When, toward midnight, the fever ebbed, he had fallen into a deep sleep of exhaustion, from which he opened his eyes next morning upon the figure of Prendergast, sitting pipe in mouth in the sunny doorway.
He lifted himself on his elbow. That crafty face had been inexplicably woven with the delirious fantasies of his fever. Where and when had he known it? Then in a great wave welled over him the memory of his last conscious hours—the scene in the saloon, the fight, the music, the sudden appalling discovery of his name and repute. He remembered the sickening wave of self-disgust, the fierce agony of resentment that had beat in his every vein as he walked up the darkening street. He remembered the thrown quartz. No doubt another missile had struck home, or he had been set upon, kicked and pommelled into insensibility. This old man—a miner probably, for there were picks and shovels in the corner—had succored him. He had been ill, there was lassitude in every limb, and shadowy recollections tantalized him. As in the garish day one mistily recalls a dream of the night before, he retained a dim consciousness of a woman's face—the face he had seen on the balcony—leaning near him, bringing into a painful disorder a sense of grateful coolness, of fragrance, and of rest.
He turned his head. Through the window he could see the blue, ravined mountain—a slope of verdure soaked in placid, yellow sunshine, rising gradually to the ridge, peaceful and Arcadian.
As he stared again at the seated figure, the grim fact reared like a grisly specter, deriding, thrusting its haggard presence upon him. In this little community, which apparently he had forsaken and to which he had by chance returned, he stood a rogue and a scoundrel, a thing to point the finger at and to avoid! The question that had burned his brain to fire flamed up again. The town despised him. What had been his career? How had he become a pariah? And by what miracle had he been so altered as to look upon himself with loathing?
He was dimly conscious withal that some fundamental change had passed over him, though how or when he could not tell. Some mysterious moral alchemy had transmuted his elements. What he had been he was no more. He was no longer even the man who had awakened in the box-car. Yet the debts of the unknown yesterday must be paid in the coin of the known to-day!
He lifted himself upright, dropping his feet to the floor. At the movement the man on the doorstep rose quickly and came forward.
"You're better, Hugh," he said. "Take it easy, though. Don't get up just yet—I'm going to cook you some breakfast." He turned to the hearth, kicked the smoldering log-ends together and set a saucepan on them. "You'll be stronger when you've got something between your ribs," he added.
"How long have I been lying here?" asked Harry.