As thought and feeling multiplied, Cameron was overwhelmed. Beyond
belief, indeed, was it that out of the millions of men in the world two
who had never seen each other could have been driven into the desert by
memory of the same woman. It brought the past so close. It showed
Cameron how inevitably all his spiritual life was governed by what had
happened long ago. That which made life significant to him was a
wandering in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret.
Some fateful chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had
wrecked. It was incomprehensible; it was terrible. It was the one
thing of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both
father and lover would have found unendurable.
Cameron's pain reached to despair when he felt this relation between
Warren and himself. Something within him cried out to him to reveal
his identity. Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death that
put Cameron on the rack. He had faced death too often to be afraid.
It was the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering man. All
at once Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's trouble, or
let him stain his hands with blood. He would tell the truth of Nell's
sad story and his own, and make what amends he could.
Then Cameron's thought shifted from father to daughter. She was
somewhere beyond the dim horizon line. In those past lonely hours by
the campfire his fancy had tortured him with pictures of Nell. But his
remorseful and cruel fancy had lied to him. Nell had struggled upward
out of menacing depths. She had reconstructed a broken life. And now
she was fighting for the name and happiness of her child. Little Nell!
Cameron experienced a shuddering ripple in all his being--the physical
rack of an emotion born of a new and strange consciousness.
As Cameron gazed out over the blood-red, darkening desert suddenly the
strife in his soul ceased. The moment was one of incalculable change,
in which his eyes seemed to pierce the vastness of cloud and range, and
mystery of gloom and shadow--to see with strong vision the illimitable
space before him. He felt the grandeur of the desert, its simplicity,
its truth. He had learned at last the lesson it taught. No longer
strange was his meeting and wandering with Warren. Each had marched in
the steps of destiny; and as the lines of their fates had been
inextricably tangled in the years that were gone, so now their steps
had crossed and turned them toward one common goal. For years they had
been two men marching alone, answering to an inward driving search, and
the desert had brought them together. For years they had wandered alone
in silence and solitude, where the sun burned white all day and the
stars burned white all night, blindly following the whisper of a
spirit. But now Cameron knew that he was no longer blind, and in this
flash of revelation he felt that it had been given him to help Warren
with his burden.
He returned to camp trying to evolve a plan. As always at that long
hour when the afterglow of sunset lingered in the west, Warren plodded
to and fro in the gloom. All night Cameron lay awake thinking.
In the morning, when Warren brought the burros to camp and began
preparations for the usual packing, Cameron broke silence.
"Pardner, your story last night made me think. I want to tell you
something about myself. It's hard enough to be driven by sorrow for
one you've loved, as you've been driven; but to suffer sleepless and
eternal remorse for the ruin of one you've loved as I have
suffered--that is hell.... Listen. In my younger days--it seems long
now, yet it's not so many years--I was wild. I wronged the sweetest
and loveliest girl I ever knew. I went away not dreaming that any
disgrace might come to her. Along about that time I fell into terrible
moods--I changed--I learned I really loved her. Then came a letter I
should have gotten months before. It told of her trouble--importuned
me to hurry to save her. Half frantic with shame and fear, I got a
marriage certificate and rushed back to her town. She was gone--had
been gone for weeks, and her disgrace was known. Friends warned me to
keep out of reach of her father. I trailed her--found her. I married
her. But too late!... She would not live with me. She left me--I
followed her west, but never found her."
Warren leaned forward a little and looked into Cameron's eyes, as if
searching there for the repentance that might make him less deserving
of a man's scorn.
Cameron met the gaze unflinchingly, and again began to speak:
"You know, of course, how men out here somehow lose old names, old
identities. It won't surprise you much to learn my name really isn't
Cameron, as I once told you."
Warren stiffened upright. It seemed that there might have been a
blank, a suspension, between his grave interest and some strange mood
to come.
Cameron felt his heart bulge and contract in his breast; all his body
grew cold; and it took tremendous effort for him to make his lips form
words.
"Warren, I'm the man you're hunting. I'm Burton. I was Nell's lover!"
The old man rose and towered over Cameron, and then plunged down upon
him, and clutched at his throat with terrible stifling hands. The harsh
contact, the pain awakened Cameron to his peril before it was too late.
Desperate fighting saved him from being hurled to the ground and
stamped and crushed. Warren seemed a maddened giant. There was a
reeling, swaying, wrestling struggle before the elder man began to
weaken. The Cameron, buffeted, bloody, half-stunned, panted for speech.
"Warren--hold on! Give me--a minute. I married Nell. Didn't you know
that?... I saved the child!"
Cameron felt the shock that vibrated through Warren. He repeated the
words again and again. As if compelled by some resistless power,
Warren released Cameron, and, staggering back, stood with uplifted,
shaking hands. In his face was a horrible darkness.
"Warren! Wait--listen!" panted Cameron. "I've got that marriage
certificate--I've had it by me all these years. I kept it--to prove to
myself I did right."
The old man uttered a broken cry.
Cameron stole off among the rocks. How long he absented himself or
what he did he had no idea. When he returned Warren was sitting before
the campfire, and once more he appeared composed. He spoke, and his
voice had a deeper note; but otherwise he seemed as usual.
They packed the burros and faced the north together.
Cameron experienced a singular exaltation. He had lightened his
comrade's burden. Wonderfully it came to him that he had also
lightened his own. From that hour it was not torment to think of Nell.
Walking with his comrade through the silent places, lying beside him
under the serene luminous light of the stars, Cameron began to feel the
haunting presence of invisible things that were real to him--phantoms
whispering peace. In the moan of the cool wind, in the silken seep of
sifting sand, in the distant rumble of a slipping ledge, in the faint
rush of a shooting star he heard these phantoms of peace coming with
whispers of the long pain of men at the last made endurable. Even in
the white noonday, under the burning sun, these phantoms came to be
real to him. In the dead silence of the midnight hours he heard them
breathing nearer on the desert wind--nature's voices of motherhood,
whispers of God, peace in the solitude.