“See here!” I said.
Langworthy looked, then turned his head away sharply. The distaste of the scientific man for the inexplicable and irrational was very strong within him.
But the old man bent forward, the lamp-light shining on his white hair, and with a womanish gesture caught the gleaming opal to his lips.
“A human soul!” he said. “A human soul!”
AN UNEARNED REWARD
It is the very last corner of the world in which you would expect to find a sermon. Overhead hang the Colorado skies, curtains of deepest, dullest cobalt, against which the unthreatening white clouds stand out with a certain solidity, a tangible look seen nowhere else save in that clear air. All around are the great upland swells of the mountains, rising endlessly, ridge beyond ridge, like the waves of the sea. In a hollow beside the glittering track is the one sign of human existence in sight—the sun-scorched, brown railway station. It is an insignificant structure planted on a high platform. There is a red tool-chest standing against the wall; a tin advertisement of somebody’s yeast-cakes is nailed to the clap-boards; three buffalo hides, with horns still on them, hang over a beam by the coal-shed, and across the side of the platform, visible only to those approaching from the west, is written, in great, black letters:
THE WAGES OF SIN IS DEATH.
This legend had no place there on the September afternoon, some years ago, when Carroll Forbes stepped off the west-bound express as it halted a minute at the desolate spot. Because it looked to him like the loneliest place in all the world the notion seized him suddenly, as the train drew up beside the high platform, to catch up his valise and leave the car. He was looking for a lonely place, and looking helplessly. He snatched at the idea that here might be what he sought, as a drowning man at the proverbial straw.
When the train had gone on and left him there, already repenting tremulously of what might prove his disastrous folly, a man, who was possibly the station agent—if this were indeed a station—came limping toward him with an inquiring look.
Forbes was a handsome man himself, and thoroughly aware of the value of beauty as an endowment. He was conscious of a half-envious pang as he faced the blonde giant halting across the platform. This was, or had been, a singularly perfect specimen of the physical man. Over six feet in height, muscular, finely proportioned, fair-haired and fair-skinned, with a curling, blonde beard, and big, expressionless blue eyes, he looked as one might who had been made when the world was young, and there was more room for mighty men than now.