But when Harboro came down the stairs she knew instantly that she could not stop him from going. That quiet look was not unreadable now. It meant unswerving determination.
He called to her, his hand outstretched; and when she went to him he kissed her. His voice was gentle and unshaken, in quite the habitual way, when he said: “I shall be back in a little while.”
She clasped her hands and looked at him imploringly. “Don’t go,” she pleaded.
“Ah, but I must go.”
She touched his cheeks with her hands. “Don’t go!” she repeated. “Nothing can be undone.”
“But a man’s job isn’t to undo things—it’s to do them.”
She held her face high as if the waters were engulfing her. “Don’t go!” she said again; and her eyes were swimming, so that at the last she did not see him go, and did not know that he had kept that look of placid courage to the end.
It was a little early for the usual Sunday morning loiterers to be about as Harboro entered the town. For a moment he believed there was no one about at all. The little town, with its main street and its secondary thoroughfares bordered by low structures, might have been regarded as the habitation of lesser creatures than human beings, as it stood there musing after the departed night, in the midst of limitless wastes of sand. That group of houses might have been likened to some kind of larger birds, hugging the earth in trepidation, ready to take flight at any moment.
Yet Harboro had been mistaken in supposing that no one was as yet astir. Two men stood out in the street, at the entrance to the Maverick bar, near a hitching-post to which a small horse carrying a big saddle was tethered. One of the men was about to mount. As Harboro approached he untied his horse and lifted one foot to its stirrup, and stood an instant longer to finish what he was saying, or perhaps to hear the other out.
The other man was in his shirt-sleeves. He carried a blue-serge sack-coat over his arm. He stood facing Harboro as the latter approached; and the expression in his eyes seemed to change in a peculiar way at sight of the big, swarthy man who stepped off the sidewalk, down into the street, and seemed to be headed directly toward him.