At the stroke of the hour a great crowd will stand in the prison yard, and gape at the scaffold, and see the drop fall, and—fascinated and frowning—gaze with straining eyes at the Thing dangling at the end of a hempen rope. A Soul will go out into immeasurable space. A purple mark on my throat will tell the story of death by strangulation. Two bodies will lie stark and dead tonight—his and mine. His will be laid in the pine box that belongs to the dishonored dead; while mine will be housed in rosewood, and satin, and silver.
You do not understand?
Listen, let me tell you! Let me go back to the first time we ever met—he and I.
After college days were over, I left the Atlantic coast and all that Life there meant to me, and came out to the West of the sagebrush, and the whirlwinds, and the little horned toads. And there in the wide wastes where there is nothing but the immensity of space and the everlasting quiet of the desert, I went into business for myself. Business there? Oh, yes! for out there where men go mad or die, cattle and sheep may thrive. I, who loved Life and the association of bright minds, and everything that such companionship gives, invested all I had (and little enough it was!) in a business of which I knew nothing, except that those men who went there with a determination to stick to the work till success should find them, brought away bags full of gold—all they could carry—as they came back into the world they had known before their self-banishment.
So I, too, went there, and bought hundreds of sheep—bleating—blear-eyed, stupid creatures that they are! I, essentially a man of cities and of people, began a strange, new life there, becoming care-taker of the flocks myself.
A lonely life? Yes; but remember there was money to be made in sheep-raising in the gray wastes; and I was willing to forego, for a time, all that civilization could give. So I dulled my recollections of the old life and the things that were dear to me, and went to work with a will in caring for the dusty, bleating, aimlessly-moving sheep. I wanted to be rich. Not for the sake of riches, but to be independent of the toil of bread-winning. I longed with all my soul to have money, that I might gratify my old desires for travel away to the far ends of the earth. All my life I had dreamed of the day I was to turn my face to those old lands far away, which would be new lands to me. So I was glad to sacrifice myself for a few years in the monstrous stillness of the gray plains so that I might the sooner be free to go where I would.
Friends tried to dissuade me from the isolated life. They declared I was of a temperament that could not stand the strain of the awful quiet there—the eternal silence broken only by some lone coyote’s yelp, or the always “Baa! Baa!” of the sheep. They told me that men before my time had gone stark mad—that I, too, would lose my mind. I laughed at them, and went my way; yet, in truth, there was many a day through the long years I lived there, when I felt myself near to madness as I watched the slow-moving, dust-powdered woolly backs go drifting across the landscape as a gray fog drifts in from the sea. It seemed the desert was the emptier by reason of the sheep being there, for nothing else moved. Never a sign of life but the sheep; never a sound but the everlasting “Baa! Baa! Baa!” Oh! I tell you I was very near to madness then, and many another man in my place would have broken under the tension. But not I. I was strong because I was growing rich. I made money. I took it eastward to the sea, and watched the ships go out. It was a fine thing to see the great waste of waters move, as the desert waste never had. There was the sea, and beyond lay far lands! Still, I said to myself:
“No; not yet will I go. I will wait yet a little longer. I will wait until I hold so much gold in my hands that I need never return—need never again look upon the desert and its ways.”
So—though I watched the ships sail away to waiting lands beyond—the time was not yet ripe for me to go. Back to the money-making a little longer—back for a while to the stupid, staring-eyed sheep—then a final good-bye to the desert’s awful emptiness, and that never-ceasing sound that is worse than silence—the bleating of the flocks!