It was evening when Billsky came up with him.
You know evening on the Altanero? The sun’s down on the edge of things, as big as a burning house. All the rocks turn clear as glass for a minute. It’s as if the light went clean through them, and came out colored with their colors: rose, violet, gold. The air you breathe glows. The rosy-red cañon Billsky was in ended sudden in a wall that hit the sky. The sunset touched it, and it became like a veil, says Billsky, a blood-red curtain hung from earth to heaven. At the foot of it lay Bad Radway.
Billsky ran at him, trying to yell. He had his water flask ready. All day he’d been saving water to give to Radway, but he was too late. Rad just looked at him; and all that had been inside him: all the remorse, the guilt, the black fear, the unknown damage of the soul that first drove him to be scared of Billsky, came out in that look.
It struck Billsky to the heart. “Rad, Rad,” he said, “don’t you be scared o’ me! I forgive you, Rad!” he said.
But Bad Radway didn’t hear. He was dead.
Billsky had done his part, but he was all broke up. He got back to the water-hole somehow, after burying Rad at the foot of the cliff. He and the other man that had been Rad’s partner lit out for home right away. They’d had enough of the Altanero.
When I last saw Billsky, he was terrible hurt and grieved because the other man held him to blame for what had happened to Radway. “He seems to think,” said Billsky to me, “that I done something to him! Me that follered him all that way just to forgive him! He seems to think, that guy does, that I done something!”
Then, in a puzzled, exasperated kind of way, he laughed. “But come to think of it,” said Billsky, “it was funny.”
Well, as I said before, religion’s a queer thing to handle; but I don’t see anything funny in it.
Marjorie L. C. Pickthall.