing to do with the others."
+
+He pretended to be convinced. But the kisses she gave to Leander were less
+rapturous. She was thinking.
+
+"I'm afraid you don't think so highly of ... Leander," he suggested.
+"Suppose I be ... Samson?"
+
+She leaned her head on his shoulder as if she had grown tired.
+
+"Samson was a very strong man," he explained. "He could push a house
+down."
+
+That interested her.
+
+"Would you like to be Samson?" she asked.
+
+"I think it might be nice ... but no--the woman who kissed Samson betrayed
+him. I think I won't be Samson, after all."
+
+She had been nervously fingering the necklace of gold beads at her throat;
+and suddenly she uttered a distressed cry. The string had broken, and the
+beads fell in a yellow shower to the rug.
+
+She climbed down on her knees beside him and picked up the beads, one by
+one.
+
+"Let them go," he urged cheerfully, noting her distress. "Come back. I'll
+be anybody you choose. Even Samson."
+
+That extinguished light seemed to have been turned on again. She looked up
+at him smiling. "No, I don't want you to be Samson," she said. "And I
+don't want to lose my beads."
+
+He regarded her happily. She looked very little and soft there on the rug.
+"You look like a kitten," he declared.
+
+She picked up the last bead and looked at the unstable baubles in her pink
+left palm. She tilted her hand so that they rolled back and forth. "Could
+a kitten look at a king?" she asked with mock earnestness.
+
+"I should think it could, if there happened to be any king about."
+
+She continued to make the beads roll about on her hand. "I'm going to be a
+kitten," she declared with decision. "Would you like me to be a kitten?"
+She raised herself on her knees and propped her right hand behind her on
+the rug for support. She was looking earnestly into his eyes.
+
+"If you'd like to be," he replied.
+
+"Hold your hand," she commanded. She poured the beads into his immense,
+hard palm. "Don't spill them." She turned about on the rug on hands and
+knees, and crept away to the middle of the floor. She turned and arose to
+her knees, and rested both hands before her on the floor. She held her
+head high and _meowed_ twice so realistically that Harboro leaned forward,
+regarding her with wonder. She lowered herself and turned and crept to the
+window. There she lifted herself a little and patted the tassel which hung
+from the blind. She continued this with a certain sedateness and
+concentration until the tassel went beyond her reach and caught in the
+curtain. Then she let herself down again, and crawled to the middle of the
+floor. Now she was on her knees, her hands on the floor before her, her
+body as erect as she could hold it. Again she _meowed_--this time with a
+certain ennui; and finally she raised one arm and rubbed it slowly to and
+fro behind her ear.... She quickly assumed a defensive attitude, crouching
+fiercely. An imaginary dog had crossed her path. She made an explosive
+sound with her lips. She regained her tranquillity, staring with slowly
+returning complacency and contempt while the imaginary dog disappeared.
+
+Harboro did not speak. He looked on in amazed silence to see what she
+would do next. His swarthy face was too sphinx-like to express pleasure,
+yet he was not displeased. He was thinking: She is a child--but what an
+extraordinary child!
+
+She crawled toward him and leaned against his leg. _She was purring!_
+
+Harboro stooped low to see how she did it, but her hair hid her lips from
+him.
+
+He seized her beneath the arms and lifted her until her face was on a
+level with his. He regarded her almost uncomfortably.
+
+"Don't you like me to be a kitten?" She adjusted her knees on his lap and
+rested her hands on his shoulders. She regarded him gravely.
+
+"Well ... a kitten gets to be a cat," he suggested.
+
+She pulled one end of his long mustache, regarding him intently. "Oh, a
+cat. But this is a different kind of a kitten entirely. It's got nothing
+to do with cats." She held her head on one side and pulled his mustache
+slowly through her fingers. "It won't curl," she said.
+
+"No, I'm not the curly sort of man."
+
+She considered that. It seemed to present an idea that was new to her.
+"Anyway, I'm glad you're a big fellow."
+
+As he did not respond to this, she went on: "Those little shrimps--you
+couldn't be a kitten with them. They would have to be puppies. That's the
+only fun you could have."
+
+"Sylvia!" he remonstrated. He adjusted her so that she sat on his lap,
+with her face against his throat. He was recalling that other Sylvia: the
+Sylvia of the dining-room, of the balcony; the circumspect, sensible,
+comprehending Sylvia. But the discoveries he was making were not
+unwelcome. Folly wore for him a face of ecstasy, of beauty.
+
+As she nestled against him, he whispered: "Is the sandman coming?"
+
+And she responded, with her lips against his throat: "Yes--if you'll carry
+me."
+
+Antonia was wrong. This was not the time of ashes. It was the time of
+flame.
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART III
+
+FECTNOR, THE PEOPLE'S ADVOCATE
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+
+And then Fectnor came.
+
+The date of the election was drawing near, and a new sheriff was to be
+jockeyed into office by the traditional practice of corralling all the
+male adult Mexicans who could be reached, and making them vote just so.
+The voice of the people was about to be heard in the land.
+
+It was a game which enjoyed the greatest popularity along the border in
+those years. Two played at it: the opposing candidates. And each built him
+a corral and began capturing Mexicans two or three days before the
+election.
+
+The Mexicans were supposed to have their abodes (of a sort) in Maverick
+County; but there was nothing conservative in the rules under which the
+game was played. If you could get a consignment of voters from Mexico you
+might do so, resting assured that your opponent would not hesitate to fill
+his corral with citizens from the other side of the river.
+
+The corrals were amazing places. Dispensers of creature comforts were
+engaged. Barbecued meat and double rations of _mezcal_ were provided. Your
+Mexican voters, held rigorously as prisoners, were in a state of collapse
+before the day of the election. They were conveyed in carryalls to the
+polls, and heads were counted, and the candidate got credit for the full
+number of constituents he had dumped out into the sunshine.
+
+And then your voter disappeared back into the chaparral, or over the Rio
+Grande bridge, and pondered over the insanity of the _gringos_.
+
+It will be seen that the process touched upon was less pleasant than
+simple. Among the constituents in the corrals there was often a tendency
+to fight, and occasionally a stubborn fellow had a clear idea that he
+wanted to be in a different corral from the one in which he found himself.
+There was needed a strong-handed henchman in these cases. Jesus Mendoza
+was the henchman for one faction, but the other faction needed a henchman,
+too.
+
+And so Fectnor came.
+
+He had the reputation of knowing every Mexican in Maverick County and in
+the territory immediately contiguous thereto. Many of them had been
+members of his gangs when he had contracts in the neighborhood of Eagle
+Pass. He knew precisely which of them could be depended upon to remain
+docile under all manner of indignity, and which of them had a bad habit of
+placing a sudden check on their laughter and lunging forward with a knife.
+They knew him, too. They feared him. They knew he could be coldly
+brutal--an art which no Mexican has ever mastered. The politicians knew
+that getting Fectnor was almost equivalent to getting the office. It was
+more economical to pay him his price than to employ uncertain aids who
+would have sold their services much more cheaply.
+
+Harboro and Sylvia were sitting on their balcony the second night before
+the election. A warm wind had been blowing and it was quite pleasant out
+of doors.
+
+One of the corrals lay not far from the house on the Quemado Road. Mounted
+Mexicans had been riding past the house and on into the town all day, and,
+contrary to usual custom, they were not to be seen later in the day
+returning to the chaparral. They were being prepared to exercise their
+suffrage privileges.
+
+As Harboro and Sylvia listened it was to be noted that over in the corral
+the several noises were beginning to be blended in one note. The barbecue
+fires were burning down; the evening meal had been served, with reserved
+supplies for late comers. _Mezcal_ and cheap whiskey were being dispensed.
+A low hum of voices arose, with the occasional uplifting of a drunken song
+or a shout of anger.
+
+Suddenly Harboro sat more erect. A shout had arisen over in the corral,
+and a murmur higher and more sinister than the dominant note of the place
+grew steadily in intensity. It came to a full stop when a pistol-shot
+arose above the lesser noises like a sky-rocket.
+
+"He's getting his work in," commented Harboro. He spoke to himself. He had
+forgotten Sylvia for the moment.
+
+"He? Who?" inquired Sylvia.
+
+He turned toward her in the dusk and replied--with indifference in his
+tone now--"Fectnor."
+
+She shrank back so that her face would be out of his line of vision.
+"Fectnor!" she echoed.
+
+"A fellow they've brought up from the interior to help with the election.
+A famous bad man, I believe."
+
+There was silence for a long interval. Harboro supposed the matter did not
+interest her; but she asked at length: "You know him, then?"
+
+"Only by reputation. A fellow with a lot of bluff, I think. I don't
+believe very much in bad men. He's managed to terrify the Mexicans somehow
+or other." He had not noticed that her voice had become dull and low.
+
+"Fectnor!" she breathed to herself. She rocked to and fro, and after a
+long interval, "Fectnor!" she repeated.
+
+He hitched his chair so that he could look at her. Her prolonged silence
+was unusual. "Are you getting chilly?" he asked solicitously.
+
+"It does seem chilly, doesn't it?" she responded.
+
+They arose and went into the house.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+
+Antonia went marketing the next morning, and when she came back Sylvia met
+her with fearful, inquiring eyes. She was terribly uneasy, and she was one
+of those creatures who must go more than half-way to meet impending
+danger. She was not at all surprised when Antonia handed her a sealed
+envelope.
+
+The old servant did not linger to witness the reading of that written
+message. She possessed the discretion of her race, of her age. The senora
+had been married quite a time now. Doubtless there were old friends....
+
+And Sylvia stood alone, reading the sprawling lines which her father had
+written:
+
+"_Fectnor's here. He wants to see you. Better come down to the house. You
+know he's likely to make trouble if he doesn't have his way._"
+
+She spelled out the words with contracted brows; and then for the moment
+she became still another Sylvia. She tore the missive into bits. She was
+pale with rage--rage which was none the less obsessing because it had in
+it the element of terror. Her father dared to suggest such a thing! It
+would have been bad enough if Fectnor had sent the summons himself; but
+for her father to unite with him against her in such an affair!
+
+She tried to calm herself, succeeding but illy. "Antonia!" she called.
+"Antonia!" For once her voice was unlovely, her expression was harsh.
+
+The startled old woman came with quite unprecedented alacrity.
+
+"Antonia, where did you see my father?"
+
+"On the street. He seemed to have waited for me."
+
+"Very well. You must find him again. It doesn't matter how long you
+search. I want you to find him."
+
+She hurriedly framed a response to that note of her father's:
+
+"_I will not come. Tell Fectnor I never will see him again. He will not
+dare to harm me._"
+
+As she placed this cry of defiance into an envelope and sealed and
+addressed it certain words of Harboro's came back to her. That night of
+their wedding he had lifted her in his powerful arms and had given her a
+man's assurance: "I mean that you're to have all the help you want--that
+you're to look to me for your strength."
+
+She reasoned shrewdly: Harboro wasn't the sort of man people would tell
+things to--about her. They would know what to expect: intense passion,
+swift punishment.
+
+And yet as she watched Antonia go away down the road, suggesting supine
+submission rather than a friend in need, her heart failed her. Had she
+done wisely? Fectnor had never stepped aside for any man. He seemed
+actually to believe that none must deny him the things he wanted. He
+seemed an insane creature when you thwarted him. There was something
+terrible about his rages.
+
+She imagined seemingly impossible things: that Fectnor would come to the
+house--perhaps while Harboro was there. He might kill Harboro.
+
+Alas, the evil she had done in those other days loomed before her now in
+its true light: not merely as evil deeds, definitely ended with their
+commission, but as fearful forces that went on existing, to visit her
+again and destroy her.
+
+She began to hope that Fectnor would actually come to her--now, before
+Harboro came home. At the worst she might save Harboro, and there was even
+a chance that she could make Fectnor see her position as she saw it--that
+she could persuade him to be merciful to her. Surely for the sake of
+security and peace in all the years that lay before her.... A definite
+purpose dawned in her eyes. She went to her room and began deliberately to
+choose her most becoming street costume.
+
+She was ready to go out when Antonia returned.
+
+"Did you find him?" she asked.
+
+Yes, the old woman had found him and delivered the message. He had sent no
+word in return; he had only glared at the bearer of the message and had
+cursed her.
+
+"Well, never mind," said Sylvia soothingly. It occurred to her that it
+must be a sad thing to be an old woman, and a Mexican, and to have to
+serve as the wire over which the electric current flowed--and to feel only
+the violence of the current without comprehending the words it carried.
+
+And now to find Fectnor--for this was what she meant to do.
+
+She would see him on the street, where publicity would protect her, even
+if there were no friends to take her part. She would see him on the street
+and explain why she could not meet him any more, why he must not ask it.
+Certainly it would not look very well for her to be seen talking to him;
+but she could not help that. She would be going out to do a little
+shopping, ostensibly, and she would hope to encounter him on the street,
+either coming or going.
+
+However, her earnest planning proved to be of no avail. Fectnor was
+nowhere to be seen.
+
+She walked rather leisurely through the town--moving barely fast enough to
+avoid the appearance of loitering. She walked circumspectly enough,
+seemingly taking little interest in events or individuals. That she was
+keenly on the alert for one familiar face no one would have guessed.
+
+She got quite to the end of the main street, and then she halted in
+painful uncertainty. If she turned back now she would have to go on
+steadily back to her home, save for a brief stop at one of the stores, or
+else betray the fact to any who might be curiously observing her that she
+was on the street on some secret mission.
+
+She stood for a space, trying to decide what to do. Often before she had
+stood on that very spot to view the picture which men and the desert had
+painted on a vast canvas down toward the river. She occupied a point of
+vantage at the top of a long flight of stone steps, broken and ancient,
+leading down to the Rio Grande and its basin. Along the water's edge in
+the distance, down in the depths below her, ancient Mexican women were
+washing garments by a process which must have been old in Pharaoh's time:
+by spreading them on clean rocks and kneading them or applying brushes.
+The river flowed placidly; the sunlight enveloped water and rock and shore
+and the patient women bending over their tasks. Nineveh or Tyre might have
+presented just such a picture of burdened women, concealing no one might
+say what passions and fires under an exterior which suggested docility or
+the unkind pressure of tradition's hand or even hopelessness.
+
+But Sylvia scarcely saw the picture now. She was recalling the words she
+had written in that message to her father. If only she had not defied
+Fectnor; if only she had made a plea for pity, or suggested a fear of her
+husband--or if she hadn't sent any answer at all!
+
+It occurred to her that the exposure which menaced her was as nothing to
+the perils to which she had subjected Harboro. She knew instinctively that
+Harboro was not a man to submit to deliberate injury from any source. He
+would defend himself in the face of any danger; he would defend that which
+belonged to him. And Fectnor was cruel and unscrupulous and cunning. He
+knew how to provoke quarrels and to gain advantages.
+
+She grew cold at the thought of losing Harboro. The inevitable
+consequences of such a loss occurred to her. She would have to submit
+always to Fectnor as long as he willed it. And afterward.... Ah, she must
+find Fectnor!
+
+She retraced her steps. At a shop where silks were sold she entered. She
+asked for a piece of ribbon. A particular shade of blue; she could not
+describe it. She sat on a stool at the counter and kept an eye on the
+street.... No, something darker than that, something less lustrous. She
+examined bolt after bolt, and when at length it appeared that she was
+quite unwilling to be pleased she made a choice. And always she watched
+the street, hoping that Fectnor would pass.
+
+At last she went up the Quemado Road, walking disconsolately. The withered
+immensity of the world broke her spirit. The vast stricken spaces were but
+a material manifestation of those cruelties of nature which had broken her
+long ago, and which could not be expected to withdraw their spell now that
+the time had come for her destruction.
+
+She looked far before her and saw where the Quemado Road attained its
+highest point and disappeared on the other side of a ridge. A house stood
+there, lonely and serene. She had known it was a convent; but now she
+observed it with eyes which really saw it for the first time. It had
+looked cool even during the period of midsummer. There was shade--a
+friendly garden. She had seen the Mother Superior once or twice: a large,
+elderly woman who wore but lightly the sedate mien which concealed a
+gentle humanity.
+
+What if she, Sylvia, were to go on past her own house, on up to the ridge,
+and appeal to that unworldly woman for succor? Was there a refuge there
+for such as she?
+
+But this was the merest passing fancy. Where the tides of life ran high
+she had been moulded; here in the open she would meet her end, whatever
+the end might be.
+
+She sat inside her house throughout that long day. Beside an open window
+she kept her place, staring toward Eagle Pass, her eyes widening whenever
+a figure appeared on the highway.
+
+But the individual she feared--Fectnor, her father, a furtive
+messenger--did not appear.
+
+Harboro came at last: Harboro, bringing power and placidity.
+
+She ran out to the gate to meet him. Inside the house she flung herself
+into his arms.
+
+He marvelled at her intensity. He held her a long moment in his embrace.
+Then he gazed into her eyes searchingly. "Everything is all right," he
+said--the words being an affirmation rather than a question. He had read
+an expression of dread in her eyes.
+
+"Yes, everything is all right," she echoed. Everything _was_ right now.
+She seemed to awaken from a horrible nightmare. Harboro's presence put to
+flight an army of fears. She could scarcely understand why she had been so
+greatly disturbed. No harm could come to him, or to her. He was too
+strong, too self-contained, to be menaced by little creatures. The bigness
+of him, the penetrating, kindly candor of his eyes, would paralyze base
+minds and violent hands seeking to do him an injury. The law had
+sanctioned their union, too--and the law was powerful.
+
+She held to that supporting thought, and during the rest of the evening
+she was untroubled by the instinctive knowledge that even the law cannot
+make right what the individual has made wrong.
+
+She was as light-hearted as a child that night, and Harboro, after the
+irksome restraints of the day, rejoiced in her. They played at the game of
+love again; and old Antonia, in her place down-stairs, thought of that
+exchange of letters and darkly pondered.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+
+The election came and went; the voice of the people had been heard, and
+Maverick County had a new sheriff. In the house on the Quemado Road
+Fectnor's name was heard no more.
+
+On the Saturday night following the election Harboro came home and found a
+letter waiting for him on the table in the hall. He found also a
+disquieted Sylvia, who looked at him with brooding and a question in her
+eyes.
+
+He stopped where he stood and read the letter, and Sylvia watched with
+parted lips--for she had recognized the handwriting on the envelope.
+
+Harboro's brows lowered into a frown. "It's from your father," he said
+finally, lifting his eyes from the letter and regarding Sylvia.
+
+She tried to achieve an effect of only mild interest. "What can he have to
+write to you about?" she asked.
+
+"Poor fellow--it seems he's been ill. Sylvia, how long has it been since
+you visited your father?"
+
+"Does he want me to come to see him?"
+
+"He hints at that pretty strongly. Yes, that's really the substance of his
+letter."
+
+"I've never been back since we were married."
+
+She led the way into the dining-room. Her manner was not quite responsive.
+She made Harboro feel that this was a matter which did not concern him.
+
+"But isn't that--doesn't that seem rather neglectful?"
+
+She drew a chair away from the table and sat down facing him. "Yes, it
+does seem so. I think I've hinted that I wasn't happy in my old home life;
+but I've never talked very much about it. I ought to tell you, I think,
+that I want to forget all about it. I want the old relationship broken off
+completely."
+
+Harboro shook his head with decision. "That won't do," he declared.
+"Believe me, you're making a mistake. You're a good deal younger than I,
+Sylvia, and it's the way of the young to believe that for every old tie
+broken a new one can be formed. At your age life seems to have an
+abundance of everything. But you'll be dismayed, in a few years, to
+discover that most things come to us but once, and that nearly all the
+best things come to us in our youth."
+
+He stood before her with an air of such quiet conviction, of such tranquil
+certainty of the truth of what he said that she could not meet his glance.
+She had placed an elbow on the table, and was supporting her face in her
+hand. Her expression was strangely inscrutable to the man who looked down
+at her.
+
+"Your father must be getting old. If you shouldn't see him for a year or
+so, you'd be fearfully grieved to note the evidences of failure: a slight
+stoop, perhaps; a slower gait; a more troubled look in his eyes. I want to
+help you to see this thing clearly. And some day you'll get word that he
+is dead--and then you'll remember, too late, how you might have carried
+little joys to him, how you might have been a better daughter...."
+
+She sprang up, shaking the tears from her eyes. "I'll go," she said. She
+startled Harboro by that note of despair in her voice. "When does he wish
+me to come?"
+
+"He says he is ill and alone. I think he would be glad if I could persuade
+you to go this evening. Why not this evening?"
+
+Unfortunately, Harboro concealed a part of the truth in this. Her father
+had quite definitely asked to have her come this evening. But Harboro
+wished her to feel that she was acting voluntarily, that she was choosing
+for herself, both as to the deed and as to the time of its doing.
+
+And Sylvia felt a wave of relief at the assurance that her father had not
+set a definite time. Oh, surely the letter was just what it purported to
+be--a cry of loneliness and an honest desire to see her. And Sylvia really
+loved her father. There was that in her nature which made it impossible
+for her to judge him.
+
+"I could go with you," ventured Harboro, "though he doesn't say anything
+about my coming. I've felt we must both go soon. Of course, I need not
+wait for an invitation."
+
+But Sylvia opposed this. "If he's ill," she said, "I think I ought to go
+alone this time." She added to herself: "I don't want him ever to go. I
+must make him believe that enough has been done if I go myself. I must
+convince him that my father doesn't care to have him come."
