“I mean,” said Saxon, forcing his words, “that God Almighty only knows who I am, or where I came from. I don’t.”
Of all the men Steele had ever known, Saxon had struck him, through months of intimacy, as the most normal, sane and cleanly constituted. Eccentricity was alien to him. In the same measure that all his physical bents were straight and clean-cut, so he had been mentally a contradiction of the morbid and irrational. The Kentuckian waited in open-eyed astonishment, gazing at the man whose own words had just convicted him of the wildest insanity.
Saxon went on, and even now, in the face of self-conviction of lunacy, his words fell coldly logical:
“I have talked to you of my work and my travels during the past five or six years. I have told you that I was a cow-puncher on a Western range; that I drifted East, and took up art. Did I ever tell you one word of my life prior to that? Do you know of a single episode or instance preceding these few fragmentary chapters? Do you know who, or what I was seven years ago?”
Steele was dazed. His eyes were studiously fixed on the gnarled roots and twisted hole of a scrub oak that hung out over the edge of things with stubborn and distorted tenacity.
“No,” he heard the other say, “you don’t, and I don’t.”
Again, there was a pause. The sun was setting at their backs, but off to the east the hills were bright in the reflection that the western sky threw across the circle of the horizon. Already, somewhere below them, a prematurely tuneful whippoorwill was sending out its night call.
Steele looked up, and saw the throat of the other work convulsively, though the lips grimly held the set, contradictory smile.
“The very name I wear is the name, not of my family, but of my race. R. A. Saxon, Robert Anglo Saxon or Robert Anonymous Saxon—take your choice. I took that because I felt that I was not stealing it.”
“Go on,” prompted Steele.