Upon the following morning he started in to work; he was a bit weak, but he insisted upon working. He dared not do without working. He began to clear another flat farther up the cañon, ridding it of brush and scrub oak and piñons.
As he worked, Thady Shea thought much of that wicker demijohn, back in the cupboard of the shack. Once, when he came in to luncheon ahead of Ross, he opened the cupboard. He looked at the clean wicker demijohn, the new demijohn, the demijohn which hung so heavily and lovingly to the hand; as he looked, a sunbeam struck the glass behind the woven wicker and made it seem filled with rich thin blood. Thady Shea shivered—and shut the door. But he could not shut that demijohn from his thoughts.
He prayed, every hour he worked, that Ross would hide away that demijohn. He said nothing to Ross about it; he felt vaguely ashamed to let Ross know of his struggles with himself. He shrank from revealing how he was tempted.
Days passed. Twice, now, Thady Shea had come in from work merely to open that door and look at the demijohn. The first time, he had forced himself to be content with the look. The second time he hefted it; then he reached for the cork, trembling—but just then the step of Ross approached, and Shea replaced the demijohn. He knew that he had been saturated with liquor, that in his involuntary carouse his body had seeped up the whiskey as the thirsty earth seeps up water. The craving was there, the wicked craving of the cracked earth for water.
Terrible were the first few nights. Despite weariness, sleep would not come. On tiptoe Thady Shea would sneak out of the shack, out into the bitter cold night, out under the white, cold stars. He would stride up and down the cold earth until the chill ate into his bones; then, shivering, he would tiptoe back and roll up in his blankets, thinking how a drink would warm him.
As the days passed, he worked harder. He slaved until, at darkness, he would nod over his pipe. He did not shave, remembering the words of the ancient, and his gaunt face became filled and strengthened by an iron-gray beard.
All the while he cursed his aimlessness, his lack of purpose. He was looking out, beyond the present; he was looking over the horizon. He was thinking of Mrs. Crump. He prayed under a sweat-soaked brow that some great flaming purpose would come into his life. The word “purpose” had become to him a creed, a mania.
He did not realize, except very dimly, that for him life had already centred upon one immediate and tremendous purpose: to avoid, to shrink from, that clean wicker demijohn in the corner cupboard! Unawares, the purpose had come to him.
And then, upon a day, Fred Ross patched the broken flivver and went to Datil for grub. Thady Shea was left alone, alone with the ranch, alone with the piñon trees and the horses, alone with the shack, alone with the corner cupboard and the clean wicker demijohn. Fred Ross did not seem to perceive any danger in leaving Shea thus alone.
Fred Ross reached the store at Datil about noon, after a long pull. Datil lay on the highway, where lordly Packards and lowly Fords wended east and west, between California and St Louis. Datil was nothing more than a frame store-hotel-post office. In the rear of the long building were sheds, relics of the days when the far ranchers came in on horseback, of the days when burros and bearded prospectors and unrestricted Indians roused talk of great and blood-stirring events.