+
+Nevertheless, she was quite resigned to the arrangement that had been made
+for her. She helped Antonia make the final preparations for supper, and
+she set off down the road quite cheerfully after they arose from the
+table. Harboro watched her with a new depth of tenderness. This sweet
+submission, the quick recognition of a filial duty once it was pointed out
+to her--here were qualities which were of the essence of that childlike
+beauty which is the highest charm in women.
+
+And Sylvia felt a strange eagerness of body and mind as she went on her
+way. She had put all thought of the house under the mesquite-tree out of
+mind, as far as possible. Becoming a closed book to her, the place and
+certain things which had been dear to her had become indistinct in her
+memory. Now that she was about to reopen the book various little familiar
+things came back to her and filled her mind with eagerness. The tiny
+canary in its cage--it would remember her. It would wish to take a bath,
+to win her praise. There had been a few potted plants, too; and there
+would be the familiar pictures--even the furniture she had known from
+childhood would have eloquent messages for her.
+
+This was the frame of mind she was in as she opened her father's gate, and
+paused for an instant to recall the fact that here she had stood when
+Harboro appeared before her for the first time. It was near sundown now,
+just as it had been then; and--yes, the goatherd was there away out on the
+trail, driving his flock home.
+
+She turned toward the house; she opened the door eagerly. Her eyes were
+beaming with happiness.
+
+But she was chilled a little by the sight of her father. Something Harboro
+had said about her father changing came back to her. He _had_
+changed--just in the little while that had elapsed since her marriage. But
+the realization of what that change was hurt her cruelly. He looked mean
+and base as he had never looked before. The old amiable submission to
+adversities had given place to an expression of petulance, of resentment,
+of cunning, of cowardice. Or was it that Sylvia was looking at him with
+new eyes?
+
+He sat just inside the door, by a window. He was in a rocking-chair, and
+his hands lay heavily against the back of it. He had a blanket about him,
+as if he were cold. He looked at her with a strange lack of responsiveness
+when she entered the room.
+
+"I got your message," she said affectionately. "I am glad you let me know
+you weren't feeling very well." She touched his cheeks with her hands and
+kissed him. "You _are_ cold," she added, as if she were answering the
+question that had occurred to her at sight of the blanket.
+
+She sat down near him, waiting for him to speak. He would have a great
+many things to say to her, she thought. But he regarded her almost
+stolidly.
+
+"Your marriage seems to have changed you," he said finally.
+
+"For the better, I hope!"
+
+"Well, that's according to the way you look at it. Cutting your old father
+cold isn't for the better, as far as I can see."
+
+She did not resent the ungenerous use of that phrase, "old father," though
+she could not help remembering that he was still under fifty, and that he
+looked young for his years. It was just one of his mannerisms in
+speaking.
+
+"I didn't do that, you know," she said. "Being married seems a wonderful
+adventure. There is so much that is strange for you to get used to. But I
+didn't forget you. You've seen Antonia--occasionally...?"
+
+The man moved his head so that it lay on one side against the chair-back.
+"I thought you'd throw that up to me," he complained.
+
+"Father!" she remonstrated. She was deeply wounded. It had not been her
+father's way to make baseless, unjust charges against her. Shiftless and
+blind he had been; but there had been a geniality about him which had
+softened his faults to one who loved him.
+
+"Well, never mind," he said, in a less bitter tone. And she waited, hoping
+he would think of friendlier words to speak, now that his resentment had
+been voiced.
+
+But he seemed ill at ease in her presence now. She might have been a
+stranger to him. She looked about her with a certain fond expression which
+speedily faded. Somehow the old things reminded her only of unhappiness.
+They were meaner than she had supposed them to be. Their influence over
+her was gone.
+
+She brought her gaze back to her father. He had closed his eyes as if he
+were weary; yet she discerned in the lines of his face a hard fixity which
+troubled her, alarmed her. Though his eyes were closed he did not present
+a reposeful aspect. There was something really sinister about that alert
+face with its closed eyes--as there is about a house with its blinds drawn
+to hide evil enterprises.
+
+So she sat for interminable minutes, and it seemed to Sylvia that she was
+not surprised when she heard the sound of tapping at the back door.
+
+She was not surprised, yet a feeling of engulfing horror came over her at
+the sound.
+
+Her father opened his eyes now; and it seemed really that he had been
+resting. "The boy from the drug-store," he said. "They were to send me
+some medicine."
+
+He seemed to be gathering his energies to get up and admit the boy from
+the drug-store, but Sylvia sprang to her feet and placed a restraining
+hand on his shoulder. "Let me go," she said.
+
+There was an expression of pity and concern for her father in her eyes
+when she got to the door and laid her hand on the latch. She was too
+absent-minded to observe at first that the bolt had been moved into its
+place, and that the door was locked. Her hand had become strange to the
+mechanism before her, and she was a little awkward in getting the bolt out
+of the way. But the expression of pity and concern was still in her eyes
+when she finally pulled the door toward her.
+
+And then she seemed to have known all the time that it was Fectnor who
+stood there.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+
+He slipped past her into the room, and when she uttered a forlorn cry of
+defeat and shrank back he gripped her by the wrist. Holding her so, he
+turned where he stood and locked the door again. Then he crossed the room,
+and closed and bolted that other door which opened into the room where
+Sylvia's father sat.
+
+Then he released her and stood his ground stolidly while she shrank away
+from him, regarding him with incredulous questioning, with black terror.
+She got the impression that he believed himself to have achieved a
+victory; that there was no further occasion for him to feel anxious or
+wary. It was as if the disagreeable beginning to a profitable enterprise
+had been gotten over with. And that look of callous complacence was
+scarcely more terrifying than his silence, for as yet he had not uttered a
+word.
+
+And yet Sylvia could not regard herself as being really helpless. That
+door into her father's room: while it held, her father could not come to
+her, but she could go to her father. She had only to wait until Fectnor
+was off his guard, and touch the bolt and make her escape. Yet she
+perceived now, that for all Fectnor's seeming complacence, he remained
+between her and that door.
+
+She looked about for other means of escape; but she knew immediately that
+there was none. Her own bedroom opened off the room in which she was now
+trapped; but it was a mere cubby-hole without an outer door or even a
+window. On the other side of the room there was a window looking out
+toward the desert; but even as her glance sought relief in that direction
+she remembered that this window, of only half-sash dimensions, was nailed
+into its place and was immovable. Against the dusty panes a bird-cage
+hung, and she realized with an oddly ill-timed pang of sorrow that it was
+empty. It was plain that the canary had died during her absence; and she
+wondered if anything in all the world could seem so empty as a bird-cage
+which had once had an occupant and had lost it. The sunset sky beyond that
+empty cage and the uncleaned window-panes caught her glance: an infinitely
+far-off drift of saffron with never a moving figure between it and the
+window through which she looked.
+
+Then all her terrors were renewed by Fectnor's voice. He had sauntered to
+a small table near the middle of the room and sat down on the end of it,
+after shoving a chair in Sylvia's direction.
+
+"What's the matter with you, Sylvia?" he demanded. He scarcely seemed
+angry: impatient would be the word, perhaps.
+
+Something in his manner, rather than his words, wiped out that chasm of
+time that had been placed between them. It was as if she had talked with
+him yesterday. She felt hideously familiar with him--on the same mental
+and moral plane with him.
+
+"I am married," she said shortly. If she had thought she would resort to
+parleying and evasions, she now had no intention of doing so. It seemed
+inevitable that she should talk to Fectnor in his own language.
+
+"I don't care anything about your marriage," he said. "A bit of church
+flummery. Use your brains, Sylvia. You know that couldn't make any
+difference."
+
+"I'm not thinking about the flummery. That isn't it. It's the fact that I
+love the man I married."
+
+"All very well and good. But you know you used to love me."
+
+"No, I never did."
+
+"Oh, yes you did. You just forget. At any rate, you was as much to me as
+you could ever be to a husband. You know you can't drop me just because
+it's convenient for you to take up with somebody else. You know that's not
+the way I'm built."
+
+She had refused to use the chair he had shoved toward her. She stood
+beside it a little defiantly. Now she looked into his eyes with a kind of
+imperious reasonableness. "Whatever I was to you, Fectnor," she said, "I
+became because I was forced into it."
+
+"I never forced you," he responded stoutly.
+
+"In one way, you didn't; but just the same ... you had both hands reached
+out to seize me when I fell. You never tried to help me; you were always
+digging the pitfall under my feet. You were forever holding out your hand
+with money in it; and there was you on one side of me with your money, and
+my father on the other with his never-ending talk about poverty and debts
+and his fear of you--and you know you took pains to make him fear you--and
+his saying always that it wouldn't make any difference in what people
+thought of me, whether I stood out against you or...." Her glance shifted
+and fell. There were some things she could not put into words.
+
+"That's book talk, Sylvia. Come out into the open. I know what the female
+nature is. You're all alike. You all know when to lower your eyes and lift
+your fan and back into a corner. That's the female's job, just as it's the
+male's job to be bold and rough. But you all know to a hair how far to
+carry that sort of thing. You always stop in plenty of time to get
+caught."
+
+She looked at him curiously. "I suppose," she said after a pause, "that
+roughly describes certain love-making processes. But it really wasn't
+love-making between you and me, Fectnor. It was a kind of barter."
+
+His eyes seemed to snare hers relentlessly. "You're not doing yourself
+justice, Sylvia," he said. "You're not one of the bartering kind. You'd
+have killed me--you'd have killed yourself--before you'd have let me touch
+you, if you hadn't liked me. You know that's a fact."
+
+The shadow of a frown darkened her brow. "There was a time when you had a
+kind of fascination for me. The way you had of making other men seem
+little and dumb, when you came in and spoke. You seemed so much alive. I
+noticed once that you didn't count your change when you'd paid for some
+drinks. That was the way in everything you did. You seemed lavish with
+everything that was in you; you let the big things go and didn't worry
+about the change. You were a big man in some ways, Fectnor. A girl needn't
+have been ashamed of admiring you. But Fectnor ... I've come to see what a
+low life it was I was leading. In cases like that, what the woman yields
+is ... is of every possible importance to her, while the man parts only
+with his money."
+
+He smote the table with his fist. "I'm glad you said that," he cried
+triumphantly. "There's a lie in that, and I want to nail it. The man gives
+only his money, you say. Do you understand what that means where a
+hard-working devil is concerned? What has he got besides the few pennies
+he earns? When he gives his money, isn't he giving his strength and his
+youth? Isn't he giving his manhood? Isn't he giving the things that are
+his for only a few years, and that he can't get back again? I'm not
+talking about the dandies who have a lot of money they never earned. I
+should think a woman with as much as one bone in her body would take a
+shotgun to that sort whenever they came around. I'm talking about the
+fellows that sweat for what they get. A lot of mollycoddles and virtuous
+damn fools have built up that Sunday-school junk about the woman giving
+everything, and the man giving nothing. But I want to tell you it's nip
+and tuck as to who gives the most. A woman takes a man's money as if it
+grew on bushes. Go and watch him earn it, if you want to know what his
+part of the bargain is."
+
+She felt as if she were being crowded against a wall. She could not look
+at him. She groped for a weapon--for any weapon--with which to fight him.
+"That would sound a little more impressive, Fectnor," she said, "if I
+didn't know what brought you to Eagle Pass just now, and how you sweat for
+the pay you got."
+
+This was unfortunately said, for there was malice in it, and a measure of
+injustice. He heard her calmly.
+
+"This election business is only a side-line of mine," he replied. "I enjoy
+it. There's nothing like knowing you can make a lot of so-called men roll
+over and play dead. If a man wants to find out where he stands, let him
+get out and try to make a crowd do something. Let him try to pull any
+prunes-and-prism stuff, either with his pocketbook or his opinions, and
+see where he gets off at. No, Sylvia, you played the wrong card. Eleven
+months out of the year I work like a nigger, and if you don't know it,
+you'd better not say anything more about it."
+
+He clasped his hands about his knee and regarded her darkly, yet with a
+kind of joyousness. There was no end of admiration in his glance, but of
+kindness there was never a suggestion.
+
+She gathered new energy from that look in his eyes. After all, they had
+been arguing about things which did not matter now. "Fectnor," she said,
+"I'm sure there must be a good deal of justice in what you say. But I know
+you're forgetting that when the man and the woman are through with youth
+there is a reckoning which gives the man all the best of it. His
+wrong-doing isn't stamped upon him. He is respected. He may be poor, but
+he isn't shunned."
+
+"That's more of the same lie. Did you ever see a poor man--a really poor
+man--who was respected? There may be two or three of the people who know
+him best who will give him credit for certain things--if he denies himself
+to pay a debt, or forfeits his rest to sit up with a sick neighbor. But
+take the world as a whole, doesn't it ride over the man who's got nothing?
+Isn't he dreaded like a plague? Isn't he a kill-joy? I don't care what a
+woman's been, she's as well off. A few people will give her credit for the
+good she does, and that's all a man can hope for, if he's been generous
+enough or enough alive to let his money go. No, you can't build up any
+fences, Sylvia. We're all in the same herd."
+
+She felt oppressed by the hardness, the relentlessness, of his words, his
+manner. She could not respond to him. But she knew that everything this
+man said, and everything he was, left out of the account all those
+qualities which make for hope and aspirations and faith.
+
+Her glance, resting upon him as from a great distance, seemed to irritate
+him. "After all, Sylvia," he said, "you're putting on an awful lot of silk
+that don't belong to you. Suppose we say that you'd have kept away from me
+if you hadn't been too much influenced. There are other things to be
+remembered. Peterson, for example. Remember Peterson? I watched you and
+him together a good bit. You'll never tell me you wasn't loose with him."
+
+Much of her strength and pride returned to her at this. Whatever the truth
+was, she knew that Fectnor had no right to bring such a charge against
+her. "Your language is very quaint at times," she said. A curve of disdain
+hovered about her lips. "I'm not aware of being, or of ever having been,
+loose in any way. I can't think where such a word originated."
+
+"You know what I mean well enough. And some of those young fellows--the
+soldiers and railroaders--I don't suppose any of them have got anything on
+you, either?"
+
+"They haven't, Fectnor!" she exclaimed hotly. She resolved to have nothing
+more to say to him. She felt that his brutality gave her the right to have
+done with him. And then her glance was arrested by his powerful hand,
+where it lay on the table beside him. It was blunt-fingered and broad and
+red, with the back covered by yellow hairs which extended down to the dabs
+of finger-nails.
+
+He seemed to read her mind, and in answer he took up a heavy pewter cup
+and held it toward her. For an instant he permitted her to scrutinize the
+cup, and then his fingers closed. He opened his hand and the shapeless
+mass of pewter fell to the floor. He threw his head back with the ecstasy
+of perfect physical fitness. His laughter arose, almost hysterically.
+
+"Fectnor!" she cried, standing tense and white before him, "I think you're
+all brute--just common, hopeless brute."
+
+He became perfectly serious; but presently he regarded her with a flicker
+of humor in his eyes, she thought. "You didn't say that as if you meant
+it, Sylvia," he declared. "You didn't say it as if you quite believed it.
+But I'm going to show you that you're right. What we've been together,
+Sylvia, you and I, we're going to continue to be until we both agree to
+quit. That's what you may call justice. And so far I'm not agreeing to
+quit."
+
+He came toward her then, and she perceived that his bearing had altered
+completely. He seemed moved by some impulse stronger than himself--as if
+it were quite outside himself.
+
+She felt that her heart had suddenly ceased to beat. A leopard crouching
+before her on a limb could not have seemed more pitiless, more terrible.
+She had sprung to the door opening into her father's room before he could
+reach her. Her fingers shot the bolt and the door was open. And then she
+knew she had made a fatal mistake in holding that long and quiet parley
+with the beast that had trapped her. She had led her father, doubtless, to
+believe that it was an amicable talk that had been going on behind the
+closed door. She knew now that at the first instant of Fectnor's
+appearance she should have given battle and cried for help.
+
+Now, looking into the adjoining room, while Fectnor's grip closed upon her
+wrist, she saw the front door quietly close. Her father had gone out.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+
+Sylvia climbed the hill in the dusk.
+
+A casual observer would have remarked that all was not right with her.
+Beneath a calm exterior something brooded. You might have supposed that
+some of the trivial things of existence had gone wrong: that a favorite
+servant had left her, or that the dressmaker had failed to keep an
+appointment. Sylvia was not an unschooled creature who would let down the
+scroll of her life's story to be read by every idle eye.
+
+But the gods of the desert, if any such there be--the spirit of the yucca
+and the cactus and the sage--must have known by the lines of that immobile
+face, by the unseeing stare in those weary eyes, that some fundamental
+change had come over the woman who passed along that road. Sylvia had
+seemed almost like a happy child when she descended the hill an hour
+before. It was a woman who fashioned a new philosophy of life who now
+returned.
+
+It was her own father who had bade her come; it was the man she loved--for
+whom she had meant to create her life anew--who had bade her go; and it
+was one to whom she had never told an untruth, for whose pleasure she had
+been beautiful and gay, who had destroyed her.
+
+She had not fully realized how beautiful a thing her new security had
+been; how deeply in her nature the roots of a new hope, of a decent
+orderliness had taken hold. But the transplanted blossom which had seemed
+to thrive naturally under the fostering care of Harboro--as if it had
+never bloomed elsewhere than in his heart--had been ruthlessly torn up
+again. The seeming gain had been turned into a hideous loss.
+
+And so over that road where a woman with illusions had passed, a
+philosopher who no longer dreamed returned.
+
+Harboro, from his seat on the balcony, saw her coming. And something which
+surrounded her like an aura of evil startled him. He dropped his newspaper
+to the floor and leaned forward, his pulse disturbed, his muscles tense.
+As she drew nearer he arose with the thought of hurrying down-stairs to
+meet her; and then it occurred to him that she would wish to see him
+alone, away from the averted eyes of old Antonia, which saw everything.
+
+A little later he heard her coming up the stairs with heavy, measured
+steps. And in that moment he warned himself to be calm, to discount the
+nameless fears--surely baseless fears--which assailed him.
+
+She appeared in the doorway and stood, inert, looking at him as from a
+great distance.
+
+"Well, Sylvia?" he said gently. He was seated now, and one arm was
+stretched out over the arm of his chair invitingly. He tried to smile
+calmly.
+
+She did not draw any nearer to him. Her face was almost expressionless,
+save that her eyes seemed slowly to darken as she regarded him. And then
+he saw that certain muscles in her face twitched, and that this tendency
+swiftly strengthened.
+
+"Sylvia!" he exclaimed, alarmed. He arose and took a step toward her.
+
+She staggered toward him and rested her hands on his shoulders. Her eyes
+were averted, and Harboro realized with a pang that she did not touch him
+with the familiar touch which seemed to call to something within him to
+respond, to make itself manifest. She was merely seeking for support such
+as a wall or a gate might afford to one who is faint.
+
+He touched her face with his hand and brought it about so that he could
+read her eyes; but this movement she resisted--not irritably, but
+hopelessly. He slipped an arm around her yearningly, and then the storm
+within her broke.
+
+He thought she must be suffocating. She gasped for breath, lifting her
+chin high. She was shaken with sobs. She clasped his head in her hands and
+placed her face against it--but the movement was despairing, not loving.
+
+He tried again to look into her eyes; and presently he discovered that
+they were quite dry. It seemed she had lost the power to weep; yet her
+sobs became rhythmic, even--like those of any woman who grieves deeply and
+is still uncomforted.
+
+He held her tenderly and spoke her name over and over. The tears would
+come soon, and when she had wept he could ask her to tell him what it was
+that had wounded her. He was suffering cruelly; he was in despair. But he
+admonished himself firmly to bear with her, to comfort her, to wait.
+
+And at last, as if indeed she had been leaning against a wall for support
+until she could recover herself, she drew away from him. She was almost
+calm again; but Harboro realized that she was no nearer to him than she
+had been when first she had climbed the stairs and stood before him.
+
+He placed a firm hand on her shoulder and guided her to a chair. He sat
+down and pulled her gently down to him. "Now, Sylvia!" he said with
+firmness.
+
+She was kneeling beside him, her elbows on his knees, her face in her
+hands. But the strange remoteness was still there. She would not look at
+him.
+
+"Come!" he admonished. "I am waiting."
+
+She looked at him then; but she wore the expression of one who does not
+understand.
+
+"Something has gone wrong," he said. "You see, I've not been impatient
+with you. But you ought to tell me now."
+
+"You mean I ought to tell you what's gone wrong?"
+
+He was startled by the even, lifeless quality of her voice. "Of course!"
+
+"In just a word or two, I suppose?"
+
+"If you can."
+
+She knelt where she could look away toward the west--toward Mexico; and
+she noted, with mild surprise, that a new moon hung low in the sky,
+sinking slowly into the desert. It seemed to her that years had passed
+since she had seen the moon--a full moon, swinging, at this hour of the
+evening, in the eastern sky.
+
+"Come, Sylvia!" It was Harboro's urgent voice again.
+
+"If I only could!" she said, moving a little in token of her discomfort.
+
+"Why not?"
+
+"I mean, if any of us could ever say what it is that has gone wrong.
+Everything has gone wrong. From the very beginning. And now you ask me:
+'What's gone wrong?' just as you might ask, 'What time is it, Sylvia?' or,
+'Who is it coming up the road?' I can't tell you what's gone wrong. If I
+talked to you a week--a month--I couldn't tell you half of it. I don't
+believe I ever could. I don't believe I know."
