“Yes, I’ve cut it out—for good!” he muttered. “I’ve been a fool for the past month, but I won’t be any longer. I’ll straighten up and be a man again, if I can, and then I’ll get back to God’s country. No more of this for me—I’ve had enough of it.”
He stopped, at the foot of the street, and swept a glance over the town and surrounding country, at the little, sunburned valley below, and the ragged hills beyond rolling away into higher and higher elevations, which were rimmed in and ringed by scarred and splintered mountains. The sight of those mountains depressed him.
The view of the town was not more prepossessing. It was a straggling mining camp, without beauty of outline or architecture. The houses were cheap affairs, half of them on the main street being saloons or gambling dens where the miners from the mountains spent their hard earnings riotously.
“I’m sick of it,” he said, “and I’m goin’ to git out of it.”
For the first time he lapsed into a hint of the dialect to which he had so long been accustomed.
Again he looked at the desert reaches of the scarred mountains, where it would seem that even a crow would have hard picking to get a living.
Then he took from an inner pocket of the old corduroy coat a single playing card—the queen of hearts; and he looked at it, with a strange emotion showing in his puffed and scarred face as he passed on down the slope.
He was soon at the edge of the town, though cheap Mexican houses, chiefly of mud, stretched on still farther. Before the doors dark-faced children played in the dust, and now and then from some deep window was visible the swarthy, Indianlike face of a Mexican woman.
Where a mesquite tree grew at the side of the road he stopped. No house was near, and he sat down on a stone, dropping heavily as if tired.
Though he had sturdily refused a drink that morning, his mind was not yet relieved of the effects of recent potations. For a month he had been on a “spree,” and the results showed in his face and general appearance, and still more in the workings of his mind.