“Afraid?”
“Yes. That I might see—might not see—the open.”
“Yes, dear?”
Helen spoke quietly, though it seemed to her as if her suffocating heart beats must betray to him what she was feeling. Gard had told her of his escape from the cloudburst; all the incidents of his Robinson Crusoe life, as she called it, of the coming of the camel; of that wonderful journey to the glade; of the glade itself; but this he had never spoken of. She had thought of it as a door in his heart yet closed against her. Now it was opening, to admit her to his chamber of sorrow.
“I don’t know what kept me alive through those other years,” he continued. “Sometimes it seems to me there wasn’t much there worth keeping alive. There wasn’t much got away but a rack of bones, held together by hate.”
Helen’s hands stole out and found both his as he went on.
“I thought I’d got to get out,” he seemed as if thinking aloud, “I thought I’d got to get out some day, just to kill Westcott. Then when I did get away, I hadn’t anything left but the longing to crawl off somewhere and die. I’m not sorry about that now, though often, in the mountain, I raged, to think I couldn’t have killed him that night. Then I learned better. But I feel mighty thankful now, that I never hurt him.”
“You would never have hurt him,” Helen murmured.
“There were times when I would if I could have got to him,” Gard replied, “but I got over my hate. Somehow, that kind of thing can’t live in big, clean places like that I drifted to. The desert’s a hard place, my girl. It don’t look lovely as this when you’re fighting for life in it. It’s fierce as a tiger, but there ain’t any hate in it. That’s only in men, but it’s deadlier than anything the desert’s got.”
“There’s got to be desert, I guess. There was a man in the surveyor’s gang I was with once, years ago, always said that. He said you take away the desert and some of the glorious climates on this slope would all be gone.”