"Yes, but Pete Leddy belongs still farther back. We may laugh at his ruffianly bravado, but no one may laugh at a forty-four calibre bullet!

Think what you are going to make me pay for your kindness! I must pay with memory of the sound of a shot and the fall of a body there in the streets of Little Rivers--a nightmare for life! Oh, I beg of you, though it is fun for you to be killed, consider me! Don't go down into that valley! I beg of you, go back over the pa.s.s!"

There was no acting, no suspicion of a gesture. She stood quite still, while all the power of her eyes reflected the misery which she pictured for herself. The low pitch of her voice sounded its depths with that restraint which makes for the most poignant intensity. As she reached her climax he had come out of his languid pose. He was erect and rigid. She saw him as some person other than the one to whom she had begun her appeal. He was still smiling, but his smile was of a different sort.

Instead of being the significant thing about him in expression of his casualness, it seemed the softening compensation for his stubbornness.

"I'd like to, but it is hardly in human nature for me to do that. I can't!" And he asked if he might bring up her pony.

"Yes," she consented.

She thought that the faint bow of courtesy with which he had accompanied the announcement of his decision he would have given, in common politeness, to anyone who pointed at the danger sign before he rode over the precipice.

"May I ride down with you, or shall I go ahead?" he inquired, after he had a.s.sisted her to mount.

"With me!" she answered, quickly. "You are safe while you are with me."

The decisive turn to her mobile lips and the faint wrinkles of a frown, coming and going in various heraldry, formed a vividly sentient and versatile expression of emotions while she watched his silhouette against the sky as he turned to get his own pony.

"Come, P.D.--come along!" he called.

In answer to his voice an equine face, peculiarly reflective of trail wisdom, bony and large, particularly over the eyes, slowly turned toward its master. P.D. was considering.

"Come along! The trail, P.D.!" And P.D. came, but with democratic independence, taking his time to get into motion. "He is never fast,"

Jack explained, "but once he has the motor going, he keeps at it all day.

So I call him P.D. without the Q., as he is never quick."

"Pretty d.a.m.n, you mean!" she exclaimed, with a certain spontaneous pride of understanding. Then she flushed in confusion.

"Oh, thank you! It was so human of you to translate it out loud! It isn't profane. Look at him now. Don't you think it is a good name for him?"

Jack asked, seriously.

"I do!"

She was laughing again, oblivious of the impending tragedy.

III

JACK RIDES IN COMPANY

Let not the Grundy woman raise an eyebrow of deprecation at the informal introduction of Jack and Mary, or we shall refute her with her own precepts, which make the steps to a throne the steps of the social pyramid. If she wishes a sponsor, we name an impeccable majesty of the very oldest dynasty of all, which is entirely without scandal. We remind her of the ancient rule that people who meet at court, vouched for by royal favor, need no introduction.

These two had met under the roof of the Eternal Painter. His palette is somewhere in the upper ether and his head in the interplanetary s.p.a.ces.

His heavy eyebrows twinkle with star-dust. Dodging occasional flying meteors, which hara.s.s him as flies hara.s.s a landscapist out of doors on a hot day, he is ever active, this mighty artist of the changing desert sky. So fickle his moods, so versatile his genius, so quick to creation his fancy, that he never knows what his next composition will be till the second that it is begun.

No earthly rival need be jealous of him. He will never clog the galleries. He always paints on the same canvas, sc.r.a.ping off one picture to make room for another. And you do not mind the loss of the old. You live for the new.

His Majesty has no artistic memory. He is as young as he was the day that he flung out his first tentative lunette after chaos. He is the patron saint of all pilgrims from the city's struggle, where they found no oases of rest. He melts "pasts" and family skeletons and hidden stories of any kind whatsoever into the blue as a background with the abandoned preoccupation of his own brushwork. His lieges, who seek oblivion in the desert, need not worry about the water that will never run over the millwheel again, or dwell in prophecy on floods to come. The omnipotence of the moment transports and soothes them.

"Time is nothing!" says the Eternal Painter. "If you feel important, remember that man's hectic bustling makes but worm-work on the planet.

Live and breathe joyfully and magnificently! Do not strain your eyes over embroidery! Come to my open gallery! And how do you like the way I set those silver clouds a-tumbling? Do you know anything better under the dome of any church or capitol? Shall I bank them? Line them with purple?

It is done! But no! Let us wipe it all out, change the tint of our background, and start afresh!"

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 creva.s.ses 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, Parna.s.sian, penetrating brilliancy, which ought to make even a miser feel that his h.o.a.rded 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 pa.s.s 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 G.o.d and Jag Ear on ahead and told him to wait at the foot of the descent. Wrath of G.o.d 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 pa.s.s 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 ba.n.a.lity of exclamations? It is _lese majeste_ 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 surpa.s.sing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.

It was dusk. Shadows returned to the creva.s.ses. 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 rea.s.serted 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.