He could no longer fight off the truth. It was facing him now in all its nakedness, monstrous to obscenity, demanding its due measure from his own soul’s blood. He aroused himself, shivering, and looked out into the room where the shadows lay heavy, and from whence came the breathing of the sleepers. He picked up the now sputtering candle, set in its hole bored in a block of wood, and held it up for a last look at the little woman-child. He was full of an agony of wonder as he gazed, of piteous questioning why this should be as it was. The child stirred and flung one arm over her eyes as if to hide the light. He put out the candle and set it down. Then stooping over, he kissed the pillow beside the child’s head and stepped lightly to the door. He had come to the end of his subterfuges—he could no longer delay his punishment.
Outside the moon was shining, and his horse moved about restlessly. He put on the saddle and rode off to the south, galloping rapidly after he reached the highway. Off there was a kindly desert where a man could take in peace such punishment as his body could bear and his soul decree; and where that soul could then pass on in decent privacy to be judged by its Maker.
Chapter XXII.
The Picture in the Sky
If something of the peace of the night-silence came to him as he rode, he counted it only the peace of surrender and despair. He knew now that he had been cheated of all his great long-nursed hopes of some superior exaltation. Nor this only; for he had sinned unforgivably and incurred perdition. He who had fasted, prayed, and endured, waiting for his Witness, for the spreading of the heavens and the glory of the open vision, had overreached himself and was cast down.
When at last he slowed his horse to a walk, it was the spring of the day. The moon had gone, and over on his left a soft grayness began to show above the line of the hills. The light grew until it glowed with the fire of opals; through the tree-tops ran little stirs of wakefulness, and all about him were faint, furtive rustlings and whispers of the new day. Then in this glorified dusk of the dawn a squirrel loosed his bark of alarm, a crested jay screamed in answer, and he knew his hour of atonement was come.
He pressed forward again toward the desert, eager to be on with it. The page with the wash of blood across it seemed to take on a new vividness in the stronger light. Under the stain, the letters of the words were magnified before his mind,—“And as ye would that men should do to you—” It seemed to him that the blood through which they came heated the words so that they burned his eyes.
An hour after daybreak the trail led him down out of the hills by a little watercourse to the edge of the desert. Along the sides of this the chaparral grew thickly, and the spring by which he halted made a little spot of green at the edge of the gray. But out in front of him was the infinite stretch of death, far sweeps of wind-furrowed sand burning under a sun made sullen red by the clouds of fine dust in the air. Sparsely over the dull surface grew the few shrubs that could survive the heat and dryness,—stunted, unlovely things of burr, spine, thorn, or saw-edged leaf,—all bent one ways by the sand blown against them,—bristling cactus and crouching mesquite bushes.
In the vast open of the blue above, a vulture wheeled with sinister alertness; and far out among the dwarfed growing things a coyote skulked knowingly. The weird, phantom-like beauty of it stole upon him, torn as he was, while he looked over the dry, flat reaches. It was a good place to die in, this lifeless waste languishing under an angry sun. And he knew how it would come. Out to the south, as many miles as he should have strength to walk, away from any road or water-hole, a great thirst would come, and then delirium, perhaps bringing visions of cool running water and green trees. He would hurry toward these madly until he stumbled and fell and died. Then would come those cynical scavengers of the desert, the vulture wheeling lower, the coyote skulking nearer, pausing suspiciously to sniff and to see if he moved. Then a few poor bones, half-buried by the restless sand, would be left to whiten and crumble into particles of the same desert dust he looked upon. As for his soul, he shuddered to think its dissolution could not also be made as sure.
He stood looking out a long time, held by the weak spirit of a hope that some reprieve might come, from within or from on high. But he saw only the page wet with blood, and the words that burned through it into his eyes; heard only the cries of women in their death-agony and the stealthy movements of the bleeding shapes behind him. There was no ray of hope to his eye nor note of it to his ear—only the cries and the rustlings back of him, driving him out.
At last he gave his horse water, tied the bridle-rein to the horn of the saddle, headed him back over the trail to the valley and turned him loose. Then, after a long look toward the saving green of the hills, he started off through the yielding sand, his face white and haggard but hard-set. He was already weakened by fasting and loss of sleep, and the heat and dryness soon told upon him as the chill was warmed from the morning air.