All the accumulated thought and emotion of recent hours concentrated in the gaze he fixed upon her face.
Her trilling laugh pealed out. She thought he was playing Taquitch, god of the heights. He was teasing her with his piercing eyes.
“Look! Look at me, O Taquitch!” she cried, with deep, pretended solemnity. “I am Ula, princess of the Coahuilas. I have left my father’s house. I have seen the sun shining in your face, oh, god of the lightnings! And I love—I love—I love with all the Indian’s heart. I will go with you to the peaks. But never—never more shall you steal another maiden!”
Adam scarcely heard Genie. He was piercing through eyes and face to the mind and soul and life and meaning of her beauty. Her skin was creamy, golden brown, transparent, with tiny tracery of veins underneath and faint tints of rose. The low forehead and level brows showed moist and soft and thoughtful under the dark, damp curls with their amber glints. A hint of desert leanness hid in the contour of her oval face. Her mouth was strong, with bowed upper lip, the under sensitive and sad—a red, sweet mouth, like a flower. And her eyes, now meeting his so frankly, losing the mock solemnity and the fun, became deep-brown, crystal gulfs of light and shade, of thought and feeling, beautiful with the beauty of exquisite color, but lovelier for the youth, the joy and wonder of life, the innocence of soul.
“Wanny—are you—playing?” she asked, tremulously, and her warm little hand clasped his.
That changed the spell of her. To look at her beauty was nothing comparable with the warm throb of her young, pulsing life. Out of Adam’s slow and painful and intense thought at last evolved a nucleus of revelation. But those clear eyes strangely checked this growing sense of a truth about to overwhelm him. They made him think, and thought had begun to waver and pale beside some subtler faculty of his being. Thus he realized the slow preponderance of feeling over thought, of body over soul, of physical over spiritual. And in this realization of unequal conflict he divined the meaning of his strange sense of peril in Genie’s presence. The peril lay in the sophistication of his mind, not in Genie’s beauty. Naturally as the mating of the birds he wanted her. That was all. It was like her simplicity, inevitable as life itself, and true to nature! But in his thoughts, flashing after comprehension, the simple fact loomed with staggering, overwhelming significance.
Bidding Genie rest or amuse herself, Adam climbed to a ledge above the waterfall, and there, with the mighty mass of mountain crowding out the light, he threw himself upon the bare stone.
Not long did he torment himself with wonder and fury and bewilderment over an indubitable fact. Almost at once he sank into a self-accusing state which grew from bad to worse, until he was sick, sore, base, and malignant in his arraignment of self. Again the old order of mind, the habit of youthful training, the learned precepts and maxims and laws, flooded back to augment his trouble. And when they got their sway he cursed himself, he hated himself, he beat his breast in the shame of an abasement terribly and inevitably and irretrievably true at that hour.
But this was a short-lived passion. It did not ring true to Adam. It was his youth had suffered shame—the youth trained by his mother—the youth that had fallen upon wild and evil days at old Picacho. His youth flaming up with all its chivalry, its ideals, its sense of honor and modesty, its white-hot shame at even an unconscious wrong to a girl! Not the desert philosophy of manhood that saw nature clearly and saw it whole!
“Peace!” he cried, huskily, as if driving back a ghost of his youth. “I am no beast—no animal!”