Much fatigued from his journey and the mental strain upon him, he went up to his room. Throwing off his coat, the night being warm to oppressiveness, he lighted a cigar and sat in the wide-open window. What a strange, tempestuous life was his! How like a mere bauble of soul and flesh was he buffeted between highest heaven and lowest earth! And for what purpose was he created in the vast scheme of endless solar systems?
From the row of negro cabins and cottages below, across the dewy grass and shrubbery, on the flower-perfumed air came sounds of unrestrained merriment. Some negro in a cottage near Linda's was playing a mouth-organ to the accompaniment of a sweetly twanging guitar. There was a rhythmic clapping of hands, the musical, drumlike thumping of feet on resounding boards, snatches of happy songs, clear, untrammelled, childlike laughter.
They—and naught else—had brought him his burden. That complete justice might be meted out to such as they, he had dipped his hands into the warm blood of his own race, and was an outlaw bearing an honored name, stalking forth, pure of heart, and yet masked and draped with deceit, among his own kind. And for what ultimate good? Alas! he was denied even the solace of a look into futurity. And yet—born in advance of his time, as the Son of God was born ahead of His—there was yet something in him which—while he shrank from the depth and bitterness of his cup—lifted him, in his unmated loneliness, in his blindness, to far-off light—high above the material world. There to suffer, there to endure, and yet—there.
CHAPTER XLI.
T was the day following the burial of the body of Dan Willis. Old man Purdy, whom Carson had gone to see, was at Dilk's cross-roads store with a basket of fresh eggs, which he had brought to exchange for their market value in coffee. Several other farmers were seated about the store on nail-kegs and soap-boxes whittling sticks and chewing tobacco, their slow tongues busy with the details of the recent death and interment.