With his eleven hundred million billionth sunset, or thereabouts, His Majesty held a man and a woman who had met on the roof of the world in thrall. He was lurid at the outset, dipping his camel's hair in at the round furnace door sinking toward the hills, whose red vortex shot tongues of flame into canyons and crevasses and drove out their lurking shadows with the fire of its inquisition. The foliage of Little Rivers became a grove of quivering leaves of gold, set on a vast beaten platter of gold. And the man and the woman, like all things else in the landscape, were suffused in this still, Parnassian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his hoarded eagles and sovereigns are ephemeral dross.
"I love it all—all the desert!" said Mary Ewold.
"And I, too!"
"I have for six years."
"I for five."
The sentences had struck clearly as answering chimes, impersonally, in their preoccupied gazing.
"It gave me life!" he added.
"And it gave me life!"
Then they looked at each other in mutual surprise and understanding; each in wonder that the other had ever been anything but radiant of out-of-doors health. That fleck on the lungs which brought a doctor's orders had long ago been healed by the physician of the ozone they were breathing.
"And you remained," he said.
"And you, also," she answered.
Their own silence seemed to become a thing apart from the silence of the infinite. It was as if both recognized a common thought that even the Eternal Painter could not compel oblivion of the past to which they did not return; of the faith of cities to which they had been bred. But it is one of the Eternal Painter's rules that no one of his subjects should ask another of his subjects why he stays on the desert. Jack was the first to speak, and his voice returned to the casual key.
"Usually I watch the sunset while we make camp," he said. "I am very late to-night—late beyond all habit; and sunset and sunrise do make one a creature of habit out here. Firio and my little train will grow impatient waiting for me."
"You mean the Indian and the burro with the silver bells that came over the pass some time before you?"
Of course they belonged to him, she was thinking, even as she made the inquiry. This play cowboy, with his absurdly enormous silver spurs, would naturally put bells on his burro.
"Yes, I sent Firio with Wrath of God and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to wait at the foot of the descent. Wrath of God will worry—he is of a worrying nature. I must be going."
In view of the dinosaur nonsense she was already prepared for a variety of inventional talk from him. As they started down from the pass in single file, she leading, the sun sank behind the hills, leaving the Eternal Painter, unhindered by a furnace glare in the centre of the canvas, to paint with a thousand brushes in the radiant tints of the afterglow.
"You don't like that one, O art critics!" we hear him saying. "Well, here is another before you have adjusted your pince-nez, and I will brush it away before you have emitted your first Ah! I do not criticise. I paint—I paint for the love of it. I paint with the pigments of the firmament and the imagination of the universe."
The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path. For how can you talk of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations? It is lèse majesté to the Eternal Painter to attempt description.
At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.
It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself. It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.
With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up, grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.
"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.
She observed in his manner something new!—a positive enthusiasm for his three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their loyalty and character.
"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat
and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit!
Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la
Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"
Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive southern strain.
"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?—always miserable, whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature. There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the cheerful humor of Jag Ear."
"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned his name."
Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had availed him nothing.
"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him, everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings back and forth."
While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of God and, with Jag Ear's bells jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an intimacy of association impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in some Utopian kindergarten.
Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for him in Little Rivers, now a dark mass on the levels, just dark, without color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of night. She knew how he would laugh at her fears; for she guessed that he was unafraid of anything in the world which, however, was no protection from Pete Leddy's six-shooter.
"I—I have a right to know—won't you tell me how you are going to defend yourself against Pete Leddy?" she demanded, in a sudden outburst.
"I hadn't thought of that. Certainly, I shall leave it to Pete himself to open hostilities. I hadn't thought of it because I have been too busy thinking out how I was going