+
+These vagaries might have touched Harboro at another time; they might have
+alarmed him. But for the moment wrath stirred in him. He arose almost
+roughly. "Very well," he said, "I shall go to your father. I shall have
+the facts."
+
+This angry reference to her father--or perhaps it was the roughness of his
+withdrawal from her--affected her in a new way.
+
+"No, you must not do that!" she cried despairingly, and then the tears
+came suddenly--the tears which had stubbornly refused to flow.
+
+"There," he said, instantly tender again, "you'll feel better soon. I
+won't be impatient with you."
+
+But Sylvia's tears were only incidental to some lesser fear or grief. They
+did not spring from the wrong she had suffered, or from the depths of her
+nature, which had been dwarfed and darkened. She listlessly pulled a chair
+into a better position and sat down where she need not look at Harboro.
+"Give me a little time," she said. "You know women have moods, don't you?"
+She tried to speak lightly. "If there is anything I can tell you, I
+will--if you'll give me time."
+
+She had no intention of telling Harboro what had happened. The very
+thought of such a course was monstrous. Nothing could be undone. She could
+only make conditions just a little worse by talking. She realized heavily
+that the thing which had happened was not a complete episode in itself; it
+was only one chapter in a long story which had its beginnings in the first
+days in Eagle Pass, and even further away. Back in the San Antonio days.
+She could not give Harboro an intelligent statement of one chapter without
+detailing a long, complicated synopsis of the chapters that went before.
+
+To be sure, she did not yet know the man she was dealing with--Harboro.
+She was entirely misled by the passive manner in which he permitted her to
+withdraw from him.
+
+"Yes, you shall have time," he said. "I only want you to know that I am
+here to help you in any way I can."
+
+She remained silent so long that he became impatient again. "Did you find
+your father very ill?" he hazarded.
+
+"My father? Oh! No ... I can hardly say. He seemed changed. Or perhaps I
+only imagined that. Perhaps he really is very ill."
+
+Another long silence ensued. Harboro was searching in a thousand dark
+places for the cause of her abnormal condition. There were no guide-posts.
+He did not know Sylvia's father. He knew nothing about the life she had
+led with him. He might be a cruel monster who had abused her--or he might
+be an unfortunate, unhappy creature, the very sight of whom would wound
+the heart of a sensitive woman.
+
+He leaned forward and took her arm and drew her hand into his. "I'm
+waiting, Sylvia," he said.
+
+She turned toward him with a sudden passion of sorrow. "It was you who
+required me to go!" she cried. "If only you hadn't asked me to go!"
+
+"I thought we were both doing what was right and kind. I'm sorry if it has
+proved that we were mistaken. But surely you do not blame me?"
+
+"Blame you? No ... the word hadn't occurred to me. I'm afraid I don't
+understand our language very well. Who could ever have thought of such a
+meaningless word as 'blame'? You might think little creatures--ants, or
+the silly locusts that sing in the heat--might have need of such a word.
+You wouldn't _blame_ an apple for being deformed, would you?--or the hawk
+for killing the dove? We are what we are--that's all. I don't blame any
+one."
+
+The bewildered Harboro leaned forward, his hands on his knees. "We are
+what we make ourselves, Sylvia. We do what we permit ourselves to do.
+Don't lose sight of that fact. Don't lose sight of the fact, either, that
+we are here, man and wife, to help each other. I'm waiting, Sylvia, for
+you to tell me what has gone wrong."
+
+All that she grasped of what he said she would have denied passionately;
+but the iron in his nature, now manifesting itself again, she did not
+understand and she stood in awe of it.
+
+"Give me until to-morrow," she pleaded. "I think perhaps I'm ill to-night.
+You know how you imagine things sometimes? Give me until to-morrow, until
+I can see more clearly. Perhaps it won't seem anything at all by
+to-morrow."
+
+And Harboro, pondering darkly, consented to question her no more that
+night.
+
+Later he lay by her side, a host of indefinable fears keeping him company.
+He could not sleep. He did not even remotely guess the nature of her
+trouble, but he knew instinctively that the very foundations of her being
+had been disturbed.
+
+Once, toward morning, she began to cry piteously. "No, oh no!" The words
+were repeated in anguish until Harboro, in despair, seized her in his
+arms. "What is it, Sylvia?" he cried. "No one shall harm you!"
+
+He held her on his breast and soothed her, his own face harrowed with
+pain. And he noticed that she withdrew into herself again, and seemed
+remote, a stranger to him.
+
+Then she fell into a sound sleep and breathed evenly for hours. The dawn
+broke and a wan light filled the room. Harboro saw that her face was the
+face of Sylvia again--the face of a happy child, as it seemed to him. In
+her sleep she reached out for him contentedly and found his throat, and
+her fingers rested upon it with little, intermittent, loving pressures.
+
+Finally she awoke. She awoke, but Harboro's crowning torture came when he
+saw the expression in her eyes. The horror of one who tumbles into a
+bottomless abyss was in them. But now--thank God!--she drew herself to him
+passionately and wept in his arms. The day had brought back to her the
+capacity to think, to compare the fine edifice she and Harboro had built
+with the wreck which a cruel beast had wrought. She sobbed her strength
+away on Harboro's breast.
+
+And when the sun arose she looked into her husband's gravely steadfast
+eyes, and knew that she must tell the truth. She knew that there was
+nothing else for her to do. She spared her father, inventing little
+falsehoods on his behalf; herself she spared, confessing no fault of her
+own. But the truth, as to how on the night before Fectnor had trapped her
+and wronged her in her father's house, she told. She knew that Harboro
+would never have permitted her to rest if she had not told him; she knew
+that she must have gone mad if she had not unbosomed herself to this man
+who was as the only tree in the desert of her life.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+
+She was puzzled by the manner in which he heard her to the end. She
+expected an outburst; and she found only that after one moment, during
+which his body became rigid and a look of incredulous horror settled in
+his eyes, a deadly quiet enveloped him. He did not try to comfort her--and
+certainly there was no evidence that he blamed her. He asked her a few
+questions when she had finished. He was not seeking to implicate her--she
+felt certain of that. He merely wanted to be quite sure of his ground.
+
+Then he got up and began dressing, deliberately and quietly. It did not
+occur to her that he was not putting on the clothes he usually wore on
+Sunday, but this deviation from a rule would not have seemed significant
+to her even if she had noticed it. She closed her eyes and pondered. In
+Sylvia's world men did not calmly ignore injury. They became violent, even
+when violence could not possibly mend matters. Had Harboro decided to
+accept the inevitable, the irremediable, without a word? Her first
+thought, last night, had been that she would probably lose Harboro, too,
+together with her peace of mind. He would rush madly at Fectnor, and he
+would be killed. Was he the sort of man who would place discretion first
+and pocket an insult?
+
+Oddly, the fear that he would attack Fectnor changed to a fear that he did
+not intend to do so. She could not bear to think of the man she loved as
+the sort of man who will not fight, given such provocation as Harboro
+had.
+
+She opened her eyes to look at him, to measure him anew. But he was no
+longer in the room.
+
+Then her fear for him returned with redoubled force. Quiet men were
+sometimes the most desperate, the most unswerving, she realized. Perhaps
+he had gone even now to find Fectnor.
+
+The thought terrified her. She sprang from the bed and began dressing with
+feverish haste. She would overtake him and plead with him not to go. If
+necessary, she would tell him other things about herself--about the
+reasons she had given Fectnor, long ago, to believe that she was not a
+woman to be respected. Harboro would not forgive her, in that event. He
+would leave her. But he would not go to his death. It seemed to her quite
+clear that the only unforgivable sin she could commit would be to permit
+Harboro to die for her sake.
+
+She hurried down into the dining-room. Ah, Harboro was there! And again
+she was puzzled by his placidity. He was standing at a window, with his
+back to her, his hands clasped behind him. He turned when he heard her.
+"It promises to be another warm day," he said pleasantly. Then he turned
+and looked out through the kitchen door as if hinting to Antonia that
+breakfast might now be served.
+
+He ate his grapes and poached eggs and drank his coffee in silence. He
+seemed unaware that Sylvia was regarding him with troubled eyes.
+
+When he arose from the table he turned toward the hall. As if by an
+afterthought, he called back, "I'm going to be busy for a little while,
+Sylvia," and she heard him going up the stairs.
+
+His tone had conveyed a hint that he did not wish to be disturbed, she
+thought, but she could not help being uncomfortably curious. What was
+there to be done on a Sunday morning that could compare in importance with
+the obviously necessary task of helping her to forget the injuries she had
+suffered? It was not his way to turn away from her when she needed him.
+
+She could not understand his conduct at all. She was wounded; and then she
+began to think more directly, more clearly. Harboro was not putting this
+thing away from him. In his way he was facing it. But how?
+
+She noiselessly climbed the stairs and opened the door of their bedroom.
+
+With great exactitude of movement he was cleaning a pistol. He had taken
+it apart and just now a cylinder of burnished steel was in his hand.
+
+He frowned when he heard her. "I am sorry you came up, Sylvia," he said.
+"I had an idea I'd given you to understand...."
+
+She hurriedly withdrew, closing the door behind her. She felt an
+inexplicable elation as she went down the stairs; yet she felt that she
+stood face to face with calamity, too. Her man was a fighting man,
+then--only he was not a madman. He was the sort of fighter who did not
+lose his head. But she could not picture him as a man skilled in the
+brutal work of killing. He was too deliberate, too scrupulous, for that
+sort of work. And Fectnor was neither deliberate nor scrupulous. He was
+the kind of man who would be intently watchful for an advantage, and who
+would be elated as he seized that advantage.
+
+... She would persuade Harboro not to go, after all. The thing was not
+known. It would never be known. Her searching woman's logic brought to her
+the realization that the only way to publish the facts broadcast was for
+Harboro to seek a quarrel with Fectnor. He would have to give his
+reasons.
+
+But when Harboro came down the stairs she knew instantly that she could
+not stop him from going. That quiet look was not unreadable now. It meant
+unswerving determination.
+
+He called to her, his hand outstretched; and when she went to him he
+kissed her. His voice was gentle and unshaken, in quite the habitual way,
+when he said: "_I shall be back in a little while_."
+
+She clasped her hands and looked at him imploringly. "Don't go," she
+pleaded.
+
+"Ah, but I must go."
+
+She touched his cheeks with her hands. "Don't go!" she repeated. "Nothing
+can be undone."
+
+"But a man's job isn't to undo things--it's to do them."
+
+She held her face high as if the waters were engulfing her. "Don't go!"
+she said again; and her eyes were swimming, so that at the last she did
+not see him go, and did not know that he had kept that look of placid
+courage to the end.
+
+It was a little early for the usual Sunday morning loiterers to be about
+as Harboro entered the town. For a moment he believed there was no one
+about at all. The little town, with its main street and its secondary
+thoroughfares bordered by low structures, might have been regarded as the
+habitation of lesser creatures than human beings, as it stood there musing
+after the departed night, in the midst of limitless wastes of sand. That
+group of houses might have been likened to some kind of larger birds,
+hugging the earth in trepidation, ready to take flight at any moment.
+
+Yet Harboro had been mistaken in supposing that no one was as yet astir.
+Two men stood out in the street, at the entrance to the Maverick bar, near
+a hitching-post to which a small horse carrying a big saddle was tethered.
+One of the men was about to mount. As Harboro approached he untied his
+horse and lifted one foot to its stirrup, and stood an instant longer to
+finish what he was saying, or perhaps to hear the other out.
+
+The other man was in his shirt-sleeves. He carried a blue-serge sack-coat
+over his arm. He stood facing Harboro as the latter approached; and the
+expression in his eyes seemed to change in a peculiar way at sight of the
+big, swarthy man who stepped off the sidewalk, down into the street, and
+seemed to be headed directly toward him.
+
+The two men had never met before; but Harboro, taking in that compact,
+muscular figure, found himself musing with assurance: "That is Fectnor."
+
+Nothing in his face or carriage betrayed his purpose, and the man with the
+blue-serge garment on his arm kept his ground complacently. The man with
+the horse mounted and rode away.
+
+Harboro advanced easily until he was within arm's length of the other man
+in the street. "You're Fectnor, aren't you?" he asked.
+
+"I am," replied the other crisply.
+
+Harboro regarded him searchingly. At length he remarked: "Fectnor, I see
+you've got a gun on you."
+
+"I have," was the steely response. Fectnor's narrow blue eyes became,
+suddenly, the most alert thing about a body which was all alertness.
+
+"So have I," said Harboro.
+
+The other's narrow eyes seemed to twinkle. His response sounded like: "The
+L you say!"
+
+"Yes," said Harboro. He added: "My wife was the woman you trapped in
+Little's house last night."
+
+Fectnor's mind went swiftly to the weapon in his holster; and something
+more than his mind, surely, since Harboro knew. Yet the man's hand had
+barely moved. However, he casually threw the coat he carried over his left
+arm, leaving his right hand free. If he had thought of reaching for his
+weapon he had probably realized that he must first get out of reach of
+Harboro's arm. "You might put that a little different," he said lightly.
+"You might say--the woman I met in Little's house."
+
+Harboro took in the insinuated insult. He remained unmoved. He could see
+that Fectnor was not a coward, no matter what else he was; and he realized
+that this man would seek to enrage him further, so that his eyes would be
+blinded, so that his hands would tremble.
+
+"I'm going to kill you, Fectnor," Harboro continued. "But I'm going to
+give you a chance for your life. I want you to turn and walk down the
+street twelve paces. Then turn and draw. I'll not draw until you turn
+unless you try to play a trick on me. Your best chance lies in your doing
+just as I tell you to."
+
+Fectnor regarded him shrewdly with his peering, merry eyes. He rather
+liked Harboro, so far as first impressions went. Yet his lips were set in
+a straight line. "All right," he drawled amiably. His voice was pitched
+high--almost to a falsetto.
+
+"Remember, you'd better not draw until you've turned around," advised
+Harboro. "You'll be more likely to get your bearings right that way. You
+see, I want to give you an even break. If I'd wanted to murder you I could
+have slipped up from behind. You see that, of course."
+
+"Clear as a whistle," said Fectnor. He gave Harboro a final searching look
+and then turned about unflinchingly. He proceeded a few steps, his hands
+held before him as if he were practising a crude cake-walk. The serge
+garment depended from one arm. He was thinking with lightning-like
+rapidity. Harboro had courage enough--that he could tell--but he didn't
+behave like a man who knew very many tricks with a gun. Nevertheless he,
+Fectnor, would be under a disadvantage in this test of skill which was
+being forced upon him. When he turned he would need just a second to get a
+perfect balance, to be quite sure of his footing, to get his bearings. And
+that one second might make all the difference in the outcome of the
+affair. Moreover, there was one other point in Harboro's favor, Fectnor
+realized. His was the stronger determination of the two. Fectnor had not
+flinched, but he knew that his heart was not in this fight. He could see
+that Harboro was a good deal of a man. A fool, perhaps, but still a decent
+fellow.
+
+These were conclusions which had come in flashes, while Fectnor took less
+than half a dozen steps. Then he turned his head partly, and flung back
+almost amiably: "Wait until I get rid of my coat!"
+
+"Drop it!" cried Harboro sharply.
+
+But Fectnor plainly had another idea. He turned a little out of his
+course, still with his hands well in front of him. It was evident, then,
+that he meant to fling his coat on the sidewalk.
+
+Harboro held him with eyes which were keen as knives, yet still a little
+dubious. He was puzzled by the man's good humor; he was watchful for
+sudden stratagems. His own hands were at his sides, the right within a few
+inches of his hip.
+
+Yet, after all, he was unprepared for what happened. Fectnor leaned
+forward as if to deposit his coat on the sidewalk. Then he seemed to
+stumble, and in two swift leaps he had gained the inner side of the walk
+and had darted into the inset of the saloon. He was out of sight in a
+flash.
+
+As if by some feat in legerdemain Harboro's weapon was in his hand; but it
+was a hand that trembled slightly. He had allowed Fectnor to gain an
+advantage.
+
+He stared fixedly at that place where Fectnor had disappeared. His right
+hand was held in the position of a runner's, and the burnished steel of
+the weapon in it caught the light of the sun. He had acquired the trick of
+firing while his weapon was being elevated--not as he lowered it; with a
+movement like the pointing of a finger. He was ready for Fectnor, who
+would doubtless try to take him by surprise.
+
+Then he realized that the level rays of the sun made the whole entrance to
+the saloon, with its several facets of glass, a thing of dazzling
+opaqueness. He could not see Fectnor until the latter stepped forth from
+his ambush; yet it seemed probable that Fectnor might be able to see him
+easily enough through the glass barricade behind which he had taken
+refuge. He might expect to hear the report of a weapon and the crash of
+glass at any instant.
+
+At this realization he had an ugly sensation at the roots of his hair--as
+if his scalp had gone to sleep. Yet he could only stand and wait. It would
+be madness to advance.
+
+So he stood, almost single-mindedly. He had a disagreeable duty to
+perform, and he must perform it. Yet the lesser cells of his brain spoke
+to him, too, and he realized that he must present a shocking sight to
+law-abiding, happy people, if any should appear. He was glad that the
+street was still deserted, and that he might reasonably hope to be
+unseen.
+
+Then his hand shot forward with the fierceness of a tiger's claw: there
+had been a movement in the saloon entrance. Only by the fraction of a
+second was the finger on the trigger stayed.
+
+It was not Fectnor who appeared. Dunwoodie stepped into sight casually and
+looked in Harboro's direction. The expression of amused curiosity in his
+eyes swiftly gave place to almost comical amazement when he took in that
+spasmodic movement of Harboro's.
+
+"What's up?" he inquired. He approached Harboro leisurely.
+
+"Stand aside, Dunwoodie," commanded Harboro harshly.
+
+"Well, wait a minute," insisted Dunwoodie. "Calm yourself, man. I want to
+talk to you. Fectnor's not in the saloon. He went on through and out the
+back way."
+
+Harboro wheeled with an almost despairing expression in his eyes. He
+seemed to look at nothing, now--like a bird-dog that senses the nearness
+of the invisible quarry. The thought came to him: "Fectnor may appear at
+any point, behind me!" The man might have run back along the line of
+buildings, seeking his own place to emerge again.
+
+But Dunwoodie went on reassuringly. He had guessed the thought in
+Harboro's mind. "No, he's quite gone. I watched him go. He's probably in
+Mexico by this time--or well on his way, at least."
+
+Harboro drew a deep breath. "You watched him go?"
+
+"When he came into the saloon, like a rock out of a sling, he stopped just
+long enough to grin, and fling out this--to me--'If you want to see a
+funny sight, go out front.' Fectnor never did like me, anyway. Then he
+scuttled back and out. I followed to see what was the matter. He made
+straight for the bridge road. He was sprinting. He's gone."
+
+Harboro's gun had disappeared. He was frowning; and then he realized that
+Dunwoodie was looking at him with a quizzical expression.
+
+He made no explanation, however.
+
+"I must be getting along home," he said shortly. He was thinking of
+Sylvia.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+
+Dunwoodie was not given to talkativeness; moreover, he was a considerate
+man, and he respected Harboro. Therefore it may be doubted if he ever said
+anything about that unexplained drama which occurred on the main street of
+Eagle Pass on a Sunday morning, before the town was astir. But there was
+the bartender at the Maverick--and besides, it would scarcely have been
+possible for any man to do what Harboro had done without being seen by
+numbers of persons looking out upon the street through discreetly closed
+windows.
+
+At any rate, there was talk in the town. By sundown everybody knew there
+had been trouble between Harboro and Fectnor, and men who dropped into the
+Maverick for a game of high-five or poker had their attention called to an
+unclaimed blue-serge coat hanging from the ice-box.
+
+"He got away with his skin," was the way the bartender put the case, "but
+he left his coat."
+
+There was a voice from one of the card-tables: "Well, any man that gets
+Fectnor's coat is no slouch."
+
+There were a good many expressions of undisguised wonder at Fectnor's
+behavior; and nobody could have guessed that perhaps some sediment of
+manhood which had remained after all the other decent standards had
+disappeared had convinced Fectnor that he did not want to kill a man whom
+he had injured so greatly. And from the popular attitude toward Fectnor's
+conduct there grew a greatly increased respect for Harboro.
+
+That, indeed, was the main outcome of the episode, so far as the town as a
+whole was concerned. Harboro became a somewhat looming figure. But with
+Sylvia ... well, with Sylvia it was different.
+
+Of course Sylvia was connected with the affair, and in only one way. She
+was the sort of woman who might be expected to get her husband into
+trouble, and Fectnor was the kind of man who might easily appeal to her
+imagination. This was the common verdict; and the town concluded that it
+was an interesting affair--the more so because nearly all the details had
+to be left to the imagination.
+
+As for Sylvia, the first direct result of her husband's gun-play was that
+a week or two after the affair happened, she had a caller--the wife of
+Jesus Mendoza.
+
+She had not had any callers since her marriage. Socially she had been
+entirely unrecognized. The social stratum represented by the Mesquite
+Club, and that lower stratum identified with church "socials" and similar
+affairs, did not know of Sylvia's existence--had decided definitely never
+to know of her existence after she had walked down the aisle of the church
+to the strains of the Lohengrin march. Nevertheless, there had been that
+trip to the church, and the playing of the march; and this fact placed
+Sylvia considerably above certain obscure women in the town who were not
+under public condemnation, but whose status was even more hopeless--who
+were regarded as entirely negligible.
