“You don’t tell me, Mr. Grier,” he burst out, “that the fellow’s any right to it.”
Grier saw that there was a celluloid collar attached to the shirt with a brass safety pin: the orthodox straight band of white a parson wears. The Old Man went on, quivering with indignation; he was, as Grier said, “uncommon correct.” Grier looked into the cabin. The girl had curled up at the end of Brennan’s bunk, sound asleep nursing his wounded feet in her arms. Something in the sight hit Grier hard; he glanced from her to Brennan’s brutal, blue-black, upturned jaw, whistled thoughtfully, and went out.
Impossible even to imagine that jowl over the parson’s collar!
But it was Brennan’s jaw—or the quality it stood for—drove him that last thirty miles between Santa Luce and the Horado.
At Santa Luce—nothing but a river-crossing—he stopped and buried his last porter. He would have delayed for nothing living. Even Buck Brennan was obliged to delay awhile for that pitiful dead. He gave Rosario a few inches of earth; rested a little; took what he could of the double load, and went on. Thinking, as he told Grier, “Well, Rosario, hombre, your resurrection won’t take no three days”. . . A hard brute, Buck Brennan, with a heart like a baked brick; enclosing God-knew-what of fires of powers. . . . He had no choice but to die where he stood or a little farther on. He jutted out that great coarse jaw of his and chose to die farther on—as far as possible. And—as far as possible—he came on the house.
Imagine a great forest, bare of all life but one brown ant crawling in it; imagine in the very heart of that forest a tiny ant-heap, just a spoonful of honey-colored granules in the roots of a grass-tuft. Can you imagine the ant finding the ant-hill? Yet, in the vast jungles of the Horado, the creeping atomy that was Brennan, came on the house.
There was, in one window of the house, one little bit of glass, which caught the levelling light through some aisles of the unplumbed forest, and shone like a star. It drew Brennan, though he was then past thought. It was an automaton of mere muscle that he made towards it, mounted steps that sagged like hammocks, found a door, and set his shoulders to it. The door gave, groaning. Something tangled his feet and tripped him—a rope, or a vine of the myriad that veiled the very substance of the house. He fell as it seemed to him, very slowly; and the door sank before him like a mist. He heard a bell ring outside, far overhead—it rolled like the salute of a gun, a challenge, a war-cry flung hollow of night, all ringing and booming with bells.
Out of this deep sleep he woke in a dawn full of screaming clouds of little parakeets. They flashed past the doorway and vanished, but their green and gold lingered on the rim of every motionless leaf: the forest seemed to drip glory. But the splendid moment passed. A hot wind blew, and, somewhere overhead, set a cracked bell jangling. Brennan dragged himself to his feet and went to explore.
Food he must have; he had it there, in the load he’d let fall as he fell. But before that, before anything, he had to explore the house. Hunger was urgent. But there was something around him more urgent still. What?
He found no answer for a long time in the ghost of that little native-built house fading away into grass and green and mould—a visible sort of transubstantiation, going on, to go on, for how long? Who had built it? Who had deserted it? Why? He moved cat-footed on floors wrenched apart by writhing growths, where squares of solid mildew proclaimed that matting had been. He cleared the windows with his knife—it was like cutting snakes—and watched intently as the light fell on blotched and voiceless walls. There were glasses and warped frames here and there on the walls: from all but one the ants had eaten the pictures: this one had been backed with tin, and so the Madonna of the Chair still looked out, through the veiling of the damp, with her exquisite clear benevolence. Brennan tried another room.