Elbert found himself staring at the little crucifix as he talked. Bart didn’t seem to be troubled as much as he was—about the feelings of the one in this house.... One night after about ten days in El Relicario, Bart turned over and drew his right shoulder clear from its covering to show how the wound was healing.

Elbert cleared his throat. ‘I don’t see how you stayed in the saddle from that bridge until daybreak when we got here,’ he said hoarsely. ‘Why, that bullet would have knocked me out of the saddle like—like—’

He had quite forgotten—‘clear through to Nogales.’

A low laugh again. ‘Say, amigo mio—say, Mister, you’re sure nervous as a filly, about being caught makin’ a move like a gamester!’

Elbert conned that all the next day in the hills.

XXVI
SILENCE

Meanwhile he was learning undreamed-of-matters about himself. No amount of riding such as he had done down in the valleys could have shown him what he was getting now, in the stillness and sunlight and starlight of high country. A hundred times a day, the flick of a lizard over leaf or pebble or twig called his eye; that was the only continual distraction. The days were mainly silent, though the nights were full of sound; the coyotes sometimes a maddening chorus that stirred up unheard-of deeps in the listener, and once as he lay awake at night a muffle-winged owl swept past so close as to fan his face. That shook him like the sounds during his first night out in White Stone Flats. In the stillness, thoughts rose up in him with a power he hadn’t known before; one could get so accustomed to this sort of life, he reflected, that he would be entirely unfit in a little while for the towns again.

Here’s where a man reverted to type. What he was at bottom came out. One might sink into being just an animal—eating and drinking and sleeping—or get more fiery alive with the days, more quick and sensitive with strange inner activity. There were times when Elbert’s thoughts carried him along with a clear cool strength that was almost frightening. He knew now that he had never been alone before; that a man isn’t quite alone, even if locked in his own room—that he is only really alone with the sky above and the earth beneath.

He had told Bart that he was getting to like it, but that didn’t become wholly true until quite a number of days had passed. Again and again he felt his jaw hardening, his lips pressed together; gradually his fears fell away and the silence bit into the very center of his being. He became a part of the outer silence of the days, a part of the fierce still sunlight that slowly blackened his hands and face. He looked back upon his dreams in the room at home, remembering the things he had treasured there—Indian blankets, pictures, leather work—all had meant something.

Out of these kid treasures and symbols, Cal and Slim had come to life, Heaslep’s, Nacimiento, San Pasquali; Bob Leadley, Bismo on the Rio Brava, Red Ante, the Dry Cache mine; Sonora, the cells, the corner of the wall, flight from the rurales, El Relicario. He could shut his eyes and think way back to the very beginning—hear the swish of motor cars from his bedroom window, the sound of the piano below, the sounds of his phonograph, and that last swung him swiftly across the continent to the Plaza at Los Angeles—‘Cuando sali—’ and the leather-store.