+
+The wife of Jesus Mendoza was one of these. She was an American woman,
+married to a renegade Mexican who was notoriously evil. I have referred to
+Mendoza as a man who went about partly concealed in his own cloud of
+cigarette smoke, who looked at nothing in particular and who was an active
+politician of a sort. He had his place in the male activities of the town;
+but you wouldn't have known he had a wife from anything there was in his
+conversation or in his public appearances. Nobody remembered ever to have
+seen the two together. She remained indoors in all sorts of weather save
+when she had marketing to do, and then she looked neither to left nor
+right. Her face was like a mask. She had been an unfortunate creature when
+Mendoza married her; and she was perhaps thankful to have even a low-caste
+Mexican for a husband, and a shelter, and money enough to pay the
+household expenses.
+
+That her life could not have been entirely complete, even from her own way
+of thinking, was evidenced by the fact that at last she came to call on
+Sylvia in the house on the Quemado Road.
+
+Sylvia received her with reticence and with a knowing look. She was not
+pleased that Mrs. Mendoza had decided to call. She realized just what her
+own status was in the eyes of this woman, who had assumed that she might
+be a welcome visitor.
+
+But Sylvia's outlook upon life, as has been seen, was distorted in many
+ways; and she was destined to realize that she must form new conclusions
+as to this woman who had come to see her in her loneliness.
+
+Mrs. Mendoza was tactful and kind. She assumed nothing, save that Sylvia
+was not very thoroughly acquainted in the town, and that as she had had
+her own house now for a month or two, she would expect people to be
+neighborly. She discussed the difficulties of housekeeping so far from the
+source of supplies. She was able, incidentally, to give Sylvia a number of
+valuable hints touching these difficulties. She discussed the subject of
+Mexican help without self-consciousness. During her call it developed that
+she was fond of music--that in fact she was (or had been) a musician. And
+for the first time since Sylvia's marriage there was music on the piano up
+in the boudoir.
+
+Mrs. Mendoza played with a passionateness which was quite out of keeping
+with her mask-like expression. It was like finding a pearl in an oyster,
+hearing her at the piano. She played certain airs from _Fra Diavolo_ so
+skilfully that she seemed to be letting bandits into the house; and when
+she saw that Sylvia was following with deep appreciation she passed on to
+the _Tower Scene_, giving to the minor chords a quality of massiveness.
+Her expression changed oddly. There was color in her cheeks and a stancher
+adjustment of the lines of her face. She suggested a good woman struggling
+through flames to achieve safety. When she played from _Il Trovatore_ you
+did not think of a conservatory, but of a prison.
+
+She stopped after a time and the color swiftly receded from her cheeks.
+"I'm afraid I've been rather in earnest," she said apologetically. "I
+haven't played on a good piano for quite a long time." She added, as if
+her remark might seem an appeal for pity, "the climate here injures a
+piano in a year or so. The fine sand, you know."
+
+"You must come and use mine whenever you will," said Sylvia heartily. "I
+love it, though I've never cared to play myself."
+
+"I wonder why?"
+
+"Ah, I could scarcely explain. I've been too busy living. It has always
+seemed to me that music and pictures and books were for people who had
+been caught in an eddy and couldn't go on with the stream." She realized
+the tactlessness of this immediately, and added: "That's just a silly
+fancy. What I should have said, of course, is that I haven't the talent."
+
+"Don't spoil it," remonstrated the other woman thoughtfully. "But you must
+remember that few of us can always go on with the stream."
+
+"Sometimes you get caught in the whirlpools," said Sylvia, as they were
+going down the stairs, "and then you can't stop, even if you'd like to."
+
+I doubt if either woman derived a great deal of benefit from this visit.
+They might have become helpful friends under happier conditions; but
+neither had anything to offer the other save the white logic of untoward
+circumstances and defeat.
+
+The wife of Jesus Mendoza did not know Sylvia well enough to perceive that
+a certain blitheness and faith had abandoned her, never to return.
+Nevertheless, the fact of her visit has its place in this chronicle, since
+it had a cruel bearing upon a day which still lay in Sylvia's future.
+
+Sylvia's caller went home; and, as it chanced, she never called again at
+the house on the Quemado Road. As for Sylvia, she did not speak to Harboro
+of her visitor. From his point of view, she thought, there would be
+nothing to be proud of in the fact that Mrs. Mendoza had called. And so
+Harboro was destined to go on to the end without knowing that there was
+any such person as the wife of Jesus Mendoza.
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART IV
+
+THE HORSE WITH THE GOLDEN DAPPLES
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+
+Two events which had a bearing upon Sylvia's destiny occurred at about
+this time. I am not sure which came first: the invitation to a celebration
+out at the Quemado settlement, or the arrival on the border of Runyon, the
+mounted inspector.
+
+The coming of Runyon caused a distinct ripple in the social circles of the
+two border towns. He was well connected, it was known: he was a cousin to
+a congressman in the San Angelo district, and he had a brother in the
+army.
+
+He was a sort of frontier Apollo; a man in his prime, of striking build--a
+dashing fellow. He had the physical strength, combined with neatness of
+lines, which characterized Buffalo Bill in his younger days. He was a
+blond of the desert type, with a shapely mustache the color of flax, with
+a ruddy skin finely tanned by sun and wind, and with deep blue eyes which
+flashed and sparkled under his flaxen brows. He was a manly appearing
+fellow, though there was a glamour about him which made prosaic folk
+suspicious.
+
+He rode a dun horse with golden dapples--a slim, proud thing which suited
+Runyon in every detail. When you saw him mounted you thought of a parade;
+you wondered where the rest of it was--the supernumerary complement.
+
+The man was also characterized by the male contingent of the border as a
+"dresser." He was always immaculately clad, despite the exposure to which
+his work subjected him. He seemed to have an artist's sense of color
+effects. Everything he put on was not only faultless in itself, but it
+seemed specially designed and made for him. In the set of his sombrero and
+the style of his spurs he knew how to suggest rakishness without quite
+achieving it; and when he permitted his spirited horse to give way to its
+wayward or playful moods there was something just a little sinister in his
+mirth. He looked as much at home in conventional clothes as in his
+inspector's outfit, and he immediately became a social favorite on both
+sides of the river. It developed that he could sing quite amazingly. His
+voice was high-pitched, but there was power and fire in it. He sang easily
+and he loved to sing. His songs were the light-opera favorites, the fame
+of which reached the border from New York and London, and even Vienna. And
+when there was difficulty about getting the accompaniments played he took
+his place unaffectedly at the piano and played them himself.
+
+His name began to appear regularly in the Eagle Pass _Guide_ in connection
+with social events; and he was not merely mentioned as "among those
+present," but there was always something about his skill as a musician.
+
+Of course Sylvia was destined to see him sooner or later, though she
+stayed at home with almost morbid fidelity to a resolution she had made.
+He rode out the Quemado Road one matchless December day when the very air
+would have seemed sufficient to produce flowers without calling the
+ungracious desert into service. Sylvia sat in her boudoir by an open
+window and watched him approach. She immediately guessed that it was
+Runyon. The remarkable manner in which he had conquered the town had made
+him an occasional subject for comment between Sylvia and Harboro, and he
+had described the man to her.
+
+Sylvia thought that the rider and his horse, with the sun on the man's
+flashing blue eyes and the horse's golden dapples, constituted the
+prettiest picture she had ever seen. Never before had she observed a man
+who sat his horse with such an air of gallantry.
+
+And as she regarded him appraisingly he glanced up at her, and there was
+the slightest indication of pleased surprise in his glance. She withdrew
+from the window; but when she reckoned that he was well past the house she
+looked after him. He was looking back, and their eyes met again.
+
+It is decidedly contrary to my conviction that either Sylvia or Runyon
+consciously paved the way for future mischief when they indulged in that
+second glance at each other. He was the sort of man who might have
+attracted a second glance anywhere, and he would have been a poor fellow
+if he had not considered Sylvia a sight worth turning his head for.
+
+Nevertheless, Sylvia regretted that second glance. It had an effect upon
+her heart which was far from soothing; and when she realized that her
+heart seemed suddenly to hurt her, her conscience followed suit and hurt
+her too. She closed the window righteously; though she was careful not to
+do so until she felt sure that Runyon was beyond sight and hearing.
+
+And then there came to Harboro the invitation out to the Quemado. The
+belle of the settlement, a Mexican girl famed for her goodness and beauty,
+was to be married to one of the Wayne brothers, ranchers on an immense
+scale. The older of the two brothers was a conventional fellow enough,
+with an American wife and a large family; but the younger brother was
+known far and wide as a good-natured, pleasure-pursuing man who counted
+every individual in Maverick County, Mexican and American alike, his
+friend. It seemed that he was planning to settle down now, and he had won
+the heart of a girl who seemed destined to make an admirable mate for one
+of his nature-loving type, though his brother had mildly opposed the idea
+of a Mexican girl as a member of the family.
+
+The wedding was to be in the fashion of the bride's race. It was to be an
+affair of some twenty-four hours' duration, counting the dancing and
+feasting, and it was to take place in a sort of stockade which served the
+Quemado settlement in lieu of a town hall or a public building of any
+kind.
+
+Invitations had been practically unlimited in number. There was to be
+accommodation for hundreds. Many musicians had been engaged, and there was
+to be a mountain of viands, a flood of beverages. It was to be the sort of
+affair--democratic and broadly hospitable--which any honest man might have
+enjoyed for an hour or so, at least; and it was in that category of events
+which drew sightseers from a considerable distance. Doubtless there would
+be casual guests from Spofford (the nearest railroad point on the Southern
+Pacific) and from Piedras Negras, as well as from Eagle Pass and the
+remote corners of Maverick County.
+
+Harboro's invitation had come to him through one of his fellow employees
+in the railroad offices--a Mexican who had spent four years in an American
+university, and who was universally respected for his urbane manner and
+kind heart. Valdez, his name was. He had heartily invited Harboro to go to
+the wedding with him as his guest; and when he saw traces of some sort of
+difficulty in Harboro's manner, he suggested, with the ready _simpatia_ of
+his race, that doubtless there was a Mrs. Harboro also, and that he hoped
+Mrs. Harboro, too, would honor him by accepting his invitation. He
+promised that the affair would be enjoyable; that it would afford an
+interesting study of a people whose social customs still included certain
+pleasures which dated back to the Cortez invasion, as well as many of the
+latest American diversions.
+
+Harboro tactfully sought for more definite details; and when he gathered
+that the affair would be too immense to be at all formal--that there would
+be introductions only so far as separate groups of persons were concerned,
+and that guests would be expected to come and go with perfect freedom, he
+accepted the invitation gratefully. He had not forgotten the slight which
+the two towns had put upon him and Sylvia, and he was not willing to
+subject himself to snubs from people who had behaved badly. But he
+realized that it was necessary for Sylvia to see people, to get away from
+the house occasionally, to know other society than his own.
+
+In truth, Harboro had been very carefully taking account of Sylvia's
+needs. It seemed to him that she had not been really herself since that
+Sunday morning when he had had to place his life in jeopardy. In a way,
+she seemed to love him more passionately than ever before; but not so
+light-heartedly, so gladly. Some elfin quality in her nature was gone, and
+Harboro would gladly have brought it back again. She had listless moods;
+and sometimes as they sat together he surprised a strange look in her
+eyes. She seemed to be very far away from him; and he had on these
+occasions the dark thought that even the substance of her body was gone,
+too--that if he should touch her she would vanish in a cloud of dust, like
+that woman in _Archibald Malmaison_, after she had remained behind the
+secret panel, undiscovered, for a generation.
+
+And so Harboro decided that he and Sylvia would go to the big affair at
+the Quemado.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+
+There was an atmosphere of happiness and bustle in the house when the
+night of the outing came. Harboro easily managed a half-holiday (it was a
+Saturday), and he had ample time to make careful selection of horses for
+Sylvia and himself at an Eagle Pass stable. He would have preferred a
+carriage, but Sylvia had assumed that they would ride, and she plainly
+preferred that mode of travel. She had been an excellent horsewoman in the
+old San Antonio days.
+
+Old Antonia was drawn out of her almost trance-like introspection. The
+young senora was excited, as a child might have been, at the prospect of a
+long ride through the chaparral, and she must not be disappointed. She had
+fashioned a riding-habit and a very charming little jacket, and to these
+the old woman made an addition of her own--a wonderful _rebozo_. She
+brought it forth from among her own possessions and offered it
+affectionately.
+
+"But shall I need it?" asked Sylvia.
+
+Very surely she might, she was assured. She would not wish to dance in her
+riding costume, certainly. And it might turn chilly after nightfall. She
+would find that other young women had such garments to protect them. And
+this particular _rebozo_ was quite wonderful. She pointed out its
+wonderful qualities. It was of so delicate a weave that it might have been
+thrust into a man's pocket; yet, unfolded, it proved to be of the
+dimensions of a blanket. And there was warmth in it. She folded it neatly
+and explained how it might be tied to the pommel of the saddle. It would
+not be in the way.
+
+Sylvia affected much gratitude for such kindness and foresight, though she
+thought it unlikely that she would need a wrap of any sort.
+
+There was an early supper, Antonia contributing a quite unprecedented
+alacrity; and then there was a cheerful call from the road. The horses had
+been brought.
+
+Sylvia ran out to inspect them; and Harboro, following, was not a little
+amazed to perceive how important a matter she considered the sort of
+horses he had engaged. Horses were not a mere medium of travel to Sylvia;
+they were persons in the drama, and it was highly important that they
+should fit into the various romantic demands of the occasion. Harboro had
+stipulated that they should be safe horses, of good appearance; and the
+boy from the stable, who had brought them, regarded them with beaming eyes
+when Harboro examined them. The boy evidently looked at the affair much as
+Sylvia did--as if the selection of the horse was far more important than
+the determining of a destination.
+
+"They seem to be all right," ventured Harboro.
+
+"Yes, they are very good horses," agreed Sylvia; but she sighed a little.
+
+Then there was the clatter of hoofs down the road, and Valdez appeared.
+He, too, bestrode a decidedly prosaic-appearing animal; but when Harboro
+exclaimed: "Ah, it's Valdez!" Sylvia became more interested in the man
+than in the horse. It would be a pity to have as companion on a long ride
+a man without merits. She was not very favorably impressed by Valdez. The
+man acknowledged his introduction to her too casually. There were no
+swift, confidential messages in his eyes. He seemed to be there for the
+purpose of devoting himself to Harboro, not to her.
+
+Antonia came out to be sure that the cherished _rebozo_ was tied to the
+pommel of Sylvia's saddle, and then Harboro and Sylvia went back into the
+house to get into their riding things. When they returned Harboro lifted
+her to her saddle with a lack of skill which brought a frown to her brows.
+But if she regretted the absence of certain established formalities in
+this performance, she yielded herself immediately to the ecstasy of being
+in the saddle. She easily assumed a pretty and natural attitude which made
+Harboro marvel at her.
+
+She watched when it came time for him to mount. The horse moved uneasily,
+as horses have done since the beginning of time beneath the touch of
+unpractised riders. Harboro gathered the reins in too firm a grip, and the
+animal tried to pull away from him.
+
+The boy from the stable sprang forward. "Let me hold his head," he said,
+with a too obvious intimation that Harboro needed help.
+
+"Never mind," said Harboro crisply; and he achieved his place in the
+saddle by sheer force rather than by skill. Neither did he fall into an
+easy position; though under ordinary circumstances this fact would not
+have been noted. But Sylvia swiftly recalled the picture of a dun horse
+with golden dapples, and of a rider whose very attitude in the saddle was
+like a hymn of praise. And again she sighed.
+
+She had seen Runyon often since the afternoon on which he had made his
+first appearance on the Quemado Road. Seemingly, his duties took him out
+that way often; and he never passed without glancing toward Sylvia's
+window--and looking back again after he had passed. Nor had he often found
+that place by the window vacant. In truth, it was one of Sylvia's
+pleasures in those days to watch Runyon ride by; and the afternoon seemed
+unduly filled with tedium when he failed to appear.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+The little picture in front of Harboro's house dissolved. The three riders
+turned their horses' heads to the north and rode away. Antonia stood at
+the gate an instant and looked after them; but she did not derive any
+pleasure from the sight. It was not a very gallant-appearing group. Sylvia
+was riding between the two men, and all three were moving away in silence,
+as if under constraint. The stable-boy went somewhat dispiritedly back
+along the way he had come.
+
+Sylvia was the first of the three riders to find herself. There were
+certain things which made the springs of gladness within her stir. The
+road was perfect. It stretched, smooth and white, away into the dusk. The
+air was clear as on a mountain top, with just enough crispness to create
+energy. Of wind there was scarcely a breath.
+
+She was not pleased at all with Harboro's friend. He had assumed the
+attitude of a deferential guide, and his remarks were almost entirely
+addressed to Harboro. But she was not to be put out by so small a part of
+the night's programme. After all, Valdez was not planning to return with
+them, and they were likely to have the ride back by themselves. Valdez,
+she had been informed, was to be a sort of best friend to the family of
+the bride, and it would be his duty to remain for the next day's
+ceremonies--the feasting and the marriage itself.
+
+The dusk deepened, and a new light began to glow over the desert. A waxing
+moon, half-full, rode near the zenith; and as the light of day receded it
+took on a surprising brilliance. The road seemed in some strange way to be
+more clearly defined than under the light of day. It became a winding path
+to happiness. It began to beckon; to whisper of the delights of swift
+races, of coquetries. It bade the riders laugh aloud and fling their cares
+away. Occasionally it rose or dipped; and then through little valleys
+between sand-dunes, or from low summits, the waters of the Rio Grande were
+visible away to the left. A mist was clinging to the river, making more
+mysterious its undisturbed progress through the desert.
+
+After a long time the silence of the road was broken by the tinkle of a
+small bell, and Valdez pulled his horse in and looked sharply away into a
+mesquite-clad depression. Of old the road had been haunted by night-riders
+who were willing enough to ride away with a traveller's possessions,
+leaving the traveller staring sightlessly toward the sky. But Valdez
+thought of no menaces in connection with the border folk. He was a
+kind-hearted fellow, to whom all men were friends.
+
+"Travellers, or a party camped for the night," he said interestedly, as if
+the presence of other human beings must be welcomed gladly. He rode out
+toward the sound of that tinkling bell, and in a moment he was guided more
+certainly by the blaze of a camp-fire.
+
+Harboro and Sylvia followed, and presently they were quite near to two
+quaint old carts, heaped high with mesquite fagots destined for the
+humbler hearths of Eagle Pass. Donkeys were tethered near by, and two
+Mexicans, quite old and docile in appearance, came forward to greet the
+intruders.
+
+Valdez exchanged greetings with them. He knew something of the loneliness
+of these people's lives, and the only religion he had was a belief that
+one must be friendly to travellers. He produced a flask and invited the
+old men to drink; and each did so with much nice formality and thoroughly
+comprehensive toasts to Harboro and Sylvia.
+
+Then Valdez replaced his flask in his pocket.
+
+"God go with you!" he called as he went away, and "God go with you!" came
+back the placid, kindly echo.
+
+And Sylvia realized suddenly that it was a very good thing indeed to be
+riding along that golden road through the desert.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIX
+
+
+Harboro became aware that some one was staring almost insolently at
+Sylvia.
+
+They were seated on one of the benches disposed around the side of the
+stockade, and there was a great deal of noise all about them. In the open
+space of the stockade a score or more of young men and women were dancing
+to the music of violins and flutes and 'cellos. Nearly all who were not
+dancing were talking or laughing. People who did not see one another for
+months at a time were meeting and expressing their pleasure in staccato
+showers of words.
+
+There were other noises in the near-by corral, in which Valdez had put
+their horses away with the other horses; and in still another place the
+work of barbecuing large quantities of meat had begun. A pleasant odor
+from the fire and the meat floated fitfully over the stockade. There was
+still an almost singular absence of wind, and the night was warm for a
+midwinter night.
+
+Valdez was remaining for the time being with his guests, and he was making
+friendly comments upon the scene.
+
+"It's chiefly the young people who are dancing now," he observed. "But
+you'll notice men and women of all ages around in the seats. They will
+become intoxicated with the joy of it all--and maybe with other
+things--later in the night, and then the dancing will begin in earnest."
+
+For the moment an old type of fandango was being danced--a dance not
+wholly unlike a quadrille, in that it admitted a number of persons to the
+set and afforded opportunity for certain individual exhibitions of skill.
+
+And then Harboro, glancing beyond Valdez, observed that a man of mature
+years--a Mexican--was regarding Sylvia fixedly. He could not help
+believing that there was something of insolence, too, in the man's gaze.
+
+He lowered his voice and spoke to Valdez: "That man sitting by himself
+over there, the fourth--the fifth--from us. Do you know him?"
+
+Valdez turned casually and seemed to be taking in the general scene. He
+brought his glance back to Harboro without seeming to have noticed
+anything in particular.
+
+"That's one of your most--er--conspicuous citizens," he said with a smile.
+"His name is Mendoza--Jesus Mendoza. I'm surprised you've never met him."
+
+"I never have," replied Harboro. He got up and took a new position so that
+he sat between Sylvia and Mendoza, cutting off the view of her.
+
+She had caught the name. She glanced interestedly at the man called Jesus
+Mendoza. She could not remember ever to have seen him before; but she was
+curious to know something about the man whose wife had been kind to her,
+and whose life seemed somehow tragically lonely.
