The American restlessly pulled his straw bolster to the foot of the bed, lay back on it with his legs hanging off, and gave himself up to staring at the little bronze Christ and the candle. The crucifix held dull high lights which focused his gaze.
Presently he found himself reconstructing his whole intercourse with the señora, from the very first night they had met. He wondered what he could have done to save their relations from this shattering wreck. It all appeared natural and inevitable.
It seemed to Strawbridge that their undoing really began with Dolores, when she confessed their plans to the priest. The American had had an idea that a priest merely heard a confession and remained entirely inactive; just as one might drop a note in a letter-box, that would end the matter; but Father Benicio had acted promptly and with extraordinary insight. He had seized on exactly the implement to persuade the drummer. Only now did Strawbridge realize how astute the priest had been in hitting on the rifles. The drummer pulled his bolster, to give his head a cool place to lie on. He drew a deep sigh, and began once more at his point of departure, searching for a flaw in his conduct. The meeting ... the breakfast ... the piazza.... Here his brain skipped an interval, and he wondered if he could not have eloped with the señora and still have obtained the order for rifles. He took the point up carefully. The dictator needed the arms; Dolores was a matter of indifference to the dictator. He would hardly have allowed her abduction to stand in the way of a trade.
The drummer began casting about in his mind for a safe way in which he might have abducted the señora and still have sold the rifles. The Tollivers might have helped him. If he and Dolores had been able to reach the English ranch, they could have slipped into federal territory while George Tolliver negotiated the trade. Strawbridge moved his pillow restlessly, and wondered why he had not done that. He lay thinking hard, with his eyes fixed on the shining points of the crucifix.
Lubito had been a possibility. If Strawbridge had explained everything to Lubito, with the bull-fighter's help he could have pushed the whole matter through during the afternoon before, instead of waiting over-night and allowing Dolores to trap them by a confession to the priest. With Lubito they could have fled to San Geronimo, and the torero could have brought back a letter arranging the order for rifles. But because he had not thought of these simple expedients, he would have to travel to the ends of the earth, while she, the woman he loved and who loved him, would be kept by the dictator to shame, or to use, as he saw fit.
The drummer writhed and clutched an edge of the straw mattress. He stared with a suffering face at the crucifix. Out of the depth of his soul he was repenting his sins. For what are sins but the mistakes which have worked pain in a man's life? And what is repentance but grief and a turning away from those mistakes? The only difference between the repentance of a saint and the chagrin of a cutpurse caught in the toils of the law, is the class of mistakes in their lives which brings them pain, and from which, in spirit, they turn.
CHAPTER XXIV
At some point in his vigil Strawbridge must have gone to sleep, for at some other point he awoke with a start. He thought that he was in a small-town hotel, and that the night clerk had allowed him to oversleep. He reached out, expecting to touch a chairful of clothes, when he discovered that he was already dressed. Then in the darkness above him he saw a lighted candle and a crucifix. Only these two objects were visible, and they stood out, swimming in a black immensity. They put to flight all theories of locality. He sat staring at the candle and the cross, trying to orient himself when, eerily, the darkness about him seemed to move, to fashion itself into his true surroundings. He was again in a cubicle in the priests' house.