Michaelis.
Becomes absorbed in his own mental pictures as he speaks.
A great table of stone, rising five hundred feet out of the endless waste of sand. A little adobe house, halfway up the mesa, with the desert far below and the Indian village far above. A few peach trees, and a spring—a sacred spring, which the Indians worshipped in secret. A little chapel, which my father had built with his own hands. He often spent the night there, praying. And there, one night, he died. I found him in the morning, lying as if in quiet prayer before the altar.
Rhoda.
After a moment's hush.
What did you do after your father died?
Michaelis.
I went away south, into the mountains, and got work on a sheep range. I was a shepherd for five years.
Rhoda.
And since then?