To what good end had he been preserved by Garvin's interference on that night of despair two months before? Had the reprieve opened up any practicable way out of the cynical labyrinth into which he had wandered? Had his immense obligation to the prospector quickened any fibre of the dead sense of human responsibility, or lighted any fire of generous love for his kind?
He shook his head. To none of these questions could he honestly append an affirmative. In the desolate wreck he had made of his life no good thing had survived save his love for Constance Elliott. That, indeed, was hopeless on the side of fruition; but he clung to it as the one clue of promise, hoping, and yet not daring to hope, that it might one day lead him out of the wilderness of indifference. While he dwelt upon it, pacing back and forth in the moonlight, he recalled his picture of her standing in the dust-filtered afternoon sunlight, with the dim corridor for a background.
"God keep you, my darling. I may not look upon your face again, but the memory of your loving kindness to one soul-sick castaway will live while he lives."
He said it reverently, turning his face toward the far-away city beyond the foot-hills; and there was no subtle sense of divination to tell him that, at an unmapped side-track on the farther slope of the southernmost sentinel mountain, Bartrow was at that moment handing Constance Elliott up the steps of a diminutive sleeping-car which was presently to go lurching and swaying on its way down the mountain in the wake of a pygmy locomotive. Nor could he know that, a few hours earlier, the far-seeing gray eyes, out of whose depths he had once drawn courage and inspiration and the will to do good, had rested for a moment on the shut-in valley.
For the southward sentinel mountain was known to the dwellers on its farther slopes as El Reposo.
CHAPTER XV
Robert Lansdale, literary starveling and doomed victim of an incurable malady, was yet sufficiently unchastened to read Bartrow's telegram with the nerves of reluctance sharp set. For what he persuaded himself were good and defensible reasons, he had lived the life of an urban hermit in Denver, arguing that a poverty-smitten crumb-gatherer with one foot in the grave might properly refuse to be other than an onlooker in any scene of the human comedy.
The prompting was not altogether unselfish. In common with other craftsmen of his guild, Lansdale was blessed, or banned, with a moiety of the seer's gift. For him, as for all who can discern the masks and trappings and the sham stage-properties, the world-comedy had become pitifully tragic; and he was by nature compassionate and sympathetic. Wherefore he spared himself the personal point of view, cultivating an aloofness which his few friends were prone to miscall cynicism and exclusiveness.