BY ROBERTA LITTLEHALE.
THE midnight stars glowed through the broken blackness of a winter's sky down upon the roof of a house where a man sat alone with his arms stretched over an empty bed. Such of his thoughts as were within his control were focused on the life and the death of his past. The bare branches of the willows scraped to and fro on the shingles, and the water in the reservoir lapped softly against the piles of the foundation. There was no light in the room to show the already hopeless untidiness of inanimate things, and the quiet figure of the aging man seemed carved out of rock.
To the youth of him, physical and mental, he returned, and remembered that he had been modeled on lines which made people expect the things for which they willingly yielded him affection and consideration in advance. It was in the tempered pain of the hope of fulfilment that his family and friends had speeded him from New England to the practise of his profession of law in a Southern city. It was in their early triumph at having counted on him truly that the fever of the California gold days got into his veins. It had been no struggle to him to throw everything over and make for the life that beat fastest and fullest in incident. The struggle had lain in separation from a woman whose saneness and spirit he felt he could not live without. But in the end he had disregarded her opposition for the sake of the beckoning fortunes and joined an ox-train caravan over the plains. The dragging slowness with which the days went by had been broken only by the alertness of his own fancy, until the discovery, one blistering Arizona night, of the loss of his money-belt. He had bathed only five miles farther back, and he had no memory of having restrapped the hot and heavy buckskin about his waist. Ignoring the danger of Indian attack, he rode over again in the starlight the miles to the little creek in the wilderness. It had been so much of a relief to find it safe. He stood strapping it about him, and he could hear as distinctly now as then the sound that fell on his ears. It was the hot and hopeless sobbing of a human voice. He had stood immovable, conscious that a group of cacti on his right sheltered a prostrate body. Then he had hurried over and found a slender boy, a slight, nervous, black-eyed Mexican, with a sunburned fairness of skin revealing his mixture of Castilian blood.
He had raised the boy quietly, and the child had hung about his neck, frenzied and fainting. The weakness of his condition made anything impossible beyond literally riding with him in his arms back again to camp. The boy's clothes were torn and dirty and his flesh was bleeding, but his delicate Southern beauty was none the less strongly in evidence.
Frazer remembered the interest and assistance of his comrades. They had hovered in the silence of men's earnestness until the boy was able to make himself coherent. His father, and mother, and brothers had been seized by the Indians, and only the accident of his having been sent after a straying mare had saved his life, by enabling him to hide himself successfully from the raiders.
His extravagant affection for Frazer made a shadow the only simile of his constant presence with him. The boy's nervous timidity and gentleness had found its chief outlet in the watchfullest care of him and the things he cared for. He had seemed wholly lacking in the lore of his class regarding life in the open. He had never gone among the horses or cared to use a gun, but had taken upon himself the cooking and domestic duties of camp life.
The men, in their vigorous courage and spirit, had found the boy monotonous except in the satisfaction he picturesquely afforded, and Frazer had accepted his homage with a mind so absorbed in his own affairs as to be little short of indifferent to the lad's presence.
As they had traveled heavily on over the Texas plains and slept under the Texas stars, Frazer could remember the softness of the small hand that had wakened him from sleep in its searching for the comfort of his presence. And one night the child had crept close to him.
"Señor——"