The fact that the way of the transgressor is hard, was being ground into
the shrinking soul of Elijah. As yet, the grinding was of no avail
because he refused to recognize that he was a transgressor. For years he
had dreamed, and worked, and planned, and in it all he had been alone.
Men would have called it alone, but not so Elijah. The Lord was with
him. At least this was his fanatical belief. Alone, or with the still,
small voice, not always interpreted aright, he had with infinite
patience dreamed his dreams, wrought out his tasks as they came to him,
and still alone, he had seen them shaping to a definite end. He had,
like a solitary player, shuffled his cards, had dealt them and played in
strict accordance with the game or modified them at will, and there was
no one to say him nay. Even Amy had strengthened this growing habit of
looking upon himself, his will and his desires as infallible.
Unconsciously he had carried this inflexible attitude of mind into the
game, when necessity had compelled him to admit partners. He resented
the insistence of others, that they should be considered as having
rights equal to his own. He demanded unconditional surrender, implicit
obedience to his will. He reasoned with a sophistical show of right that
the great idea was his, that what he gave was given in the fullness of
his heart, and that it was only base ingratitude that prompted the
recipients to oppose and thwart him.
Winston had opposed and thwarted him in a thousand details, and though
Elijah had outwardly yielded, he had not essentially changed, though he
was learning many lessons. He had learned to distinguish between what
Winston would accept and what he would reject, but involuntarily and
unconsciously there was growing up within him a burning hatred of Ralph
Winston. There was a seeming lack of sympathy in the rugged integrity of
Winston that clove through the heart of things. Winston knew only north
and south. If a needle swung to these points, it was right; if it did
not, it was wrong, and he had no use for it.
Elijah was growing jealous of Winston. He said nothing, but he noticed
that, in the field especially, and to a certain extent in the office,
details were more and more referred to Winston, even by Helen. Winston's
name was on every tongue. It seemed to Elijah as if profit, and honor,
and prestige were slipping from him and falling upon Winston. He was
being defrauded. It never occurred to him that Winston's complete
surrender of heart, and soul and mind to the successful fulfilment of
his dreams, all testified far more strongly than honeyed words of praise
to the worthiness of the idea which he had conceived.
He had turned to Helen Lonsdale. With no less rugged ideas of right and
wrong, they had been clouded in Helen with the dangerous sympathy of a
woman's heart. With sympathy, Helen had softened the blows she had dealt
him. To a certain extent she had kept him right, but because the blows
had not pained, they lacked a compelling power. Her intuition,
stimulated by her belief in him, in his essential greatness, had been
quick to detect every changing mood; in her womanly sympathy, her
efforts to soothe and comfort had been unstinted.
In spite of all condemning appearances, these influences were having an
unconscious effect for good upon Elijah, until the advent of Mrs.
MacGregor. She nursed his sense of wrong, stimulated his belief in
himself, fed his morbidly craving soul with honeyed food that fattened
it for the hand of the slayer.
Yet Mrs. MacGregor had missed her mark. She had counted upon a possible
sometime awakening of Elijah, but before the awakening she had intended
to have him fully in her power. She had not reckoned at its full value
the impatient greed of Elijah; she had not reckoned on the womanhood of
Helen Lonsdale which, though struggling in a fog of sinister influences,
never lost consciousness of its own identity.
When, on the morning of his declaration to Helen, Elijah left the
office, it was as one stricken with a numbing wound. He was not
conscious of its meaning, only of the sickening absence of pain which,
coupled with the knowledge of the wound, filled him with an unknown
terror. As the meaning of it all slowly dawned upon him, the stinging,
biting pain played full upon every tingling nerve. He became filled with
blind, ungovernable, impotent rage. He raged against himself, against
Helen, against Mrs. MacGregor. He would have returned to the office at
once; what darker crime he might have committed, only imagination can
suggest, but return was impossible. When the thought came to him, he was
far beyond Ysleta, surrounded by desert sands that dragged at his feet
till physical exertion was no longer possible. Burning with thirst,
weakened by hunger, he threw himself upon the hot sands and watched with
unconscious eyes the fierce sun sink into the Pacific.
It was here that a wandering vaquero chanced upon him. The simple
Mexican knew naught of the delirium born of a frenzied mind, but he knew
the delirium of blood thirst that lack of water brings upon the desert
wanderer. With this knowledge and belief, he carried Elijah to his hut
and nursed him back to life. If the strange senor chose to call upon the
names of men and women whom he knew not, that was the senor's privilege,
and it was his duty as a host to patter softly with bare feet on the
dirt floor, and to bind the hot forehead with herbs which the desert
gave. It was his duty as a host to bind with thongs the raving senor to
his raw-hide couch, lest he should once more go out into the desert
before his strength had returned.
As consciousness began to return to Elijah, his sense of injury took
another form. He had been for several days in the Mexican's hut and no
one had called for him or inquired. After all he had done for others,
they had left him, turned from him in heartless ingratitude, in this his
hour of need. He raged against Helen especially, but his rage changed
first to an intense longing, then to a determination to see her again.
