ACROSS THE DESERT TO THE END
Never in the after years could Winston clearly recall the incidents of that night's ride across the sand waste. The haze which shrouded his brain would never wholly lift. Except for a few detached details the surroundings of that journey remained vague, clouded, indistinct. He remembered the great, burning desert; the stars gleaming down above them like many eyes; the ponderous, ragged edge of cloud in the west; the irregular, castellated range of hills at their back; the dull expanse of plain ever stretching away in front, with no boundary other than that southern sky. The weird, ghostly shadows of cactus and Spanish bayonet were everywhere; strange, eerie noises were borne to them out of the void—the distant cries of prowling wolves, the mournful sough of the night wind, the lonely hoot of some far-off owl. Nothing greeted the roving eyes but desolation,—a desolation utter and complete, a mere waste of tumbled sand, by daylight whitened here and there by irregular patches of alkali, but under the brooding night shadows lying brown, dull, forlorn beyond all expression, a trackless, deserted ocean of mystery, oppressive in its drear sombreness.
He rode straight south, seeking no trail, but guiding their course by the stars, his right hand firmly grasping the pony's bit, and continually urging his own mount to faster pace. The one thought dominating his mind was the urgent necessity for haste—a savage determination to intercept that early train eastward. Beyond this single idea his brain seemed in hopeless turmoil, seemed failing him. Any delay meant danger, discovery, the placing of her very life in peril. He could grasp that; he could plan, guide, act in every way the part of a man under its inspiration, but all else appeared chaos. The future?—there was no future; there never again could be. The chasm of a thousand years had suddenly yawned between him and this woman. It made his head reel merely to gaze down into those awful depths. It could not be bridged; no sacrifice, no compensation might ever undo that fatal death-shot. He did not blame her, he did not question her justification, but he understood—together they faced the inevitable. There was no escape, no clearing of the record. There was nothing left him to do except this, this riding through the night—absolutely nothing. Once he had guided her into safety all was done,—done forever; there remained to him no other hope, ambition, purpose, in all this world. The desert about them typified that forthcoming existence—barren, devoid of life, dull, and dead. He set his teeth savagely to keep back the moan of despair that rose to his lips, half lifting himself in the stirrups to glance back toward her.
If she perceived anything there was not the slightest reflection of it within her eyes. Lustreless, undeviating, they were staring directly ahead into the gloom, her face white and almost devoid of expression. The sight of it turned him cold and sick, his unoccupied hand gripping the saddle-pommel as though he would crush the leather. Yet he did not speak, for there was nothing to say. Between these two was a fact, grim, awful, unchangeable. Fronting it, words were meaningless, pitiable.
He had never before known that she could ride, but he knew it now. His eye noted the security of her seat in the saddle, the easy swaying of her slender form to the motion of the pony, in apparent unconsciousness of the hard travelling or the rapidity of their progress. She had drawn back the long tresses of her hair and fastened them in place by some process of mystery, so that now her face was revealed unshadowed, clearly defined in the starlight. Dazed, expressionless, as it appeared, looking strangely deathlike in that faint radiance, he loved it, his moistened eyes fondly tracing every exposed lineament. God! but this fair woman was all the world to him! In spite of everything, his heart went forth to her unchanged. It was Fate, not lack of love or loyalty, that now set them apart, that had made of their future a path of bitterness. In his groping mind he rebelled against it, vainly searching for some way out, urging blindly that love could even blot out this thing in time, could erase the crime, leaving them as though it had never been. Yet he knew better. Once she spoke out of the haunting silence, her voice sounding strange, her eyes still fixed in that same vacant stare ahead into the gloom.
"Isn't this Mercedes' pony? I—I thought she rode away on him herself?"
With the words the recollection recurred to him that she did not yet know about that other tragedy. It was a hard task, but he met it bravely. Quietly as he might, he told the sad story in so far as he understood it—the love, the sacrifice, the suffering. As she listened her head drooped ever lower, and he saw the glitter of tears falling unchecked. He was glad she could cry; it was better than that dull, dead stare. As he made an end, picturing the sorrowing Stutter kneeling in his silent watch at the bedside, she looked gravely across to him, the moisture clinging to the long lashes.
"It was better so—far better. I know how she felt, for she has told me. God was merciful to her;" the soft voice broke into a sob; "for me, there is no mercy."
"Beth, don't say that! Little woman, don't say that! The future is long; it may yet lead to happiness. A true love can outlast even the memory of this night."
She shook her head wearily, sinking back into the saddle.