His earnestness deeply affected her.
“Sir, your kind words warm a cold and forlorn heart,” she said. “But I cannot be turned back. It’s too late.”
“No hour is ever too late.... Mrs. Virey, I’ll not distress you with advice or importunities. I know too well the need and the meaning of peace. But the fact of your being here—a woman of your evident quality—a woman of your sensitiveness and delicate health—why, it is a terrible thing! This is Death Valley. The month is April. Soon it will be May—then June. When midsummer comes you cannot survive here. I know nothing of why you are here—I don’t seek to know. But you cannot stay. It would be a miracle for your husband to find gold here, if that is what he seeks. Surely he has discovered that.”
“Virey does not seek gold,” the woman said.
“Does he know that a white woman absolutely cannot live here in Death Valley? Even the Indians abandon it in summer.”
“He knows. There are Shoshone Indians up on the mountains now. They pack supplies to us. They have warned him.”
Adam could ask no more, yet how impossible not to feel an absorbing interest in this woman’s fate. As he sat with bowed head, watching the glowing and paling of the red embers, he felt her gaze upon him.
“Wansfell, you must have a great heart—like your body,” she said, presently. “It is blessed to meet such a man. Your kindness, your interest, soften my harsh and bitter doubt of men. We are utter strangers. But there’s something in this desert that bridges time—that bids me open my lips to you ... a man who traveled this ghastly valley to serve me!... My husband, Virey, knows that Death Valley is a hell on earth. So do I. That is why he brought me ... that is why I came!”
“My God!” breathed Adam, staring incredulously at her. Dismukes had prepared him for tragedy; the desert had shown him many dark and terrible calamities, misfortunes, mysteries; he had imagined he could no longer be thrown off his balance by amaze. But that a sad-eyed, sweet-voiced woman, whose every tone and gesture and look spoke of refinement and education, of a life infinitely removed from the wild ruggedness of the desert West—that she could intimate what seemed in one breath both murder and suicide—this staggered Adam’s credulity.
Yet, as he stared at her, realizing the tremendous passion of will, of spirit, of something more than emanated from her, divining how in her case intellect and culture had been added to the eternal feminine of her nature, he knew she spoke the truth. Adam had met women on the desert, and all of them were riddles. Yet what a vast range between Margarita Arallanes and Magdalene Virey!