“We’ll meet some day,” soliloquized Adam. “But he would never recognize me.”
The comfort of that fact did not long abide in Adam’s troubled mind. He would recognize Collishaw. And that seemed to hold something fatalistic and inevitable. “When I meet Collishaw I’ll tell him who I am—and I’ll kill him!” That fierce whisper was the desert voice in Adam—the desert spirit. He could no more help that sudden bursting flash of fire than he could help breathing. Nature in the desert did not teach men to meet a threat with forgiveness, nor to wait until they were struck. Instinct had precedence over intelligence and humanity. In the eternal strife to keep alive on the desert a man who conquered must have assimilated something of the terrible nature of the stinging cholla cactus, and the hard, grasping tenacity of the mesquite roots, and the ferocity of the wildcat, and the cruelty of the hawk—something of the nature of all that survived. It was a law. It forced a man to mete out violence in advance of that meant for him.
“To fight and to think were to be my blessings,” soliloquized Adam, and he shook his head with a long-familiar doubt. Then he had to remember that no blessings of any kind whatsoever could be his. Stern and terrible duty to himself!
So he rolled in his blankets and stretched his long body to the composure of rest. Sleep did not drop with soft swiftness upon his eyes, as it had upon those of Dismukes. He had walked far, but he was not tired. He never tired any more. There seemed to be no task of a single day that could weary his strength. And for long he lay awake, listening to the deep breathing of his companion, and the howl of the coyotes, and the sounds of Tecopah, so unnatural in the quiet of the desert. A sadness weighed heavily upon Adam. At first he was glad to have met Dismukes, but now he was sorry. A tranquillity, a veil seemed to have been rent. The years had not really changed the relation of his crime, nor materially the nature of his sin. But they had gradually, almost imperceptibly, softened his ceaseless and eternal remorse. By this meeting with Dismukes he found that time effaced shocks, blows, stains, just as it wore away the face of the desert rock. That, too, was a law; and in this Adam divined a blessing that he could not deny. Dismukes had unleashed a specter out of the dim glow of the past. Eight years! So many, and yet they were as eight days! There were the bright stars, pitiless and cold, and the dark bold mountains that had seemed part of his strength. In the deep-blue sky above and in the black shadow below Adam saw a white face, floating, fading, reappearing, mournful and accusing and appalling—a face partaking of the old boyish light and joy and of the godlike beauty of perfect manhood—the haunting face of his brother Guerd. It haunted Adam, and the brand of Cain burned into his brain. The old resurging pangs in his breast, the long sighs, the oppressed heart, the salt tears, the sleepless hours—these were Adam’s again, as keen as in the first days of his awakening down on the Colorado Desert, where from the peaks of the Chocolate Mountains he had gazed with piercing eyes far south to the purple peak—Picacho, the monument, towering above his brother’s grave. “Some day I’ll go back!” whispered Adam, as if answering to an imperative and mysterious call.
The long night wore on with the heavens star-fired by its golden train, and the sounds at last yielding to the desert silence. Adam could see Dismukes, a wide, prone figure, with dark face upturned to the sky, a man seemingly as strange and strong as the wastelands he talked so much about, yet now helpless in sleep, unguarded, unconscious, wrapped in his deep dreams of the joy and life his gold was to bring him. Adam felt a yearning pity for this dreamer. Did he really love gold or was his passion only a dream? Whatever that was and whatever the man was, there rested upon his ragged, dark face a shadow of tragedy. Adam wondered what his own visage would reflect when he lay asleep, no more master of a mind that never rested? The look of an eagle? So Dismukes had said, and that was not the first time Adam had heard such comparison. He had seen desert eagles, dead and alive. He tried to recall how they looked, but the images were not convincing. The piercing eye, clear as the desert air, with the power of distance in the gray depths; the lean, long lines; the wild poise of head, bitter and ruthless and fierce; the look of loneliness—these characters surely could not be likened to his face. What a strange coincidence that Dismukes should hit upon the likeness of an eagle—the winged thunderbolt of the heights—the lonely bird Adam loved above all desert creatures! And so Adam wandered in mind until at last he fell asleep.
CHAPTER XIII
When Adam awoke he saw that Dismukes had breakfast steaming on the fire.
“I’m on my way to-day,” announced the prospector. “What’ll you do?”
“Well, I’ll hang around Tecopah as long as I can stand it,” replied Adam.