“Shall I try to get Virey to eat?” she asked, presently.
“That depends. On the desert, after a collapse, we are careful with food and water.”
“Will you look at him?”
Adam followed her as she swept aside a flap of the canvas partition. This room was larger and lighter. It had an aperture for a window. Adam’s quick glance took this in, and then the two narrow beds of blankets raised on brush cots. Virey lay on the one farther from the door. His pallid brow and unshaven face appeared drawn into terrible lines, which, of course, Adam could not be sure were permanent or the result of the collapse in the valley. He inclined, however, to the conviction that Virey’s face was the distorted reflection of a tortured soul. Surely he had been handsome once. He had deep-set black eyes, a straight nose, and a mouth that betrayed him, despite its being half hidden under a mustache. Adam, keen and strung in that moment as he received his impressions of Virey, felt the woman’s intensity as if he had been studying her instead of her husband. How singular women were! How could it matter to her what opinion he formed of her husband? Adam knew he had been powerfully prejudiced against this man, but he had held in stern abeyance all judgment until he could look at him. For long years Adam had gazed into the face of the desert. Outward appearance could not deceive him. As the cactus revealed its ruthless nature, as the tiny inch-high flower bloomed in its perishable but imperative proof of beauty as well as life, as the long flowing sands of the desert betrayed the destructive design of the universe—so the face of any man was the image of his soul. And Adam recoiled instinctively, if not outwardly, at what he read in Virey’s face.
“You’re in pain?” queried Adam.
“Yes,” came the husky whisper, and Virey put a hand on his breast.
“It’s sore here,” said Adam, feeling Virey. “You’ve breathed poisoned air down in the valley. It acts like ether.... You just lie quiet for a while. I’ll do the work around camp.”
“Thank you,” whispered Virey.
The woman followed Adam outside and gazed earnestly up at him, unconscious of herself, with her face closer than it had ever been to him and full in the sunlight. It struck Adam that the difference between desert flowers and the faces of beautiful women was one of emotion. How much better to have the brief hour of an unconscious flower, wasting its fragrance on the desert air!
“He’s ill, don’t you think?” queried the woman.