+
+Mendoza made no sign of recognition of Harboro's displeasure. He arose
+with a purposeless air and went farther along the stockade wall. Sylvia's
+glance followed him. She had not taken in the fact that the man's
+presence, or anything that he had done, had annoyed Harboro. She was
+wondering what kind of man it was who had captivated and held the woman
+who had filled her boudoir with passionate music, and who knew how to keep
+an expressionless mask in place so skilfully that no one on the border
+really knew her.
+
+The fandango came to an end, and the smooth earth which constituted the
+floor of the enclosure was vacated for an instant. Then the musicians
+began a favorite Mexican waltz, and there was a scurrying of young men and
+women for places. There was an eager movement along the rows of seats by
+young fellows who sought partners for the waltz. Custom permitted any man
+to seek any disengaged woman and invite her to dance with him.
+
+"We ought to find Wayne and pay our respects," suggested Valdez. "He will
+want to meet Mrs. Harboro, too, of course. Shall we look for him?"
+
+They skirted the dancing space, leaving Sylvia with the assurance that
+they would soon return. Harboro was noting, with a relief which he could
+scarcely understand, that he was among strangers. The people of Eagle Pass
+were almost wholly unrepresented as yet. The few Americans present seemed
+to be casual sightseers or ranchmen neighbors of the bridegroom.
+
+Left alone, Sylvia looked eagerly and a little wistfully toward the
+dancers. Her muscles were yielding to the call of the violins. She was
+being caught by the spirit of the occasion. Here she would have been
+wholly in her element but for a vague fear that Harboro would not like her
+to yield unrestrainedly to the prevailing mood. She wished some one would
+ask her to dance. The waltz was wonderful, and there was plenty of room.
+
+And then she looked up as a figure paused before her, and felt a thrill of
+interest as she met the steady, inquiring gaze of Jesus Mendoza.
+
+"Mrs. Harboro, I believe?" he asked. The voice was musical and the English
+was perfect. He shrewdly read the glance she gave him and then held out
+his hand.
+
+"I heard you spoken of as Mr. Mendoza," she replied. "Your wife has been
+very kind to me." She did not offer to make room for him on the seat
+beside her. She had been relieved of her riding-habit, and she held
+Antonia's _rebozo_ across her knees. She had decided not to use it just
+yet. The night was still comfortably warm and she did not like to cover up
+the pretty Chinese silk frock she was wearing. But as Mendoza glanced down
+at her she placed the _rebozo_ over one arm as if she expected to rise.
+
+Mendoza must have noted the movement. A gleam of satisfaction shone in his
+inscrutable eyes--as when a current of air removes some of the ash from
+above a live coal. "Will you dance with me?" he asked. "When the young
+fellows overlook so charming a partner, surely an old man may become
+bold."
+
+She arose with warm responsiveness, yet with undefined misgivings. He had
+an arm about her firmly in an instant, and when they had caught step with
+the music he held her close to him. He was an excellent dancer. Sylvia was
+instantly transported away from the world of petty discretions into a
+realm of faultless harmony, of singing rhythm.
+
+Her color was heightened, her eyes were sparking, when they returned to
+their place. "It was nice," she said, releasing her partner's arm and
+drawing apart. A purple-and-gold Chinese lantern glowed just above her
+head. And then she realized that Harboro and Valdez had returned. There
+was a stranger with them.
+
+Harboro regarded her with unmistakable disapproval; but only for an
+instant. When something of the childlike glory of her face departed under
+the severe expression of his eyes, he relented immediately. "Are you
+enjoying yourself, Sylvia?" he inquired gently, and then: "I want you to
+meet our host."
+
+Wayne shook hands with her heartily. "You're a very kind lady to get right
+into our merrymaking," he said, "though I hope you'll save a dance for me
+a little later."
+
+They all went to see the bride-to-be then. She was hidden away in one of
+the _adobe_ houses of the settlement near by, receiving congratulations
+from friends. She was a dark little creature, nicely demure and almost
+boisterously joyous by turns.
+
+But later Sylvia danced with Wayne, and he thought of a dozen, a score, of
+young fellows who would wish to meet her. He brought them singly and in
+groups, and they all asked to dance with her. She was immediately popular.
+Happiness radiated from her, and she added to the warmth of every heart
+that came within her influence.
+
+Harboro watched her with wonder. She was like a flame; but he saw her as a
+sacred flame.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XX
+
+
+Sylvia was resting. She had not danced to her heart's content, but she had
+become weary, and she threw Antonia's _rebozo_ over her shoulders and
+leaned back in her seat. For the moment Harboro and Valdez and Wayne were
+grouped near her, standing. The girl Wayne was to marry the next day had
+made her formal appearance now and was the centre of attention. She was
+dancing with one after another, equally gracious toward all.
+
+Then Sylvia heard Valdez and Wayne cry out simultaneously:
+
+"Runyon!"
+
+And then both men hurried away toward the entrance to the stockade.
+
+Sylvia drew her wrap more snugly about her. "Runyon!" she repeated to
+herself. She closed her eyes as if she were pondering--or recuperating.
+And she knew that from the beginning she had hoped that Runyon would
+appear.
+
+"It's that inspector fellow," explained Harboro, without looking at her.
+His tone was not at all contemptuous, though there was a note of amusement
+in it. "He seems a sort of Prince Charming that everybody takes a liking
+to." Wayne and Valdez were already returning, with Runyon between them.
+They pretended to lead him captive and his face radiated merriment and
+good nature. He walked with the elasticity of a feline creature; he
+carried his body as if it were the depository of precious jewels. Never
+was there a man to whom nature had been kinder--nor any man who was more
+graciously proud of what nature had done for him. For the occasion he was
+dressed in a suit of fawn-colored corduroy which fitted him as the rind
+fits the apple.
+
+"Just a little too much so," Harboro was thinking, ambiguously enough,
+certainly, as Runyon was brought before him and Sylvia. Runyon
+acknowledged the introduction with a cheerful urbanity which was quite
+without discrimination as between Harboro and Sylvia. Quite impartially he
+bestowed a flashing smile upon both the man and the woman. And Harboro
+began vaguely to understand. Runyon was popular, not because he was a
+particularly good fellow, but because he was so supremely cheerful. And he
+seemed entirely harmless, despite the glamour of him. After all, he was
+not a mere male coquette. He was in love with the world, with life.
+
+Wayne was reproaching him for not having come sooner. He should have been
+there for the beginning, he said.
+
+And Runyon's response was characteristic enough, perhaps: "Everything is
+always beginning."
+
+There was gay laughter at this, though the meaning of it must have been
+obscure to all save Sylvia. The words sounded like a song to her. It was a
+song she had wished to sing herself. But she was reflecting, despite her
+joy in the saying: "No, everything is always ending."
+
+Runyon was borne away like a conqueror. He mingled with this group and
+that. His presence was like a stimulant. His musical voice penetrated
+everywhere; his laughter arose now and again. He did not look back toward
+Sylvia. She had the strange feeling that even yet they had not met--they
+had not met, yet had known each other always. He ignored her, she felt, as
+one ignores the best friend, the oldest associate, on the ground that no
+explanations are necessary, no misunderstanding possible.
+
+Harboro sat down beside Sylvia. When he spoke there was a note of easy
+raillery in his voice. "They're getting him to sing," he said, and Sylvia,
+bringing her thoughts back from immeasurable distances, realized that the
+dancing space had been cleared, and that the musicians had stopped playing
+and were engaged in a low-spoken conference with Runyon. He nodded toward
+them approvingly and then stepped out into the open, a little distance
+from them.
+
+The very sky listened; the desert became dumb. The orchestra played a
+prelude and then Runyon began to sing. The words came clear and resonant:
+
+                   "By the blue Alsatian mountains
+                   Dwelt a maiden young and fair...."
+
+Runyon sang marvellously. Although he was accustomed to the confines of
+drawing-rooms with low ceilings, he seemed quite at home on this earthen
+floor of the desert, with the moon sinking regretfully beyond the top of
+the stockade. He was perfectly at ease. His hands hung so naturally by his
+sides that they seemed invisible.
+
+                    "But the blue Alsatian mountains
+                    Seem to watch and wait alway."
+
+The song of a woman alone, and then another, "A Warrior Bold," and then
+"Alice, Where Art Thou?" And finally "Juanita." They were songs his
+audience would appreciate. And all those four songs of tragedy he sang
+without banishing the beaming smile from his eyes. He might have been
+relating the woes of marionettes.
+
+He passed from the scene to the sound of clapping hands, and when he
+returned almost immediately after that agreeable theatrical exit, he began
+to dance. He danced with the bride-to-be, and then with the bridesmaids.
+He found obscure girls who seemed to have been forgotten--who might be
+said to have had no existence before he found them--and danced with them
+with natural gallantry. He came finally to Sylvia, and she drifted away
+with him, her hand resting on his shoulder like a kiss.
+
+"I thought you would never come to me," she said in a lifeless voice.
+
+"You knew I would," was the response.
+
+Her lips said nothing more. But her heart was beating against him; it was
+speaking to him with clarity, with eloquence.
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART V
+
+A WIND FROM THE NORTH
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXI
+
+
+Harboro and Sylvia were taking leave of Wayne and Valdez. Their horses had
+been brought and they were in their saddles, their horses' heads already
+in the direction of Eagle Pass. Valdez was adding final instructions
+touching the road.
+
+"If you're not quite sure of the way I'll get some one to ride in with
+you," said Wayne; but Harboro would not listen to this.
+
+"I'll not lose the way," he declared; though there remained in his mind a
+slight dubiousness on this point. The moon would be down before the ride
+was finished, and there were not a few roads leading away from the main
+thoroughfare.
+
+Then, much to Harboro's surprise, Runyon appeared, riding away from the
+corral on his beautiful dun horse. He overheard the conference between
+Harboro and the others, and he made himself one of the group with pleasant
+familiarity.
+
+"Ah, Harboro, must you be going, too?" he inquired genially; and then: "If
+you don't mind, I'll ride with you. It's rather a lonely road at this
+hour, and I've an idea I know the way better than you."
+
+Harboro's eyes certainly brightened with relief. "It's good of you to
+offer," he declared heartily. "By all means, ride with us." He turned
+toward Sylvia, plainly expecting her to second the invitation.
+
+"It will be much pleasanter," she said; though it seemed to Harboro that
+her words lacked heartiness. She was busying herself with the little
+package at her pommel--old Antonia's _rebozo_.
+
+"And you must all remember that there's one more latch-string out here at
+the Quemado," said Wayne, "whenever you feel inclined to ride this way."
+
+They were off then. The sound of violins and the shuffle of feet became
+faint, and the last gay voice died in the distance. Only now and then,
+when the horses' feet fell in unison, there drifted after them the note of
+a violin--like a wind at night in an old casement. And then the three
+riders were presently aware of being quite alone on a windless waste, with
+a sentinel yucca standing on a distant height here and there between them
+and the descending moon, and distant groups of mesquite wreathing
+themselves in the silver mist of early morning. It had been a little past
+midnight when they left the Quemado.
+
+Sylvia, riding between the two men, was so obviously under some sort of
+constraint that Harboro sought to arouse her. "I'm afraid you overtaxed
+yourself, Sylvia," he suggested. "It's all been pleasant, but
+rather--heroic." It was an effort for him to speak lightly and cheerfully.
+The long ride out to the Quemado was a thing to which he was not
+accustomed, and the merrymaking had seemed to him quite monotonous after
+an hour or two. Even the midnight supper had not seemed a particularly gay
+thing to him. He was not quite a youth any more, and he had never been
+young, it seemed to him, in the way in which these desert folk were young.
+Joy seemed to them a kind of intoxication--as if it were not to be
+indulged in save at long intervals.
+
+"I didn't overtax myself," replied Sylvia. "The ending of things is never
+very cheerful. I suppose that's what I feel just now--as if, at the end,
+things don't seem quite worth while, after all."
+
+Harboro held to his point. "You _are_ tired," he insisted.
+
+Runyon interposed cheerfully. "And there are always the beginnings," he
+said. "We're just beginning a new day and a fine ride." He looked at
+Harboro as if inviting support and added, in a lower tone: "And I'd like
+to think we were beginning a pleasant acquaintance."
+
+Harboro nodded and his dark eyes beamed with pleasure. It had seemed to
+him that this final clause was the obvious thing for Runyon to say, and he
+had waited to see if he would say it. He did not suppose that he and
+Sylvia would see a great deal of Runyon in Eagle Pass, where they were not
+invited to entertainments of any kind, but there might be occasional
+excursions into the country, and Runyon seemed to be invited everywhere.
+
+But Sylvia refused to respond to this. The pagan in her nature reasserted
+itself, and she felt resentful of Runyon's affable attitude toward
+Harboro. The attraction which she and Runyon exerted toward each other was
+not a thing to be brought within the scope of a conventionally friendly
+relationship. Its essence was of the things furtive and forbidden. It
+should be fought savagely and kept within bounds, even if it could never
+be conquered, or it should be acknowledged and given way to in secret. Two
+were company and three a crowd in this case. She might have derived a
+great deal of tumultuous joy from Runyon's friendship for her if it could
+have been manifested in secret, but she could feel only a sense of
+duplicity and shame if his friendship included Harboro, too. The wolf does
+not curry favor with the sheep-dog when it hungers for a lamb. Such was
+her creed. In brief, Sylvia had received her training in none of the
+social schools. She was a daughter of the desert--a bit of that jetsam
+which the Rio Grande leaves upon its arid banks as it journeys stealthily
+to the sea.
+
+They were riding along in silence half an hour later, their horses at a
+walk, when the stillness of the night was rudely shattered by the sound of
+iron wheels grinding on stone, and in an instant a carriage could be seen
+ascending a branch road which arose out of a near-by _arroyo_.
+
+The riders checked their horses and waited: not from curiosity, but in
+response to the prompting of a neighborly instinct. Travellers in the
+desert are never strangers to one another.
+
+The approaching carriage proved to be an impressively elegant affair, the
+locality considered, drawn by two horses which were clearly not of the
+range variety. And then further things were revealed: a coachman sat on
+the front seat, and a man who wore an air of authority about him like a
+kingly robe sat alone on the back seat. Then to Harboro, sitting high with
+the last rays of the moon touching his face, came the hearty hail:
+"Harboro! How are you, Harboro?"
+
+It was the voice of the General Manager.
+
+Harboro turned his horse so that he stood alongside the open carriage. He
+leaned over the wheel and shook hands with the General Manager. The
+encounter seemed to him to add the one desirable touch of familiarity to
+the night ride. He explained his presence away out on the Quemado Road;
+and the General Manager also explained. He had been spending the evening
+with friends on a near-by ranch. His family were remaining for the night,
+but it had been necessary for him to return to Piedras Negras.
+
+Harboro looked about for his companions, intending to introduce them. But
+they were a little too far away to be included comfortably in such a
+ceremony. For some reason Runyon had chosen to ride on a few steps.
+
+"How many are you?" inquired the General Manager, with a note of
+purposefulness in his voice. "Three? That's good. You get in with me. Tie
+your horse behind. Two can ride abreast more comfortably than three, and
+you and I can talk. I've never felt so lonesome in my life." He moved over
+to one side of the seat, and looked back as if he expected to help in
+getting Harboro's horse tied behind the carriage. His invitation did not
+seem at all like a command, but it did seem to imply that a refusal would
+be out of the question.
+
+The arrangement seemed quite simple and desirable to Harboro. He was not a
+practised horseman, and he was beginning to feel the effect of saddle
+strain. Moreover, he had realized a dozen times during the past hour that
+two could ride easily side by side on the desert road, while a third rider
+was continually getting in the way.
+
+He called to Runyon cheerfully: "You two go on ahead--I'm going to ride
+the rest of the way in."
+
+"Fine!" called back Runyon. To Runyon everything always seemed precisely
+ideal--or at least such was the impression he created.
+
+It became a little cavalcade now, the riders leading the way. Riders and
+carriage kept close together for a time. Sylvia remained silent, but she
+felt the presence of her companion as a deliciously palpable thing.
+Harboro and the General Manager were talking, Harboro's heavy tones
+alternating at unequal intervals with the crisp, penetrating voice of the
+General Manager--a voice dry with years, but vital nevertheless.
+
+After a time the horses in the carriage broke into a rhythmic trot. In the
+darkness Runyon's eyes gleamed with satisfaction. "We'll have to have a
+little canter, or we'll get run over," he said gayly, and he and Sylvia
+gave rein to their horses.
+
+In a very few minutes they had put a distance of more than a hundred yards
+between them and the occupants of the carriage.
+
+"This is more like it!" exclaimed Runyon exultantly. Tone and words alike
+implied all too strongly his satisfaction at being rid of Harboro--and
+Sylvia perversely resented the disloyalty of it, the implication of
+intrigue carried on behind a mask.
+
+And then she forgot her scruples. The boy who had chosen her horse for her
+had known what he was doing, after all. The animal galloped with a dashing
+yet easy movement which was delightful. She became exhilarated by a number
+of things. The freedom of movement, the occasional touch of her knee
+against Runyon's, the mysterious vagueness of the road, now that the moon
+had gone down.
+
+Perhaps they both forgot themselves for a time, and then Sylvia checked
+her horse with a laugh in which there was a sound of dismay. "We ought to
+wait for them to catch up," she said.
+
+Runyon was all solicitude immediately. "We seem to have outdistanced them
+completely," he said. They turned their horses about so that they faced
+the north. "I can't even hear them," he added. Then, with the
+irrepressible optimism which was his outstanding quality, he added
+laughingly: "They'll be along in a few minutes. But wasn't it a fine
+ride?"
+
+She had not framed an answer to this question when her mind was diverted
+swiftly into another channel. She held her head high and her body became
+slightly rigid. She glanced apprehensively at Runyon and realized that he,
+too, was listening intently.
+
+A faint roar which seemed to come from nowhere fell on their ears. The
+darkness swiftly deepened, so that the man and the woman were almost
+invisible to each other. That sinister roaring sound came closer, as if
+mighty waters were rolling toward them far away. The northern sky became
+black, as if a sable curtain had been let down.
+
+And then upon Sylvia's startled senses the first breath of the norther
+broke. The little winds, running ahead as an advance-guard of the tempest,
+flung themselves upon her and caught at her hair and her riding-habit.
+They chilled her.
+
+"A norther!" she exclaimed, and Runyon called back through the whistle of
+the winds: "It's coming!"
+
+His voice had the quality of a battle-cry, joined to the shouts of the
+descending storm.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXII
+
+
+Fortunately, Runyon knew what to do in that hour of earth's desolation and
+his own and Sylvia's peril.
+
+He sprang from his horse and drew his bridle-rein over his arm; and then
+he laid a firm hand on the bridle of Sylvia's horse. His own animal he
+could trust in such an emergency; but the other had seemed to lose in
+height and he knew that it was trembling. It might make a bolt for it at
+any moment.
+
+"Keep your seat," he shouted to Sylvia, and she realized that he was
+leading both horses away from the road. She caught glimpses of his
+wraith-like figure as the whirling dust-cloud that enveloped them thinned
+occasionally.
+
+She knew that he had found a clump of mesquite after a faltering progress
+of perhaps fifty yards. Their progress was checked, then, and she knew he
+was at the hitching straps, and that he was tethering the animals to the
+trees. The powdered dust and sand were stinging her face, and the cold
+wind was chilling her; yet she felt a strange elation as she realized that
+she was here alone with Runyon, and that he was managing the situation
+with deftness and assurance.
+
+She felt his hand groping for her then, and, leaning forward, she was
+borne to the ground. He guided her to a little depression and made her
+understand that she was to sit down. He had removed his saddle-blanket and
+spread it on the earth, forming a rug for her. "The _rebozo_?" he cried in
+her ear.
+
+"It's fastened to the pommel," she called back.
+
+She could neither see nor hear him; but soon he was touching her on the
+shoulders. The _rebozo_ was flung out on the wind so that it unfolded, and
+he was spreading it about her.
+
+She caught his hand and drew him close so that she could make herself
+heard. "There's room under it for two," she said. She did not release his
+hand until he had sat down by her. Together they drew the _rebozo_ about
+them like a little tent.
+
+Immediately they were transformed into two sheltered and undismayed Arabs.
+The _rebozo_ was pinioned behind them and under their feet. The finest
+dust could not penetrate its warp and woof. The wind was as a mighty hand,
+intent upon bearing them to earth, but it could not harm them.
+
+Sylvia heard Runyon's musical laugh. He bent his head close to hers.
+"We're all right now," he said.
+
+He had his arm across her shoulder and was drawing her close. "It's going
+to be cold," he said, as if in explanation. He seemed as joyous as a
+boy--as innocent as a boy. She inclined her head until it rested on his
+shoulder, so that both occupied little more than the space of one. The
+storm made this intimacy seem almost natural; it made it advantageous,
+too.
+
+And so the infinite sands swarmed over them, and the norther shrieked in
+their ears, and the earth's blackness swallowed them up until they seemed
+alone as a man and a woman never had been alone before.
+
+The _rebozo_ sagged about them at intervals, weighted down with the dust;
+but again it rippled like a sail when an eccentric gust swept away the
+accumulated sediment.
+
+The desert was a thing of blank darkness. A protected torch would have
+been invisible to one staring toward it a dozen steps away. A temporary
+death had invaded the world. There was neither movement nor sound save the
+frenzied dance of dust and the whistle of winds which seemed shunted
+southward from the north star.
