“The foxes have holes—the birds of the air have nests!” cried Adam.
Was it he who lay there with aching heart and burning eyes? Ah! Again the lonely wasteland claimed him. That illimitable desert was home. Whose face was that limned on the clouds, and set into the beaten bossy mosaic of the sands, and sculptored in the contour of the dim, colored ranges?
His burros nipped the sage behind him as he lay, back against a stone, on the lofty height of the Sierra Madre divide, gazing down into that boundless void. What was it that had happened? Ah! He had fled! And he lived over again for the thousandth time, that week—that fleeting week of transport with its endless regrets—in which he had found Genie a home, in which the daughter of Magdalene Virey had stormed his soul.
Vague and happy those first days when he bought the valley lands and flooded them with cattle—vague because of the slow gathering of insupportable and unconscious love—happy because he lived with Genie’s rapture and her romance. Vivid were some of the memories—when he placed in Genie’s little brown hands papers and deeds and bankbooks, and by a gesture, as if by magic, proclaimed to her wondering sense the truth of a tale of Aladdin; when, to the serious-faced mother, pondering the costs, he announced her once more owner of the long-regretted land; when, to a fire-eyed lad, he had drawn aside the veil of the future.
But vague, mystic as a troubled dream, the inception of a love that rose like the blaze of the sun—vague as the opaque dawn of the desert! Whenever he looked up, by night or day, at task or idleness, there shone the lovely face, pale as a dawn-hazed star, a face like Magdalene Virey’s, with all of its beauty, but naught of its passion; with all of its charm, yet none of its havoc. With youth, and bloom, and wide-open purple eyes, dark as midnight, staring at fate. And a voice like the voice of her mother, sweet, but not mocking, haunted the dreams of the man and lived in the winds.
“And you are a desert man,” she had said.
“Yes—a desert man,” he had replied.
“There’s a place I want to go some day—when I am twenty-one.... Death Valley! Do you know it? My grandfather says I’m mad.”
“Death Valley! For such as you? Stay—never go near that awful hell!”
The ghastly white pit and its naked red walls, the midnight furnace winds with their wailing roar, the long, long slopes to the avalanche graves! Ah! the torment of his heart, the tragedy he would hide, and the secret he must keep, and the miniature that burned in its place—they drew her with the invisible cords of life and fate. What he would spare her surged in the air that she breathed.