They returned her gaze with a sudden glisten, as of ice-bound pools when Spring has touched them. In their fundamental honesty the two natures stood for the moment upon common ground.
“Friends.” Kate Hallard drew a long breath as she took up her bridle-rein. “Child,” she said, “if the friendship of a woman like me is ever any use to you, it’s yours while there’s a drop o’ blood in my heart,” and ere Helen could make answer she was well down the avenue toward the great gate.
CHAPTER VII
The days immediately following his return to Sylvania were hard ones for Gard. The few cautious inquiries he had dared to make in the investigation of his own affairs had resulted in the information that Jim Texas was dead and that Hart Dowling had left Wyoming and gone on into Idaho. Gard’s messenger had been unable to get to him on account of the deep snow.
He read the letter containing this news lying coatless upon the sand, far beyond the town. The desert was his one solace in the enforced idleness of waiting for word from Sawyer, for which he had written to San Francisco. The vast barren seemed in tune with his own mood.
The fierceness of his ache was there; the yearning of his solitude: he tried to picture the vast sea of sand overgrown with verdure, calling up cool visions of tree and pool, and gentle growths born of the small spring rain on the green grass. The picture came before him like a memory of delicious holidays in lush woods.
It was but a vision however. The scent of the desert was in his nostrils; the impress of the desert upon his brain. He opened his eyes and saw again the silent reaches of the waste—wide, untamed, untamable—and sat up, the better to view the lean landscape.
At his first movement a jack-rabbit, observing him from beneath a cholla, gathered its swift hind-legs under him and fled, with incredible rapidity, before the shadow of fear. Gard laughed, but there was underneath his amusement a sense of the constant deadly strife of the place. If he had no designs upon the jack-rabbit, plenty of other creatures had. The lurking snake that lay in wait to take him subtly; the lank coyote, more cunning than he, if not so swift; even the Gila monster, slow and hideous; the savage, sneaking wild-cat, and the little hydrophobia skunk, were constantly on the alert to surprise those wide-open eyes and ears. These all preyed upon him, and upon one another, caught in the endless struggle of the desert, moved upon by constant need to sustain life, and to hold it against all other life.
The thought brought Gard to a sharpened sense of his own danger, and of the enemies who, if they but knew, would be so quick to hunt and harry him. The savagery of it all smote him with a keener desolation. The armed vegetation, grotesque and menacing; the preying creatures of the plain; the sand-laden wind that was constantly tearing down and rebuilding the shifting scene—were not all these but a commentary upon the mad, devouring human world about him?
But the wind that laid bare the earth’s nakedness clothed and healed as well, purifying the air and cleansing the waste. The give as well as the take of life was there. Death was in the desert, but not decay. Gard, feeling it all in the whirl of his emotions, knew that the grim plain which mothered the whole fierce brood had mothered him as well, giving him back health and strength from her own burning heart, and he loved her, as her children must.