+
+Runyon's hand travelled soothingly from Sylvia's shoulder to her cheek. He
+held her to him with a tender, eloquent pressure. He was the man, whose
+duty it was to protect; and she was the woman, in need of protection.
+
+And Sylvia thought darkly of the ingenuities of Destiny which set at
+naught the petty steps which the proprieties have taken--as if the gods
+were never so diverted as when they were setting the stage for tragedy, or
+as if the struggles and defeats of all humankind were to them but a proper
+comedy.
+
+But Runyon was thinking how rare a thing it is for a man and a woman to be
+quite alone in the world; how the walls of houses listen, and windows are
+as eyes which look in as well as out; how highways forever hold their
+malicious gossips to note the movements of every pair who do not walk
+sedately; how you may mount the stairway of a strange house--and encounter
+one who knows you at the top, and who laughs in his sleeve; how you may
+emerge from the house in which you have felt safe from espionage--only to
+encounter a familiar talebearer at the door.
+
+But here indeed were he and Sylvia alone.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIII
+
+
+Before the next spring came two entirely irreconcilable discoveries were
+made in Eagle Pass.
+
+The first of these was made by certain cronies of the town who found their
+beer flat if there was not a bit of gossip to go with it, and it was to
+the effect that the affair between Sylvia and Runyon was sure to end
+disastrously if it did not immediately end otherwise.
+
+The other discovery was made by Harboro, and it was to the effect that
+Sylvia had at last blossomed out as a perfectly ideal wife.
+
+A certain listlessness had fallen from her like a shadow. Late in the
+winter--it was about the time of the ride to the Quemado, Harboro thought
+it must have been--a change had come over her. There was a glad
+tranquillity about her now which was as a tonic to him. She was no longer
+given to dark utterances which he could not understand. She was devoted to
+him in a gentle, almost maternal fashion--studying his needs and moods
+alertly and affectionately. Something of the old tempestuous ardor was
+gone, but that, of course, was natural. Harboro did not know the phrases
+of old Antonia or he would have said: "It is the time of embers." She was
+softly solicitous for him; still a little wistful at times, to be sure;
+but then that was the natural Sylvia. It was the quality which made her
+more wonderful than any other woman in the world.
+
+And Sylvia? Sylvia had found a new avenue of escape from that tedium which
+the Sylvias of the world have never been able to endure.
+
+Not long after that ride to the Quemado a horse had been brought to her
+front gate during a forenoon when Harboro was over the river at work.
+Unassisted she had mounted it and ridden away out the Quemado Road. A mile
+out she had turned toward the Rio Grande, and had kept to an indistinct
+trail until she came to a hidden _adobe_ hut, presided over by an ancient
+Mexican.
+
+To this isolated place had come, too, Runyon--Runyon, whose dappled horse
+had been left hidden in the mesquite down by the river, where the man's
+duties lay.
+
+And here, in undisturbed seclusion, they had continued that intimacy which
+had begun on the night of the norther. They were like two children,
+forbidden the companionship of each other, who find something particularly
+delicious in an unguessed rendezvous. All that is delightful in a
+temporary escape from the sense of responsibility was theirs. Their
+encounters were as gay and light as that of two poppies in the sun, flung
+together by a friendly breeze. They were not conscious of wronging any
+one--not more than a little, at least--though the ancient genius of the
+place, a Mexican who had lost an eye in a jealous fight in his youth, used
+to shake his head sombrely when he went away from his hut, leaving them
+alone; and there was anxiety in the glance of that one remaining eye as he
+kept a lookout over the trail, that his two guests might not be taken by
+surprise.
+
+Sometimes they remained in the hut throughout the entire noon-hour, and on
+these occasions their finely discreet and taciturn old host placed food
+before them. Goat's milk was brought from an earthenware vessel having its
+place on a wooden hook under the eaves of the house; and there was a
+delicious stew of dried goat's flesh, served with a sauce which contained
+just a faint flavor of peppers and garlic and herbs. And there was _pan_,
+as delicate as wafers, and coffee.
+
+Time and again, throughout the winter, the same horse made its appearance
+at Sylvia's gate at the same hour, and Sylvia mounted and rode away out
+the Quemado Road and disappeared, returning early in the afternoon.
+
+If you had asked old Antonia about these movements of her mistress she
+would have said: "Does not the senora need the air?" And she would have
+added: "She is young." And finally she would have said: "I know nothing."
+
+It is a matter of knowledge that occasionally Sylvia would meet the boy
+from the stable when he arrived at the gate and instruct him gently to
+take the horse away, as she would not require it that day; and I am not
+sure she was not trying still to fight the battle which she had already
+lost; but this, of course, is mere surmise.
+
+And then a little cog in the machine slipped.
+
+A ranchman who lived out on the north road happened to be in Eagle Pass
+one evening as Harboro was passing through the town on his way home from
+work. The ranchman's remark was entirely innocent, but rather unfortunate.
+"A very excellent horsewoman, Mrs. Harboro," he remarked, among other
+things.
+
+Harboro did not understand.
+
+"I met her riding out the road this forenoon," explained the ranchman.
+
+"Oh, yes!" said Harboro. "Yes, she enjoys riding. I'm sorry, on her
+account, that I haven't more liking for it myself."
+
+He went on up the hill, pondering. It was strange that Sylvia had not told
+him that she meant to go for a ride. She usually went into minute details
+touching her outings.
+
+He expected her to mention the matter when he got home, but she did not do
+so. She seemed disposed not to confide in him throughout the entire
+evening, and finally he remarked with an air of suddenly remembering: "And
+so you went riding to-day?"
+
+She frowned and lowered her eyes. She seemed to be trying to remember.
+"Why, yes," she said, after a moment's silence. "Yes, I felt rather dull
+this morning. You know I enjoy riding."
+
+"I know you do," he responded cordially. "I'd like you to go often, if
+you'll be careful not to take any chances." He smiled at the recollection
+of the outcome of that ride of theirs to the Quemado, and of the
+excitement with which they compared experiences when they got back home.
+Sylvia and Runyon had made a run for it and had got home before the worst
+of it came, she had said. But Harboro and the General Manager had waited
+until the storm had spent itself, both sitting in the carriage with their
+handkerchiefs pressed to their nostrils, and their coats drawn up about
+their heads. He remembered, too, how the dust-fog had lingered in the air
+until well into the next day, like a ghost which could not be laid.
+
+He brought himself back from the recollection of that night. "If you like,
+I'll have the horse sent every day--or, better still, you shall have a
+horse of your own."
+
+"No," replied Sylvia, "I might not care to go often." She had let her hair
+down and was brushing it thoughtfully. "The things which are ordered for
+you in advance are always half spoiled," she added. "It's better to think
+of things all of a sudden, and do them."
+
+He looked at her in perplexity. That wasn't his way, certainly; but then
+she was still occasionally something of an enigma to him. He tried to
+dismiss the matter from his mind. He was provoked that it came back again
+and again, as if there were something extraordinary about it, something
+mysterious. "She only went for a ride," he said to himself late at night,
+as if he were defending her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIV
+
+
+A month later Harboro came home one afternoon to find an envelope
+addressed to him on the table in the front hall.
+
+He was glad afterward that Sylvia was engaged with Antonia in the
+dining-room, and did not have a chance to observe him as he examined the
+thing which that envelope contained.
+
+It was a statement from one of the stables of the town, and it set forth
+the fact that Harboro was indebted to the stable for horse-hire. There
+were items, showing that on seven occasions during the past month a horse
+had been placed at the disposal of Mrs. Harboro.
+
+Harboro was almost foolishly bewildered. Sylvia had gone riding seven
+times during the month, and she had not even mentioned the matter to him!
+Clearly here was a mystery. Her days were not sufficiently full of events
+to make seven outings a matter of little consequence to her. She was not
+given to reticence, even touching very little things. She had some reason
+for not wishing him to know of these movements of hers.
+
+But this conclusion was absurd, of course. She would understand that the
+bill for services rendered would eventually come to him. He was relieved
+when that conclusion came to him. No, she was not seeking to make a
+mystery out of the matter. Still, the question recurred: Why had she
+avoided even the most casual mention of these outings?
+
+He replaced the statement in the envelope thoughtfully and put it away in
+his pocket. He was trying to banish the look of dark introspection from
+his eyes when Sylvia came in from the kitchen and gave a little cry of joy
+at sight of him. She _was_ happy at the sight of him--Harboro knew it. Yet
+the cloud did not lift from his brow as he drew her to him and kissed her
+slowly. She was keeping a secret from him. The conclusion was
+inescapable.
+
+His impulse was to face the thing frankly, affectionately. He had only to
+ask her to explain and the thing would be cleared up. But for the first
+time he found it difficult to be frank with her. If the thing he felt was
+not a sense of injury, it was at least a sense of mystery: of resentment,
+too. He could not deny that he felt resentful. At the foundation of his
+consciousness there was, perhaps, the belief and the hope that she would
+explain voluntarily. He felt that something precious would be saved to him
+if she confided in him without prompting, without urging. If he waited,
+perhaps she would do so. His sense of delicacy forbade him to inquire
+needlessly into her personal affairs. Surely she was being actuated by
+some good reason. That she was committed to an evil course was a suspicion
+which he would have rejected as monstrous. Such a suspicion did not occur
+to him.
+
+It did not occur to him until the next day, when a bolt fell.
+
+He received another communication from the stable. It was an apology for
+an error that had been made. The stableman found that he had no account
+against Mr. Harboro, but that one which should have been made out against
+Mr. Runyon had been sent to him by mistake.
+
+Quite illogically, perhaps, Harboro jumped to the conclusion that the
+service had really been rendered to Sylvia, as the original statement had
+said, and that for some obscure reason it was to be charged against
+Runyon. But even now it was not a light that he saw. Rather, he was
+enveloped in darkness. He heard the envelope crackle in his clinched hand.
+He turned and climbed the stairs heavily, so that he need not encounter
+Sylvia until he had had time to think, until he could understand.
+
+Sylvia was taking rides, and Runyon was paying for them. That was to say,
+Runyon was the moving factor in the arrangement. Therefore, Runyon was
+deriving a pleasure from these rides of Sylvia's. How? Why, he must be
+riding with her. They must be meeting by secret appointment.
+
+Harboro shook his head fiercely, like a bull that is being tortured and
+bewildered by the matadors. No, no! That wasn't the way the matter was to
+be explained. That could indicate only one thing--a thing that was
+impossible.
+
+He began at the beginning again. The whole thing had been an error. Sylvia
+had been rendered no services at all. Runyon had engaged a horse for his
+own use, and the bill had simply been sent to the wrong place. That was
+the rational explanation. It was a clear and sufficient explanation.
+
+Harboro held his head high, as if his problem had been solved. He held
+himself erect, as if a burden had been removed. He had been almost at the
+point of making a fool of himself, he reflected. Reason asserted itself
+victoriously. But something which speaks in a softer, more insistent voice
+than reason kept whispering to him: "Runyon and Sylvia! Runyon and
+Sylvia!"
+
+He faced her almost gayly at supper. He had resolved to play the role of a
+happy man with whom all is well. But old Antonia looked at him darkly. Her
+old woman's sense told her that he was acting a part, and that he was
+overacting it. From the depths of the kitchen she regarded him as he sat
+at the table. She lifted her eyes like one who hears a signal-cry when he
+said casually:
+
+"Have you gone riding any more since that other time, Sylvia?"
+
+Sylvia hesitated. "'That other time'" she repeated vaguely.... "Oh, yes,
+once since then--once or twice. Why?"
+
+"I believe you haven't mentioned going."
+
+"Haven't I? It doesn't seem a very important thing. I suppose I've thought
+you wouldn't be interested. I don't believe you and I look at a
+horseback-ride alike. I think perhaps you regard it as quite an event."
+
+He pondered that deliberately. "You're right," he said. "And ... about
+paying for the horse. I'm afraid your allowance isn't liberal enough to
+cover such things. I must increase it next month. Have you been paying out
+of your own pocket?"
+
+"Yes--yes, of course. It amounts to very little."
+
+His sombre glance travelled across the table to her. She was looking at
+her plate. She had the appearance of a child encountering a small obstacle
+in the way of a coveted pleasure. There was neither guilt nor alarm in her
+bearing, but only an irksome discomfort.
+
+But old Antonia withdrew farther within the kitchen. She took her place
+under a picture of the Virgin and murmured a little prayer.
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART VI
+
+THE GUEST-CHAMBER
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXV
+
+
+It was remarked in the offices of the Mexican International Railroad about
+this time that something had gone wrong with Harboro. He made mistakes in
+his work. He answered questions at random--or he did not answer them at
+all. He passed people in the office and on the street without seeing them.
+But worse than all this, he was to be observed occasionally staring darkly
+into the faces of his associates, as if he would read something that had
+been concealed from him. He came into one room or another abruptly, as if
+he expected to hear his name spoken.
+
+His associates spoke of his strange behavior--being careful only to wait
+until he had closed his desk for the day. They were men of different minds
+from Harboro's. He considered their social positions matters which
+concerned them only; but they had duly noted the fact that he had been
+taken up in high places and then dropped without ceremony. They knew of
+his marriage. Certain rumors touching it had reached them from the
+American side.
+
+They were rather thrilled at the prospect of a denouement to the story of
+Harboro's eccentricity. They used no harsher word than that. They liked
+him and they would have deplored anything in the nature of a misfortune
+overtaking him. But human beings are all very much alike in one
+respect--they find life a tedious thing as a rule and they derive a
+stimulus from the tale of downfall, even of their friends. They are not
+pleased that such things happen; they are merely interested, and they
+welcome the break in the monotony of events.
+
+As for Harboro, he was a far more deeply changed man than they suspected.
+He was making a heroic effort in those days to maintain a normal bearing.
+It was only the little interstices of forgetfulness which enabled any one
+to read even a part of what was taking place in his thoughts.
+
+He seemed unchanged to Sylvia, save that he admitted being tired or having
+a headache, when she sought to enliven him, to draw him up to her own
+plane of merriment. He was reminding himself every hour of the night and
+day that he must make no irretrievable blunder, that he must do nothing to
+injure his wife needlessly. Appearances were against her, but possibly
+that was all.
+
+Yet revelations were being made to him. Facts were arraying themselves and
+marching before him for review. Suspicion was pounding at him like a body
+blow that is repeated accurately and relentlessly in the same vulnerable
+spot.
+
+Why had Sylvia prevented him from knowing anything about her home life?
+Why had she kept him and her father apart? Why had Eagle Pass ceased to
+know him, immediately after his marriage? And Peterson, that day they had
+gone across the river together--why had Peterson behaved so clownishly,
+following his familiar greeting of Sylvia? Peterson hadn't behaved like
+himself at all. And why had she been so reluctant to tell him about the
+thing that had happened in her father's house? Was that the course an
+innocent woman would have pursued?
+
+What was the explanation of these things? Was the world cruel by choice to
+a girl against whom nothing more serious could be charged than that she
+was obscure and poor?
+
+These reflections seemed to rob Harboro of the very marrow in his bones.
+He would have fought uncomplainingly to the end against injustice. He
+would cheerfully have watched the whole world depart from him, if he had
+had the consciousness of righting in a good cause. He had thought
+scornfully of the people who had betrayed their littleness by ignoring
+him. But what if they had been right, and his had been the offense against
+them?
+
+He found it almost unbearably difficult to walk through the streets of
+Eagle Pass and on across the river. What had been his strength was now his
+weakness. His loyalty to a good woman had been his armor; but what would
+right-thinking people say of his loyalty to a woman who had deceived him,
+and who felt no shame in continuing to deceive him, despite his efforts to
+surround her with protection and love?
+
+And yet ... what did he know against Sylvia? She had gone riding--that was
+all. That, and the fact that she had made a secret of the matter, and had
+perhaps given him a false account of the manner in which she had paid for
+her outings.
+
+He must make sure of much more than he already knew. Again and again he
+clinched his hands in the office and on the street. He would not wrong the
+woman he loved. He would not accept the verdict of other people. He would
+have positive knowledge of his own before he acted.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVI
+
+
+Harboro had admitted a drop of poison to his veins and it was rapidly
+spreading to every fibre of his being. He was losing the power to think
+clearly where Sylvia was concerned. Even the most innocent acts of hers
+assumed new aspects; and countless circumstances which in the past had
+seemed merely puzzling to him arose before him now charged with deadly
+significance.
+
+His days became a torture to him. He could not lose himself in a crowd,
+and draw something of recuperation from a sense of obscurity, a feeling
+that he was not observed. He seemed now to be cruelly visible to every man
+and woman on both sides of the river. Strangers who gave more than the
+most indifferent glance to his massive strength and romantic, swarthy
+face, with its fine dark eyes and strong lines and the luxuriant black
+mustache, became to him furtive witnesses to his shame--secret
+commentators upon his weakness. He recalled pictures of men held in
+pillories for communities to gibe at--and he felt that his position was
+not unlike theirs. He had at times a frantic realization that he had
+unconquerable strength, but that by some ironic circumstance he could not
+use it.
+
+If his days were sapping his vigor and driving him to the verge of
+madness, his nights were periods of a far more destructive torture. He had
+resolved that Sylvia should see no change in him; he was trying to
+persuade himself that there _was_ no change in him. Yet at every tenderly
+inquiring glance of hers he felt that the blood must start forth on his
+forehead, that body and skull must burst from the tumult going on within
+them.
+
+It was she who brought matters to a climax.
+
+"Harboro, you're not well," she said one evening when her hand about his
+neck had won no response beyond a heavy, despairing gesture of his arm.
+His eyes were fixed on vacancy and were not to be won away from their
+unseeing stare.
+
+"You're right, Sylvia," he said, trying to arouse himself. "I've been
+trying to fight against it, but I'm all out of sorts."
+
+"You must go away for a while," she said. She climbed on his knee and
+assumed a prettily tyrannical manner. "You've been working too hard. They
+must give you a vacation, and you must go entirely away. For two weeks at
+least."
+
+The insidious poison that was destroying him spread still further with a
+swift rush at that suggestion. She would be glad to have him out of the
+way for a while. Were not unfaithful wives always eager to send their
+husbands away? He closed his eyes resolutely and his hands gripped the
+arms of his chair. Then a plan which he had been vaguely shaping took
+definite form. She was really helping him to do the thing he felt he must
+do.
+
+He turned to her heavily like a man under the influence of a drug. "Yes,
+I'll go away for a while," he agreed. "I'll make arrangements right
+away--to-morrow."
+
+"And I'll go with you," she said with decision, "and help to drive the
+evil hours away." She had his face between her hands and was smiling
+encouragingly.
+
+The words were like a dagger thrust. Surely, they were proof of fidelity,
+of affection, and in his heart he had condemned her.
+
+"Would you like to go with me, Sylvia?" he asked. His voice had become
+husky.
+
+She drew back from him as if she were performing a little rite. Her eyes
+filled with tears. "Harboro!" she cried, "do you need to ask me that?" Her
+fingers sought his face and traveled with ineffable tenderness from line
+to line. It was as if she were playing a little love-lyric of her own upon
+a beautiful harp. And then she fell upon his breast and pressed her cheek
+to his. "Harboro!" she cried again. She had seen only the suffering in his
+eyes.
+
+He held her in his arms and leaned back with closed eyes. A hymn of praise
+was singing through all his being. She loved him! she loved him! And then
+that hymn of praise sank to pianissimo notes and was transformed by some
+sort of evil magic to something shockingly different. It was as if a
+skillful yet unscrupulous musician were constructing a revolting medley,
+placing the sacred song in juxtaposition with the obscene ditty. And the
+words of the revolting thing were "Runyon and Sylvia! Runyon and Sylvia!"
+
+He opened his eyes resolutely. "We're making too much over a little
+matter," he said with an obvious briskness which hid the cunning in his
+mind. "I suppose I've been sticking to things too close. I'll take a run
+down the line and hunt up some of the old fellows--down as far as Torreon
+at least. I'll rough it a little. I suspect things have been a little too
+soft for me here. Maybe some of the old-timers will let me climb up into a
+cab and run an engine again. That's the career for a man--with the
+distance rushing upon you, and your engine swaying like a bird in the air!
+That will fix me!"
+
+He got up with an air of vigor, helping Sylvia to her feet. "It wouldn't
+be the sort of experience a woman could share," he added. "You'll stay
+here at home and get a little rest yourself. I must have been spoiling
+things for you, too." He looked at her shrewdly.
+
+"Oh, no," she said honestly. "I'm only sorry I didn't realize earlier that
+you need to get away."
+
+She went out of the room with something of the regal industry of the queen
+bee, as if she were the natural source of those agencies which sustain and
+heal. He heard her as she busied herself in their bedroom. He knew that
+she was already making preparations for that journey of his. She was
+singing a soft, wordless song in her throat as she worked.
+
+And Harboro, with an effect of listening with his eyes, stood in his place
+for a long interval, and then shook his head slowly.
+
+He could not believe in her; he would not believe in her. At least he
+would not believe in her until she had been put to the test and met the
+test triumphantly. He could not believe in her; and yet it seemed equally
+impossible for him to hold with assurance to his unbelief.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVII
+
+
+Returning from the office the next forenoon, Harboro stopped at the head
+of the short street on which the chief stable of Eagle Pass was situated.
