"Why not, pray?"
"Well, I dare say I'm a good deal of a rotter—I must be to go into a thing like this—but I have a superstitious streak in me. Possibly it's reverence; at any rate I believe there is a Power outside of ourselves which appoints the hour of our coming and the hour of our going. I'm not so sure you can pull this off until that Power says so."
Murray laughed. "Nonsense! What is to prevent my shooting myself at this moment, if I want to?"
"Nothing, if you want to—but you don't want to. Why don't you want to? Because that Power hasn't named this as your time. I don't make myself very clear."
"I think I see what you're driving at, but you're wrong. We are masters of our own destinies; we make our lives as full or as empty as we choose. I have emptied mine of all it contained, and I don't consider that I am doing any one an injury in disposing of what belongs alone to me. Now we'll complete the details."
The speaker drew a blank note from his desk and filled it in.
It was with a very natural feeling of interest that Butler Murray watched the desert unfold before his car window a few days later as his train made its way southward from the main line and into the Bad Lands of the Nevada gold-fields. There was snow everywhere; not enough for warmth, but enough to chill the landscape with a gray, forbidding aspect. It lay, loose-piled and shifting, behind naked rocks, or streamed over the knife-edge ridges, swirling and settling in the gullies like filmy winding-sheets. All the world up here was barren, burned out, and cold, like his own life; it was a fitting place in which to end an existence which had proven such a mockery and failure.
Goldfield was a conglomerate city in the hectic stage of its growth. Rough, uncouth, primitive, it lay cradled in the lap of inhospitable hills upon the denuded slopes of which derricks towered like gallows. The whole naked country spoke of death and desolation.
A bitter wind laden with driving particles of sleet met the travelers as they stepped off the train.
DeVoe's headquarters consisted of a typical mining-camp shack in the heart of the town, containing a bare little office and two sleeping-rooms, the hindermost of which gave egress to a yard banked in snow and flanked by other frame buildings.