He stared up at the sun as if to assure himself that he was awake, then laughed hoarsely, foolishly. The wagon did not melt away. He could crawl that far, though in stretching forth his arm he might grasp but empty air. He began to crawl forward, but the wagon did not move. As it grew plainer in all its details, a new strength came to him. He strove to rise, and after several efforts, succeeded. He staggered forward till his hands grasped one of the wheels. The contact cleared his brain as by a magic touch. It was no dream.
Supporting himself by the sideboard, he drew himself around to the front, the only opening of the canvas room. He looked within. A first look told him that the wagon was fitted up for a long journey, and that its contents had not been disturbed by bandits or Indians. The second look distinguished two objects that excluded from attention all others. Upon a mattress at the rear of the wagon lay a woman, her face covered by a cloth; and near the front seat stood a keg of water. It was impossible to note the rigid form of the woman and the position of the arms and hands without perceiving that she was dead.
The man recognized this truth but it made only a dim impression; that keg of water meant life—and life was a thousandfold more to him than death. He drew himself upon the seat, snatched at the tin cup beside the keg, and drew out the cloth-covered corn-cob that stopped the flow. Having slaked his thirst, there was mingled with his sense of ineffable content, an overwhelming desire for sleep. He dropped on the second mattress, on which bedclothes were carelessly strewn; his head found the empty pillow that lay indented as it had been left by some vanished sleeper. As his eyelids closed, he fell sound asleep. But for the rising and falling of his powerful breast, he was as motionless as the body of the woman.
Without, the afternoon sun slowly sank behind the mountains casting long shadows over the plains; the wind swirled the sand in tireless eddies, sometimes lifting it high in great sheets, forming sudden dunes; coyotes prowled among the foot-hills and out on the open levels, squatting with eyes fixed on the wagon, uttering sharp quick barks of interrogation. A herd of deer lifted their horns against the horizon, then suddenly bounded away, racing like shadows toward the lowlands of Red River. On the domelike summit of Mount Welsh, a mile away, a mountain-lion showed his sinuous form against the sky seven hundred feet in air. And from the mountainside near at hand stared from among the thick greenery of a cedar, the face of an Indian whose black hair was adorned by a single red feather.
Within the wagon, unconscious of all, in strange fellowship, lay the living and the dead.
CHAPTER IV
AN UNWONTED PRAYER
When Willock started up from the mattress in the covered wagon, the sun had set. Every object, however, was clearly defined in the first glow of the long August twilight, and it needed but a glance to recall the events that had brought him to seek shelter and slumber beside the dead woman. He sat up suddenly, staring from under his long black hair as it fell about his eyes. Accustomed as he was to deeds of violence, even to the sight of men weltering in their life's blood, he was strangely moved by that rigid form with the thin arms folded over the breast, by that white cloth concealing face and hair. A long keen examination of the prairie assured him that no human being was between him and the horizon. He turned again toward the woman. He felt an overpowering desire to look on her face.
For years there had been no women in his world but the abandoned creatures who sought shelter in the resorts of Beer City in No-Man's Land—these, and the squaws of the reservations, and occasionally a white terrified face among the wagon-trains. As a boy, before running away from home in the Middle West, he had known a different order of beings, and some instinct told him that this woman belonged to the class of his childhood's association. There was imperative need of his hurrying to the mountain, lest, at any moment, a roving band of Indians discover the abandoned wagon; besides this, he was very hungry since his rest, and the wagon was stocked with provisions; nevertheless, to look on the face of the dead was his absorbing desire.