+
+He had had no difficulty in obtaining a leave of absence, which was to be
+for one week with the privilege of having it extended to twice that time
+if he felt he needed it. In truth, his immediate superior had heartily
+approved of the plan of his going for an outing. He had noticed, he
+admitted, that Harboro hadn't been altogether fit of late. He was glad he
+had decided to go away for a few days. He good-naturedly insisted upon the
+leave of absence taking effect immediately.
+
+And Harboro had turned back toward Eagle Pass pondering darkly.
+
+He scanned the street in the direction of the stable. A stable-boy was
+exercising a young horse in the street, leading it back and forth, but
+otherwise the thoroughfare seemed somnolently quiet.
+
+He sauntered along until he came to the stable entrance. He had the
+thought of entering into a casual conversation with the proprietor. He
+would try to get at the actual facts touching that mistake the stable
+people had made. He would not question them too pointedly. He would not
+betray the fact that he believed something was wrong. He would put his
+questions casually, innocently.
+
+The boy was just turning in with the horse he had been exercising. He
+regarded Harboro expectantly. He was the boy who had brought the horses on
+the night of that ride to the Quemado.
+
+"I didn't want anything," said Harboro; "that is, nothing in particular.
+I'll be likely to need a horse in a day or two, that's all."
+
+He walked leisurely into the shady, cool place of pungent odors. He had
+just ascertained that the proprietor was out when his attention was
+attracted by a dog which lay with perfect complacency under a rather
+good-looking horse.
+
+"A pretty dangerous place, isn't it?" he asked of the stable-boy.
+
+"You _would_ think so, wouldn't you? But it isn't. They're friends. You'll
+always find them together when they can get together. When Prince--that's
+the horse--is out anywhere, we have to pen old Mose up to keep him from
+following. Once when a fellow hired Prince to make a trip over to
+Spofford, old Mose got out, two or three hours later, and followed him all
+the way over. He came back with him the next day, grinning as if he'd done
+something great. We never could figure out how old Mose knew where he had
+gone. Might have smelled out his trail. Or he might have heard them
+talking about going to Spofford, and understood. The more you know about
+dogs the less you know about them--same as humans."
+
+He went back farther into the stable and busied himself with a harness
+that needed mending.
+
+Harboro was looking after him with peculiar intensity. He looked at the
+horse, which stood sentinel-like, above the drowsing dog. Then he engaged
+the stable-boy in further conversation.
+
+"A pretty good-looking horse, too," he said. And when the boy nodded
+without enthusiasm, he added: "By the way, I suppose it's usually your job
+to get horses ready when people want them?"
+
+"Yes, mostly."
+
+Harboro put a new note of purposefulness into his voice. "I believe you
+send a horse around for Mrs. Harboro occasionally?"
+
+"Oh, yes; every week or so, or oftener."
+
+Harboro walked to the boy's side and drew his wallet from his pocket
+deliberately. "I wish," he said, "that the next time Mrs. Harboro needs a
+horse you'd send this fine animal to her. I have an idea it would please
+her. Will you remember?" He produced a bank-note and placed it slowly in
+the boy's hand.
+
+The boy looked up at him dubiously, and then understood. "I'll remember,"
+he said.
+
+Harboro turned away, but at the entrance he stopped. "You'd understand, of
+course, that the dog wouldn't be allowed to go along," he called back.
+
+"Oh, yes. Old Mose would be penned up. I'd see to it."
+
+"And I suppose," said Harboro finally, "that if I'd telephone to you any
+day it wouldn't take you long to get a horse ready for me, would it? I've
+been thinking of using a horse a little myself."
+
+He was paying little attention to the boy's assurances as he went away.
+His step had become a little firmer as he turned toward home. He seemed
+more like himself when he entered the house and smiled into his wife's
+alertly questioning eyes.
+
+"It's all right, I'm to get away," he explained. "I'm away now, strictly
+speaking. I want to pack up a few things some time to-day and get the
+early morning train for Torreon."
+
+She seemed quite gleeful over this cheerful information. She helped him
+make selection of the things he would need, and she was ready with many
+helpful suggestions. It seemed that his train left the Eagle Pass station
+at five o'clock in the morning--a rather awkward hour; but he did not
+mind, he said.
+
+They spent the day together without any restraints, seemingly. There were
+a good many things to do, and Sylvia was happy in the thought of serving
+him. If he regarded her now and again with an expression of smouldering
+fire in his eyes she was unaware of the fact. She sang as she worked,
+interrupting her song at frequent intervals to admonish him against this
+forgetfulness or that.
+
+                   *       *       *       *       *
+
+She seemed to be asleep when, an hour before daybreak, he stirred and left
+her side. But she was awake immediately.
+
+"Is it time to go?" she asked sleepily.
+
+"I hoped I needn't disturb you," he said. "Yes, I ought to be getting on
+my way to the station."
+
+She lay as if she were under a spell while he dressed and made ready to go
+out. Her eyes were wide open, though she seemed to see nothing. Perhaps
+she was merely stupid as a result of being awakened; or it may be that
+indefinable, foreboding thoughts filled her mind.
+
+When he came to say good-by to her she put her arms around his neck. "Try
+to have a good time," she said, "and come back to me your old self
+again."
+
+She felt fearfully alone as she heard him descend the stairs. She held her
+head away from the pillow until she heard the sharp closing of the
+street-door. "He's gone," she said. She shivered a little and drew the
+covers more closely about her.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXVIII
+
+
+Runyon rode out past Harboro's house that afternoon.
+
+Sylvia, in her place by the window, watched him come. In the distance he
+assumed a new aspect in her eyes. She thought of him impersonally--as a
+thrilling picture. She rejoiced in the sight of him as one may in the
+spectacle of an army marching with banners and music.
+
+And then he became to her a glorious troubadour, having no relationship
+with prosaic affairs and common standards, but a care-free creature to be
+loved and praised because of his song; to be heard gladly and sped on his
+way with a sigh.
+
+The golden notes of his songs out at the Quemado echoed in her ears like
+the mournful sound of bells across lonely fields. Her heart ached again at
+the beauty of the songs he had sung.
+
+... She went down-stairs and stood by the gate, waiting for him.
+
+They talked for a little while, Runyon bending down toward her. She
+thought of him as an incomparably gay and happy creature. His musical
+powers gave him a mystic quality to her. She caressed his horse's mane and
+thrilled as she touched it, as if she were caressing the man--as if he
+were some new and splendid type of centaur. And Runyon seemed to read her
+mind. His face became more ruddy with delight. His flashing eyes suggested
+sound rather than color--they were laughing.
+
+Their conference ended and Runyon rode on up the hill. Sylvia carried
+herself circumspectly enough as she went back into the house, but she was
+almost giddy with joy over the final words of that conference. Runyon had
+lowered his voice almost to a whisper, and had spoken with intensity as
+one sometimes speaks to children.
+
+She did not ride that afternoon. It appeared that all her interests for
+the time being were indoors. She spent much of her time among the things
+which reminded her most strongly of Harboro; she sought out little
+services she could perform for him, to delight him when he returned. She
+talked with more than common interest with Antonia, following the old
+woman from kitchen to dining-room and back again. She seemed particularly
+in need of human companionship, of sympathy. She trusted the old servant
+without reserve. She knew that here was a woman who would neither see nor
+speak nor hear evil where either she or Harboro was concerned. Not that
+her fidelity to either of them was particular; it was the home itself that
+was sacred. The flame that warmed the house and made the pot boil was the
+thing to be guarded at any cost. Any winds that caused this flame to waver
+were evil winds and must not be permitted to blow. The old woman was
+covertly discerning; but she had the discretion common to those who know
+that homes are built only by a slow and patient process--though they may
+be destroyed easily.
+
+When it came time to light the lamps Sylvia went up into her boudoir. She
+liberated the imprisoned currents up in the little mediaeval lanterns. She
+drew the blinds so that she should feel quite alone. She had put on one of
+the dresses which made her look specially slim and soft and childlike. She
+knew the garment became her, because it always brought a tender expression
+to Harboro's eyes.
+
+And then she sat down and waited.
+
+At eight o'clock Runyon came. So faint was his summons at the door that it
+might have been a lost bird fluttering in the dark. But Sylvia heard it.
+She descended and opened the door for him. In the dimly lighted hall she
+whispered: "Are you sure nobody saw you come?"
+
+He took both her hands into his and replied: "Nobody!"
+
+They mounted the steps like two children, playing a slightly hazardous
+game. "The cat's away," she said, her eyes beaming with joy.
+
+He did not respond in words but his eyes completed the old saying.
+
+They went up into the boudoir, and he put away his coat and hat.
+
+They tried to talk, each seeking to create the impression that what was
+being said was quite important. But neither heard what the other said.
+They were like people talking in a storm or in a house that is burning
+down.
+
+He took his place at the piano after a while. It seemed that he had
+promised to sing for her--for her alone. He glanced apprehensively toward
+the windows, as if to estimate the distance which separated him from the
+highway. It was no part of their plan that he should be heard singing in
+Sylvia's room by casual passers-by on the Quemado Road.
+
+He touched the keys lightly and when he sang his voice seemed scarcely to
+carry across the room. There was a rapid passage on the keyboard, like the
+patter of a pony's hoofs in the distance, and then the words came:
+
+                    "From the desert I come to thee
+                    On my Arab shod with fire...."
+
+It was a work of art in miniature. The crescendo passages were sung
+relatively with that introductory golden whisper as a standard. For the
+moment Sylvia forgot that the singer's shoulders were beautifully compact
+and vigorous. She was visualizing the Bedouin who came on his horse to
+declare his passion.
+
+                    "And I faint in thy disdain!..."
+
+She stood near him, spellbound by the animation of his face, the seeming
+reality of his plea. He was not a singer; he was the Bedouin lover.
+
+There was a fanatic ardor in the last phrase:
+
+             "Till the leaves of the Judgment Book unfold!"
+
+He turned lightly away from the piano. He was smiling radiantly. He threw
+out his arms with an air of inviting approval; but the gesture was to her
+an invitation, a call. She was instantly on her knees beside him, drawing
+his face down to hers. His low laughter rippled against her face as he put
+his arms around her and drew her closer to him.
+
+They were rejoicing in an atmosphere of dusky gold. The light from the
+mediaeval lanterns fell on her hair and on his laughing face which glowed
+as with a kind of universal good-will. A cloud of delicate incense seemed
+to envelop them as their lips met.
+
+And then the shadow fell. It fell when the door opened quietly and Harboro
+came into the room.
+
+He closed the door behind him and regarded them strangely--as if his face
+had died, but as if his eyes retained the power of seeing.
+
+Sylvia drew away from Runyon, not spasmodically, but as if she were moving
+in her sleep. She left one hand on Runyon's sleeve. She was regarding
+Harboro with an expression of hopeless bewilderment. She seemed incapable
+of speaking. You would not have said she was frightened. You would have
+thought: "She has been slain."
+
+Harboro's lips were moving, but he seemed unable to speak immediately.
+
+It was Sylvia who broke the silence.
+
+"You shouldn't have tricked me, Harboro!" she said. Her voice had the
+mournful quality of a dove's.
+
+He seemed bewildered anew by that. The monstrous inadequacy of it was too
+much for him. He had tricked her, certainly, and that wasn't a manly thing
+to do. He seemed to be trying to get his faculties adjusted. Yet the words
+he uttered finally were pathetically irrelevant, it would have seemed. He
+addressed Runyon.
+
+"Are you the sort of man who would talk about--about this sort of thing?"
+he asked.
+
+Runyon had not ceased to regard him alertly with an expression which can
+be described only as one of infinite distaste--with the acute discomfort
+of an irrepressible creature who shrinks from serious things.
+
+"I am not," he said, as if his integrity were being unwarrantably
+questioned.
+
+Harboro's voice had been strained like that of a man who is dying of
+thirst. He went on with a disconcerting change of tone. He was trying to
+speak more vigorously, more firmly; but the result was like some talking
+mechanism uttering words without shading them properly. "I suppose you are
+willing to marry her?" he asked.
+
+It was Sylvia who answered this. "He does not wish to marry me," she
+said.
+
+Harboro seemed staggered again. "I want his answer to that," he insisted.
+
+"Well, then, I don't want to marry him," continued Sylvia.
+
+Harboro ignored her. "What do you say, Runyon?"
+
+"In view of her unwillingness, and the fact that she is already
+married----"
+
+"Runyon!" The word was pronounced almost like a snarl. Runyon had adopted
+a facetious tone which had stirred Harboro's fury.
+
+Something of the resiliency of Runyon's being vanished at that tone in the
+other man's voice. He looked at Harboro ponderingly, as a child may look
+at an unreasoning parent. And then he became alert again as Harboro threw
+at him contemptuously: "Go on; get out!"
+
+
+
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+PART VII
+
+SYLVIA
+
+------------------------------------------------------------------------
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXIX
+
+
+Sylvia did not look at Runyon as he picked up his coat and hat and
+vanished. She did not realize that he had achieved a perfect middle ground
+between an undignified escape and a too deliberate going. She was
+regarding Harboro wanly. "You shouldn't have come back," she said. She had
+not moved.
+
+"I didn't go away," said Harboro.
+
+Her features went all awry. "You mean----"
+
+"I've spent the day in the guest-chamber. I had to find out. I had to make
+sure."
+
+"Oh, Harboro!" she moaned; and then with an almost ludicrously swift
+return to habitual, petty concerns: "You've had no food all day."
+
+The bewildered expression returned to his eyes. "Food!" he cried. He
+stared at her as if she had gone insane. "Food!" he repeated.
+
+She groped about as if she were in the dark. When her fingers came into
+contact with a chair she drew it toward her and sat down.
+
+Harboro took a step forward. He meant to take a chair, too; but his eyes
+were not removed from hers, and she shrank back with a soft cry of
+terror.
+
+"You needn't be afraid," he assured her. He sat down opposite her, slowly,
+as very ill people sit down.
+
+As if she were still holding to some thought that had been in her mind,
+she asked: "What _do_ you mean to do, then?"
+
+He was breathing heavily. "What does a man do in such a case?" he said--to
+himself rather than to her, it might have seemed. "I shall go away," he
+said at length. "I shall clear out." He brought his hands down upon the
+arms of his chair heavily--not in wrath, but as if surrendering all hope
+of seeing clearly. "Though it isn't a very simple thing to do," he added
+slowly. "You see, you're a part of me. At least, that's what I've come to
+feel. And how can a man go away from himself? How can a part of a man go
+away and leave the other part?" He lifted his fists and smote his breast
+until his whole body shook. And then he leaned forward, his elbows on the
+arms of his chair, his hands clasped before him. He was staring into
+vacancy. He aroused himself after a time. "Of course, I'll have to go," he
+said. He seemed to have become clear on that one point. And then he flung
+himself back in his chair and thrust his arms out before him. "What were
+you driving at, Sylvia?" he asked.
+
+"Driving at...?"
+
+"I hadn't done you any harm. Why did you marry me, if you didn't love
+me?"
+
+"I do love you!" She spoke with an intensity which disturbed him.
+
+"Ah, you mean--you did?"
+
+"I mean I do!"
+
+He arose dejectedly with the air of a man who finds it useless to make any
+further effort. "We'll not talk about it, then," he said. He turned toward
+the door.
+
+"I do love you," she repeated. She arose and took a step toward him,
+though her limbs were trembling so that they seemed unable to sustain her
+weight. "Harboro!" she called as he laid his hand on the door. "Harboro! I
+want you to listen to me." She sank back into her chair, and Harboro
+turned and faced her again wonderingly.
+
+"If you'd try to understand," she pleaded. "I'm not going to ask you to
+stay. I only want you to understand." She would not permit her emotions to
+escape bounds. Something that was courageous and honorable in her forbade
+her to appeal to his pity alone; something that was shrewd in her warned
+her that such a course would be of no avail.
+
+"You see, I was what people call a bad woman when you first met me.
+Perhaps you know that now?"
+
+"Go on," he said.
+
+"But that's such a silly phrase--_a bad woman_. Do you suppose I ever felt
+like a _bad woman_--until now? Even now I can't realize that the words
+belong to me, though I know that according to the rules I've done you a
+bad turn, Harboro."
+
+She rocked in silence while she gained control over her voice.
+
+"What you don't know," she said finally, "is how things began for me, in
+those days back in San Antonio, when I was growing up. It's been bad luck
+with me always; or if you don't believe in luck, then everything has been
+a kind of trick played on me from the beginning. Not by anybody--I don't
+mean that. But by something bigger. There's the word Destiny...." She
+began to wring her hands nervously. "It seems like telling an idle tale.
+When you frame the sentences they seem to have existed in just that form
+always. I mean, losing my mother when I was twelve; and the dreadful
+poverty of our home and its dulness, and the way my father sat in the sun
+and seemed unable to do anything. I don't believe he _was_ able to do
+anything. There's the word Destiny again. We lived in what's called the
+Mexican section, where everybody was poor. What's the meaning of it; there
+being whole neighborhoods of people who are hungry half the time?
+
+"I was still nothing but a child when I began to notice how others escaped
+from poverty a little--the Mexican girls and women I lived among. It
+seemed to be expected of them. They didn't think anything of it at all. It
+didn't make any difference in their real selves, so far as you could see.
+They went on going to church and doing what little tasks they could find
+to do--just like other women. The only precaution they took when a man
+came was to turn the picture of the Virgin to the wall...."
+
+Harboro had sat down again and was regarding her darkly.
+
+"I don't mean that I felt about it just as they did when I got older. You
+see, they had their religion to help them. They had been taught to call
+the thing they did a sin, and to believe that a sin was forgiven if they
+went and confessed to the priest. It seemed to make it quite simple. But I
+couldn't think of it as a sin. I couldn't clearly understand what sin
+meant, but I thought it must be the thing the happy people were guilty of
+who didn't give my father something to do, so that we could have a decent
+place to live in. You must remember how young I was! And so what the other
+girls called a sin seemed to me ... oh, something that was untidy--that
+wasn't nice."
+
+Harboro broke in upon her narrative when she paused.
+
+"I'm afraid you've always been very fastidious."
+
+She grasped at that straw gratefully. "Yes, I have been. There isn't one
+man in a hundred who appeals to me, even now." And then something, as if
+it were the atmosphere about her, clarified her vision for the moment, and
+she looked at Harboro in alarm. She knew, then, that he had spoken
+sarcastically, and that she had fallen into the trap he had set for her.
+"Oh, Harboro! You!" she cried. She had not known that he could be unkind.
+Her eyes swam in tears and she looked at him in agony. And in that moment
+it seemed to him that his heart must break. It was as if he looked on
+while Sylvia drowned, and could not put forth a hand to save her.
+
+She conquered her emotion. She only hoped that Harboro would hear her to
+the end. She resumed: "And when I began to see that people are expected to
+shape their own lives, mine had already been shaped. I couldn't begin at a
+beginning, really; I had to begin in the middle. I had to go on weaving
+the threads that were already in my hands--the soiled threads. I met nice
+women after a while--women from the San Antonio missions, I think they
+were; and they were kind to me and gave me books to read. One of them took
+me to the chapel--where the clock ticked. But they couldn't really help
+me. I think they did influence me more than I realized, possibly; for my
+father began to tell them I wasn't at home ... and he brought me out here
+to Eagle Pass soon after they began to befriend me."
+
+Harboro was staring at her with a vast incredulity. "And then--?" he
+asked.
+
+"And then it went on out here--though it seemed different out here. I had
+the feeling of being shut out, here. In a little town people know. Life in
+a little town is like just one checker-board, with a game going on; but
+the big towns are like a lot of checkerboards, with the men on some of
+them in disorder, and not being watched at all."
+
+Harboro was shaking his head slowly, and she made an effort to wipe some
+of the blackness from the picture. "You needn't believe I didn't have
+standards that I kept to. Some women of my kind would have lied or stolen,
+or they would have made mischief for people. And then there were the young
+fellows, the mere boys.... It's a real injury to them to find that a girl
+they like is--is not nice. They're so wonderfully ignorant. A woman is
+either entirely good or entirely bad in their eyes. You couldn't really do
+anything to destroy their faith, even when they pretended to be rather
+rough and wicked. I wasn't that kind of a bad woman, at least."
+
+Harboro's brow had become furrowed, with impatience, seemingly. "But your
+marriage to me, Sylvia?" He put the question accusingly.
+
+"I thought you knew--at first. I thought you _must_ know. There are men
+who will marry the kind of woman I was. And it isn't just the little or
+worthless men, either. Sometimes it is the big men, who can understand and
+be generous. Up to the time of our marriage I thought you knew and that
+you were forgiving everything. And at last I couldn't bear to tell you.
+Not alone from fear of losing you, but I knew it would hurt you horribly,
+and I hoped ... I had made up my mind ... I _was_ truly loyal to you,
+Harboro, until they tricked me in my father's house."
+
+Harboro continued to regard her, a judge unmoved. "And Runyon,
+Sylvia--Runyon?" he asked accusingly.
+
+"I know that's the thing you couldn't possibly forgive, and yet that seems
+the slightest thing of all to me. You can't know what it is to be humbled,
+and so many innocent pleasures taken away from you. When Fectnor came back
+... oh, it seemed to me that life itself mocked me and warned me coldly
+that I needn't expect to be any other than the old Sylvia, clear to the
+end. I had begun to have a little pride, and to have foolish dreams. And
+then I went back to my father's house. It wasn't my father; it wasn't even
+Fectnor. It was Life itself whipping me back into my place again.
+
+"... And then Runyon came. He meant pleasure to me--nothing more. He
+seemed such a gay, shining creature!" She looked at him in the agony of
+utter despair. "I know how it appears to you; but if you could only see
+how it seemed to me!"
