And all day long, one by one, more men came forth, like ghosts, from the dead-land. But the twilight had come and the wind had died away before teamster Slivers limped from the desert. He came afoot. He had ridden his horse to death, in his desperate quest. He could barely see—and his hair was white, even below the coating of the dust.
Moody ran to meet him.
“Barney?—Sally?—the kid?” the teamster demanded, raucously.
“Back—and goin’ to live,” said Moody. “The Injuns up to Red Shirt heard where the little feller was and was goin’ on the war-trail, sudden, but the mother came down on the stage to-day,—and got her pretty little kid.”
“Oh, God! I didn’t deserve it!” said Slivers, and letting himself fall limply to the earth, he lay with his face in the curve of his arm and shook with emotion.
THE REPARATION
BY EMERY POTTLE
He looked up from the desk where he had been sitting for the last hour, his head down on his arms, trying to shut out the brave, old cry of life coming in through the open windows, pulling gently at his heart, cheeping through the darkened room as lightly and as blithely as the birds in the horse-chestnut tree just outside—the brave cry of life that, somehow, for all its clamorous traditions, seemed just then something peaceful, something that held release, freedom.
He stared about him, furtively, for an instant, as if instinctively on his guard against an unwelcome eye. Then, presently, he smiled, and going to a window, pushed open the blinds, leaning, with elbows on the sill, gratefully out into the rectangular enclosure, walled in high by houses, where the late afternoon sun glanced with uncertain warmth on the horse-chestnut.
There was now, he told himself, no use of evading or denying it longer; right or wrong, things had come to a point with him where anything but the truth was unbearable; it was there, like a live thing with him in the room, and out in the court, too,—almost as if he could put out his hand and draw it in close to him. Freedom, that was it. His lips made the word noiselessly, again and again, fascinated with the sensation. “Free, free,” he kept whispering, stretching out his hands greedily, drawing in full breaths of the late September air.