Toward the evening of the fifth day, he prevailed upon the Mexican to
drive him to Ysleta. At the Rio Vista, having gone to his room, he
called a servant and sent him with a message to Helen. She was not to be
found. At the office he learned that Helen had gone out to the works and
would be absent for several days. He would have followed, but he dared
not. Her last words, the last look that he remembered so clearly, these
told him only too plainly that she would not be forced, that--he dared
think no further. He must work on her sympathy through an appeal. He
returned to his room at the hotel and found what he had overlooked
before, a package of papers on his table. They had been sent over from
the office. A slip of paper in Helen's writing, "Elijah Berl, Rio
Vista." He tore the string from the bundle in feverish haste. His
fingers trembled as he shuffled the letters one by one. Not one was in
Helen's hand. Again and again he went over them, then he gave up in
despair.
With infinite patience, the Almighty has taught us by precept and
example, that our destinies are in our own hands; that the punishment
for failure that comes to us, is self-inflicted, and not from him, when
in blind despair, we thrust aside a redemption that is waiting to make
us whole. The smitten rock that quenched the thirst of Israel, the
parted sea that gave them a way to safety, the column of smoke that
reached into the day, the pillar of fire that made the darkness light,
these may be fables; but they speak with a voice that cannot be stilled,
telling us that in ages past, as in the present, an eye that sleeps not,
watches over us; that hope is for us if we will.
Among the discarded letters, was one from Winston. It told of the
plucked fangs of Mellin, of Uncle Sid's restoration of the stolen money,
of the meeting with Seymour. It ended, "Come back, old man, we want
you."
Late as was the hour when Elijah at last turned from his unopened
letters, he rang for a servant and ordered a carriage to take him to his
ranch. He could not go to the dam; the thought of idly waiting at the
hotel was unendurable. He wanted to see some one, he must see some one.
He had deliberately put Amy from him; but she did not know this. The
black heartlessness of his proposed action did not once occur to him.
Before leaving the hotel he wrote an appeal to Helen. He told her where
he was going and that he would wait her answer.
At the ranch, he found Amy as of old. Eager, questioning hope leaped to
her eyes as they rested on his face; then the hope died out to the dumb,
patient waiting; the dumb, patient suffering of an animal that endures
without question, without resentment. Through the long days that
followed, she did her best to draw him from himself, from the fires that
were consuming him. It was in vain. In vain, when she found him seated
with his eyes fastened on the dusty trail from Ysleta, she slipped her
hand in his and nestled close to him, inviting confidences that were
never given, tendering sympathy that was not accepted, assuring him of
unswerving confidence that nothing and no one could destroy.
He let no opportunity pass to send other appeals to Helen, but these too
were unanswered. One day a messenger came. Elijah did not wait, but
rushed to meet him. The message was not from Helen. Instead, a telegram.
Mechanically he signed the receipt which the messenger held out; then he
opened the envelope. The message was in cipher, but he knew each symbol.
The messenger looked at him inquiringly. Elijah shook his head, "No
answer," and the messenger rode away.
It did not matter to Elijah that the message was over a week old; the
message itself was sufficient. "Have failed to raise the money. I start
for California tomorrow."
Elijah felt that his return to Ysleta was hopelessly barred. Mrs.
MacGregor was there now, Seymour was there, Helen was there. Like
sneaking jackals, they were ready to fall upon him, wounded to the
death. They would not leave him in peace. They would not leave him in
peace even with what was his own. Nothing was left him but vengeance;
how could he compass it?
Like the white flash of a thunderbolt, the transaction with Mellin came
to him. Its sinister condition--"within three months after the water
shall have been turned into the main canal of the Las Graces"--danced
before his eyes. The words were clear and minatory, but there was a
hidden meaning that he could not catch, that was pointing the way of
deliverance. He strained forward as if to listen more clearly. The
swollen veins on his forehead throbbed and beat; then he sprang to his
feet--
"As God lives, that water shall not be turned on!"
The sun had set and darkness was falling, but day and night were alike
to Elijah now. He was at the gates of the canal at the mouth of the
canyon. The roar of the Sangre de Cristo was gone, only a trickle of
water slipped by blackened boulders and gurgled as it fell into tiny
pools, then wimpled and slid out toward the desert. Up through the trail
that led to the dam, darkened by dense evergreens to a deeper shadow, he
rode wildly. In the shadow of a great rock, he looked down upon the
still rising water, black with depth. He saw the great tubes let in at
the base, the wheels by which the gates were controlled, the wide,
rock-paved waste weir that, leading from the reservoir, gave into the
canyon below. He noted the broken earth, the clinging trees that hung
over the weir. His eyes, calculating, merciless, rested on the trees. A
gleam of triumph came to them. If the wheels were broken, the gates
could not be opened, and the water was even now trickling over the weir.
In a day or two, the whole volume of the Sangre de Cristo would pour
through it. Just a little powder behind the retaining wall, and the
whole bank would fall and choke the weir. Just a few hours and, the weir
choked, the gates unopened, the whole volume of the river would creep
over the coping of the dam, pick out grain by grain the unprotected
earth, till the dam weakened, the mighty mass of stored water would rush
in devastating waves down through the canyon, and the canal would be as
if it had never been. The dream of a life, the labor of years, these lay
in the hollow of his hand.
Why should he pity others who were pitiless to him? What mattered it,
if, like Samson of old, he should drag down the very pillars of the
structure he had raised? What mattered it, if he too should perish in
the ruins?