+
+"I'm trying," said Harboro, unmoved.
+
+"If I'd been a little field of grass for the sheep to graze on, do you
+suppose I shouldn't have been happy if the birds passed by, or that I
+shouldn't have been ready for the sheep when they came? If I'd been a
+little pool in the desert, do you suppose I wouldn't have been happier for
+the sunlight, and just as ready for the rains when they came?"
+
+He frowned. "But you're neither grass nor water," he said.
+
+"Ah, I think I am just that--grass and water. I think that is what we all
+are--with something of mystery added."
+
+He seized upon that one tangible thought. "There you have it, that
+_something of mystery_," he said. "That's the thing that makes the world
+move--that keeps people clean."
+
+"Yes," she conceded dully, "or makes people set up standards of their own
+and compel other people to accept them whether they understand them or
+believe in them or not."
+
+When he again regarded her with dark disapproval she went on:
+
+"What I wanted to tell you, Harboro, is that my heart has been like a
+brimming cup for you always. It was only that which ran over that I gave
+to another. Runyon never could have robbed the cup--a thousand Runyons
+couldn't. He was only like a flower to wear in my hair, a ribbon to put on
+for an outing. But you ... you were the hearth for me to sit down before
+at night, a wall to keep the wind away. What was it you said once about a
+man and woman becoming one? You have been my very body to me, Harboro; and
+any other could only have been a friendly wind to stir me for a moment and
+then pass on."
+
+Harboro's face darkened. "I was the favorite lover," he said.
+
+"You won't understand," she said despairingly. And then as he arose and
+turned toward the door again she went to him abjectly, appealingly.
+"Harboro!" she cried, "I know I haven't explained it right, but I want you
+to believe me! It is you I love, really; it is you I am grateful to and
+proud of. You're everything to me that you've thought of being. I couldn't
+live without you!" She sank to her knees and covered her eyes with one
+hand while with the other she reached out to him: "Harboro!" Her face was
+wet with tears, now; her body was shaken with sobs.
+
+He looked down at her for an instant, his brows furrowed, his eyes filled
+with horror. He drew farther away, so that she could not touch him. "Great
+God!" he cried at last, and then she knew that he had gone, closing the
+door sharply after him.
+
+She did not try to call him back. Some stoic quality in her stayed her. It
+would be useless to call him; it would only tear her own wounds wider
+open, it would distress him without moving him otherwise. It would alarm
+old Antonia.
+
+If he willed to come back, he would come of his own accord. If he could
+reconcile the things she had done with any hope of future happiness he
+would come back to her again.
+
+But she scarcely hoped for his return. She had always had a vague
+comprehension of those pragmatic qualities in his nature which placed him
+miles above her, or beneath her, or beyond her. She had drunk of the cup
+which had been offered her, and she must not rebel because a bitter
+sediment lay on her lips. She had always faintly realized that the hours
+she spent with Runyon might some day have to be paid for in loneliness and
+despair.
+
+Yet now that Harboro was gone she stood at the closed door and stared at
+it as if it could never open again save to permit her to pass out upon
+ways of darkness. She leaned against it and laid her face against her arm
+and wept softly. And then she turned away and knelt by the chair he had
+occupied and hid her face in her hands.
+
+She knew he would no longer be visible when she went to the window. She
+had spared herself the sight of him on his way out of her life. But now
+she took her place and began, with subconscious hope, the long vigil she
+was to keep. She stared out on the road over which he had passed. If he
+came back he would be visible from this place by the window.
+
+Hours passed and her face became blank, as the desert became blank. The
+light seemed to die everywhere. The little home beacons abroad in the
+desert were blotted out one by one. Eagle Pass became a ghostly group of
+houses from which the last vestiges of life vanished. She became stiff and
+inert as she sat in her place with her eyes held dully on the road. Once
+she dozed lightly, to awaken with an intensified sense of tragedy. Had
+Harboro returned during that brief interval of unconsciousness? She knew
+he had not. But until the dawn came she sat by her place, steadfastly
+waiting.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXX
+
+
+When Harboro went down the stairs and out of the house he had a purposeful
+air which vanished as soon as his feet were set on the highway. Where was
+he going? Where _could_ he go? That beginning he had made usually ended in
+the offices across the river. But he could not go to his office now. There
+was nothing there for him to do. And even if he were able to get in, and
+to find some unfinished task to which he could turn, his problem would not
+be solved. He could not go on working always. A man must have some
+interests other than his work.
+
+He pulled himself together and set off down the road. He realized that his
+appearance must be such that he would attract attention and occasion
+comment. The foundations of his pride stiffened, as they had always done
+when he was required to face extraordinary difficulties. He must not allow
+casual passers-by to perceive that things were not right with him. They
+would know that he and Sylvia were having difficulties. Doubtless they had
+been expecting something of the sort from the beginning.
+
+He seemed quite himself but for a marked self-concentration as he walked
+through the town. Dunwoodie, emerging from the Maverick bar, hailed him as
+he passed. He did not hear--or he was not immediately conscious of
+hearing. But half a dozen steps farther on he checked himself. Some one
+had spoken to him. He turned around. "Ah, Dunwoodie--good evening!" he
+said. But he did not go back, and Dunwoodie looked after him meditatively
+and then went back into the bar, shaking his head. He had always meant to
+make a friend of Harboro, but the thing evidently was not to be done.
+
+Harboro was scarcely conscious of the fact that he crossed the river. If
+he encountered any one whom he knew--or any one at all--he passed without
+noticing. And this realization troubled him. The customs guard, who was an
+old acquaintance, must have been in his place on the bridge. He tried to
+arouse himself anew. Surely his conduct must seem strange to those who
+chanced to observe him.
+
+With an air of briskness he went into the _Internacional_ dining-room. He
+had had nothing to eat all day. He would order supper and then he would
+feel more like himself. He did not realize what it was that made his
+situation seem like a period of suspense, which kept in his mind the
+subconscious thought that he would come out of the dark into a clearing if
+he persevered.
+
+The fact was that something of what Sylvia had said to him had touched his
+conscience, if it had not affected his sense of logic. She really could
+not be quite what she seemed to be--that was the unshaped thought in the
+back of his brain. There were explanations to make which had not yet been
+made. If he told himself that he had solved the problem by leaving the
+house, he knew in reality that he had not done so. He was benumbed,
+bewildered. He must get back his reasoning faculties, and then he would
+see more clearly, both as to what had been done and what he must set about
+doing.
+
+He had an idea that he could now understand the sensations of people who
+had indulged too freely in some sort of drug. He had temporarily lost the
+power to feel. Here was Sylvia, a self-confessed wanton--and yet here was
+Sylvia as deeply intrenched in his heart as ever. This was a monstrous
+contradiction. One of these things must be a fact, the other a fantastic
+hallucination.
+
+The waiter brought food which he looked at with distaste. It was a typical
+frontier meal--stereotyped, uninviting. There were meat and eggs and
+coffee, and various heavy little dishes containing dabs of things which
+were never eaten. He drank the coffee and realized that he had been almost
+perishing from thirst. He called for a second cup; and then he tried to
+eat the meat and eggs; but they were like dust--it seemed they might choke
+him. He tried the grapes which had got hidden under the cruet, and the
+acid of these pleased him for an instant, but the pulp was tasteless,
+unpalatable.
+
+He finished the second cup of coffee and sat listlessly regarding the
+things he had not touched. He had hoped he might prolong the supper hour,
+since he could think of nothing else to engage his attention. But he was
+through, and he had consumed only a few minutes.
+
+His glance wandered to a railroad poster in the dining-room, and this
+interested him for an instant. Attractive names caught his eye: Torreon,
+Tampico, Vera Cruz, the City, Durango. They were all waiting for him, the
+old towns. There was the old work to be done, the old life to resume....
+Yes, but there was Sylvia. Sylvia, who had said with the intentness of a
+child, "I love you," and again, "I love you." She did not want Runyon. She
+wanted him, Harboro. And he wanted her--good God, how he wanted her! Had
+he been mad to wander away from her? His problem lay with her, not
+elsewhere.
+
+And then he jerked his head in denial of that conclusion. No, he did not
+want her. She had laid a path of pitch for his feet, and the things he
+might have grasped with his hands, to draw himself out of the path which
+befouled his feet--they too were smeared with pitch. She did not love him,
+certainly. He clung tenaciously to that one clear point. There lay the
+whole situation, perfectly plain. She did not love him. She had betrayed
+him, had turned the face of the whole community against him, had permitted
+him to affront the gentle people who had unselfishly aided him and given
+him their affection.
+
+He wandered about the streets until nearly midnight, and then he engaged a
+room in the _Internacional_ and assured himself that it was time to go to
+bed. He needed a good rest. To-morrow he would know what to do.
+
+But the sight of the room assigned to him surprised him in some odd
+way--as if every article of furniture in it were mocking him. It was not a
+room really to be used, he thought. At least, it was not a room for him to
+use. He did not belong in that bed; he had a bed of his own, in the house
+he had built on the Quemado Road. And then he remembered the time when he
+had been able to hang his hat anywhere and consider himself at home, and
+how he had always been grateful for a comfortable bed, no matter where.
+That was the feeling which he must get back again. He must get used to the
+strangeness of things, so that such a room as this would seem his natural
+resting-place, and that other house which had been destroyed for him would
+seem a place of shame, to be avoided and forgotten.
+
+He slept fitfully. The movements of trains in the night comforted him in a
+mournful fashion. They reminded him of that other life, which might be his
+again. But even in his waking moments he reached out to the space beside
+him to find Sylvia, and the returning full realization of all that had
+happened brought a groan to his throat.
+
+He dressed in the morning with a feeling of guilt, mingled with a sense of
+relief. He had slept where he had had no business to sleep. He had been
+idle at a time when he should have been active. He had done nothing, and
+there was much to be done. He had not even rested.
+
+He put on an air of briskness, as one will don a garment, as he ordered
+coffee and rolls in the dining-room. There were things to be attended to.
+He must go over to the offices and write out his resignation. He must see
+the General Manager and ask him for work on the road elsewhere. He must
+transfer his holdings--his house and bank-account--to Sylvia. He had no
+need of house or money, and she would need them badly now. And then ...
+then he must begin life anew.
+
+It was all plain; yet his feet refused to bear him in the direction of the
+railroad offices; his mind refused to grapple with the details of the task
+of transferring to Sylvia the things he owned. Something constructive,
+static, in the man's nature stayed him.
+
+He wandered away from the town during the day, an aimless impulse carrying
+him quite out into the desert. He paused to inspect little irrigated spots
+where humble gardens grew. He paused at mean _adobe_ huts and talked to
+old people and to children. Again and again he came into contact with
+conditions which annoyed and bewildered him. People were all bearing their
+crosses. Some were hopelessly ill, waiting for death to relieve them, or
+they were old and quite useless. And all were horribly poor, casting about
+for meagre food and simple clothing which seemed beyond their reach. They
+were lonely, overburdened, despondent, darkly philosophical.
+
+What was the meaning of human life, he wondered? Were men and women
+created to suffer, to bear crosses which were not of their own making, to
+suffer injustices which seemed pointless?...
+
+Late in the afternoon he was back in Piedras Negras again. He had eaten
+nothing save a handful of figs which an old woman had given him, together
+with a bowl of goat's milk. He had wished to pay for them, but the old
+woman had shaken her head and turned away.
+
+He encountered a tourist in clerical garb--a thin-chested man with a
+colorless face, but with sad, benevolent eyes--sitting in the plaza near
+the sinister old _cuartel_. He sat down and asked abruptly in a voice
+strangely high-pitched for his own:
+
+"Is a man ever justified in leaving his wife?"
+
+The tourist looked startled; but he was a man of tact and wisdom,
+evidently, and he quickly adjusted himself to what was plainly a special
+need, an extraordinary condition. "Ah, that's a very old question," he
+replied gently. "It's been asked often, and there have been many
+answers."
+
+"But is he?" persisted Harboro.
+
+"There are various conditions. If a man and a woman do not love each
+other, wouldn't it seem wiser for them to rectify the mistake they had
+made in marrying? But if they love each other ... it seems to me quite a
+simple matter then. I should say that under no circumstances should they
+part."
+
+"But if the wife has sinned?"
+
+"My dear man ... sinned; it's a difficult word. Let us try to define it.
+Let us say that a sin is an act deliberately committed with the primary
+intention of inflicting an injury upon some one. It becomes an ugly
+matter. Very few people sin, if you accept my definition."
+
+Harboro was regarding him with dark intentness.
+
+"The trouble is," resumed the other man, "we often use the word sin when
+we mean only a weakness. And a weakness in an individual should make us
+cleave fast to him, so that he may not be wholly lost. I can't think of
+anything so cruel as to desert one who has stumbled through weakness. The
+desertion would be the real sin. Weaknesses are a sort of illness--and
+even a pigeon will sit beside its mate and mourn, when its mate is ill. It
+is a beautiful lesson in fidelity. A soldier doesn't desert his wounded
+comrade in battle. He bears him to safety--or both perish together. And by
+such deeds is the consciousness of God established in us."
+
+"Wait!" commanded Harboro. He clinched his fists. A phrase had clung to
+him: "He bears him to safety or both perish together!"
+
+He arose from the seat he had taken and staggered away half a dozen steps,
+his hands still clinched. Then, as if remembering, he turned about so that
+he faced the man who had talked to him. Beyond loomed the ancient church
+in which Sylvia had said it would seem possible to find God. Was He there
+in reality, and was this one of His angels, strayed a little distance from
+His side? It was not the world's wisdom that this man spoke, and yet how
+eternally true his words had been! A flock of pigeons flew over the plaza
+and disappeared in the western glow where the sun was setting. "Even a
+pigeon will sit by its mate and mourn...."
+
+Harboro gazed at the man on the bench. His face moved strangely, as a dark
+pool will stir from the action of an undercurrent. He could not speak for
+a moment, and then he called back in a voice like a cry: "I thank you."
+
+"You are welcome--brother!" was the response. The man on the bench was
+smiling. He coughed a little, and wondered if the open-air treatment the
+physician had prescribed might not prove a bit heroic. When he looked
+about him again his late companion was gone.
+
+Harboro was hurrying down toward the Rio Grande bridge. He was trying to
+put a curb on his emotions, on his movements. It would never do for him to
+hurry through the streets of Eagle Pass like a madman. He must walk
+circumspectly.
+
+He was planning for the future. He would take Sylvia away--anywhere. They
+would begin their married life anew. He would take her beyond the ordinary
+temptations. They would live in a tent, an igloo, in the face of a cliff.
+He would take her beyond the reach of the old evil influences, where he
+could guide her back to the paths she had lost. He would search out some
+place where there was never a dun horse with golden dapples, and a rider
+who carried himself like a crier of God, carrying glad tidings across the
+world.
+
+Yet he was never conscious of the manner in which he made that trying
+journey. He was recalled to self when he reached his own door. He realized
+that he was somewhat out of breath. The night had fallen and the house
+revealed but little light from the front. Through the door he could see
+that the dining-room was lighted. He tried the door stealthily and entered
+with caution. It would not do to startle Sylvia.
+
+Ah--that was her voice in the dining-room. The telephone bell had sounded,
+just as he opened the door, and she was responding to the call.
+
+Her voice seemed cold at first: "I didn't catch the name." And then it
+turned to a caress: "Oh, Mendoza--I didn't hear at first. Of course, I
+want to see you." There was now a note of perplexity in her tone, and
+then: "No, don't come here. It would be better for me to see you at my
+father's. In the afternoon."
+
+Harboro found himself leaning against the wall, his head in his hands.
+Mendoza! The town's notorious philanderer, who had regarded Sylvia with
+insolent eyes that night out at the Quemado! Yes, and she had danced with
+him the minute his back was turned; danced with him with unconcealed joy.
+Mendoza....
+
+He climbed the stairs slowly. He heard Sylvia's footsteps as she moved
+away; into the kitchen, probably. He climbed stealthily, like a thief. He
+mustn't permit Sylvia to hear him. He couldn't see her now.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XXXI
+
+
+Sylvia had spent the entire day by her window, looking down the road. She
+had refused the food that old Antonia had brought, and the comforting
+words that came with it. Something that was not a part of herself argued
+with her that Harboro would come back, though all that she was by training
+and experiences warned her that she must not look for him.
+
+At nightfall she turned wearily when Antonia tapped at her door.
+
+"_Nina!_" The troubled old woman held out a beseeching hand. "You must
+have food. I have prepared it for you, again. There are very good eggs,
+and a glass of milk, and coffee--coffee with a flavor! Come, there will be
+another day, and another. Sorrows pass in the good God's time; and even a
+blind sheep will find its blade of grass." Her hand was still extended.
+
+Sylvia went to her and kissed her withered cheek. "I will try," she said
+with docility.
+
+And they went down the stairs as if they were four; the young woman
+walking with Despair, the old woman moving side by side with Knowledge.
+
+It was then that the telephone rang and Sylvia went to the instrument and
+took down the receiver with trembling fingers. If it were only Harboro!...
+But it was a woman's voice, and the hope within her died. She could
+scarcely attend, after she realized that it was a woman who spoke to her.
+The name "Mrs. Mendoza" meant nothing to her for an instant. And then she
+aroused herself. She must not be ungracious. "Oh, Mendoza," she said; "I
+didn't hear at first." She felt as if a breath of cold air had enveloped
+her, but she shook off the conviction. From habit she spoke cordially;
+with gratitude to the one woman in Eagle Pass who had befriended her she
+spoke with tenderness. The wife of Jesus Mendoza wanted to call on her.
+
+But Sylvia had planned the one great event of her life, and it occurred to
+her that she ought not to permit this unfortunate woman to come to the
+house on the morrow. It would be an unforgivable cruelty. And then she
+thought of her father's house, and suggested that her visitor come to see
+her there.
+
+She hung up the receiver listlessly and went into the kitchen, where
+Antonia was eagerly getting a meal ready for her. She looked at these
+affectionate preparations indulgently, as she might have looked at a child
+who assured her that a wholly imaginary thing was a real thing.
+
+She ate dutifully, and then she took a bit of husk from Antonia's store
+and made a cigarette. It was the first time she had smoked since her
+marriage. "He's not coming back," she said in a voice like that of a
+helpless old woman. She leaned her elbows on the table and smoked. Her
+attitude did not suggest grief, but rather a leave-taking.
+
+Then with returning briskness she got up and found street apparel and left
+the house.
+
+She went down into the town almost gayly--like the Sylvia of old. In the
+drug-store she told an exciting little story to the clerk. There had been
+a nest of scorpions ... would he believe it? In the kitchen! She had been
+given such a start when the servant had found them. The servant had
+screamed; quite naturally, too. She had been told that a weak solution,
+sprinkled on the floor, would drive them away. What was it?... Yes, that
+was it. She had forgotten.
+
+She received the small phial and paid the price with fingers which were
+perfectly firm. And then she started back up the hill.
+
+Under a street light she became aware that she was being followed. She
+turned with a start. It was only a dog--a forlorn little beast which
+stopped when she stopped, and regarded her with soft, troubled eyes.
+
+She stooped and smoothed the creature's head. "You mustn't follow," she
+said in a voice like hidden water. "I haven't any place to take
+you--nowhere at all!" She went on up the hill. Once she turned and
+observed that the lost dog stood where she had left him, still imploring
+her for friendship.
+
+At her door she paused and turned. She leaned against the door-post in a
+wistful attitude. A hundred lonely, isolated lights were burning across
+the desert, as far as the eye could reach. They were little lights which
+might have meant nothing at all to a happier observer; but to Sylvia they
+told the story of men and women who had joined hands to fight the battle
+of life; of the sweet, humble activities which keep the home intact--the
+sweeping of the hearth, the mending of the fire, the expectant glance at
+the clock, the sound of a foot-fall drawing near. There lay the desert,
+stretching away to the Sierra Madre, a lonely waste; but it was a paradise
+to those who tended their lights faithfully and waited with assurance for
+those who were away.
+
+... She turned and entered her house stealthily.
+
+At the top of the stairs she paused in indecision. Antonia had not heard
+her enter. (She did not know that the old woman was standing in the
+kitchen under the picture of the Virgin, with her hands across her eyes
+like a bandage.) The lovely boudoir called to her, but she would not enter
+it.
+
+"I will go into the guest-chamber," she said; "that is the room set apart
+for strangers. I think I must always have been a stranger here."
+
+She opened the door quietly.
+
+A pungent odor of smoke filled her nostrils. She groped for the light and
+turned it on.
+
+Through little horizontal wisps of smoke she saw Harboro lying across the
+bed, his great chest standing high, his muscular throat exposed to the
+light, a glint of teeth showing under the sweeping black mustache. His
+eyes, nearly closed, seemed to harbor an eager light--as if he had
+travelled along a dark path and saw at last a beacon on a distant hilltop.
+A pistol was still clasped in his dead hand.
+
+The unopened phial Sylvia carried slipped to the floor. She clutched at
+her lips with both hands, to suppress the scream that arose within her.
+
+He had no right to lie so, in this room. That was her thought. He had
+taken the place she had chosen for her own.
+
+And then she thought of Harboro as a stranger, too. Had she ever known
+him, really?
+
+Her first thought recurred. It should have been her right to lie here in
+the guest-chamber, not Harboro's.
+
+And yet, and yet....
+
+The End
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Children of the Desert, by Louis Dodge
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