THE EVIL EYE
Harry Sanderson, harking back from the perilous pathway of fever, was to
see himself in the light of reawakened instincts. The man of no
memories, in his pointless wanderings, had felt dissatisfaction, a
fierce resentment, a savage unrest, but morally he had not suffered. The
spiritual elements of the maturer growth had slept. At a woman's look
they had awakened, to rise to full stature under the strange spell of
melody. When the real, remorseful nature, newly emerged, found itself an
object of animadversion and contempt, face to face with a past of shame
and reproach, the shock had been profound. The stirring of the old
conscience was as painful as is the first gasp of air to the drowned
lung. It had thrown the brain into a fever to whose fierce onslaught the
body had temporarily succumbed.
When, toward midnight, the fever ebbed, he had fallen into a deep sleep
of exhaustion, from which he opened his eyes next morning upon the
figure of Prendergast, sitting pipe in mouth in the sunny doorway.
He lifted himself on his elbow. That crafty face had been inexplicably
woven with the delirious fantasies of his fever. Where and when had he
known it? Then in a great wave welled over him the memory of his last
conscious hours--the scene in the saloon, the fight, the music, the
sudden appalling discovery of his name and repute. He remembered the
sickening wave of self-disgust, the fierce agony of resentment that had
beat in his every vein as he walked up the darkening street. He
remembered the thrown quartz. No doubt another missile had struck home,
or he had been set upon, kicked and pommelled into insensibility. This
old man--a miner probably, for there were picks and shovels in the
corner--had succored him. He had been ill, there was lassitude in every
limb, and shadowy recollections tantalized him. As in the garish day one
mistily recalls a dream of the night before, he retained a dim
consciousness of a woman's face--the face he had seen on the
balcony--leaning near him, bringing into a painful disorder a sense of
grateful coolness, of fragrance, and of rest.
He turned his head. Through the window he could see the blue, ravined
mountain--a slope of verdure soaked in placid, yellow sunshine, rising
gradually to the ridge, peaceful and Arcadian.
As he stared again at the seated figure, the grim fact reared like a
grisly specter, deriding, thrusting its haggard presence upon him. In
this little community, which apparently he had forsaken and to which he
had by chance returned, he stood a rogue and a scoundrel, a thing to
point the finger at and to avoid! The question that had burned his brain
to fire flamed up again. The town despised him. What had been his
career? How had he become a pariah? And by what miracle had he been so
altered as to look upon himself with loathing?
He was dimly conscious withal that some fundamental change had passed
over him, though how or when he could not tell. Some mysterious moral
alchemy had transmuted his elements. What he had been he was no more. He
was no longer even the man who had awakened in the box-car. Yet the
debts of the unknown yesterday must be paid in the coin of the known
to-day!
He lifted himself upright, dropping his feet to the floor. At the
movement the man on the doorstep rose quickly and came forward.
"You're better, Hugh," he said. "Take it easy, though. Don't get up just
yet--I'm going to cook you some breakfast." He turned to the hearth,
kicked the smoldering log-ends together and set a saucepan on them.
"You'll be stronger when you've got something between your ribs," he
added.
"How long have I been lying here?" asked Harry.
"Only since last night. You've had a fever."
"Where is my dog?"
"Dog?" said the other. "I never knew you had one."
Harry's lips set bitterly. It had fared more hardly, then, than he. It
had been a ready object for the crowd to wreak their hatred upon,
because it belonged to him--because it was Hugh Stires' dog! He leaned
back a moment against the cabin wall, with closed eyes, while
Prendergast stirred the heating mixture, which gave forth a savory
aroma.
"Is this your cabin, my friend?"
The figure bending over the hearth straightened itself with a jerk and
the blinking yellow eyes looked hard at him. Prendergast came close to
the bunk.
"That's the game you played in the town," he said with a surly sneer.
"It's all right for those that take it in, but you needn't try to
bamboozle me, pretending you don't know your own claim and cabin! I'm no
such fool!"
A dull flush came to Harry's face. Here was a page from that iniquitous
past that faced him. His own cabin? And his own claim? Well, why not?
"You are mistaken," he said calmly. "I am not pretending. I can not
remember you."
Prendergast laughed in an ugly, derisive way. "I suppose you've
forgotten the half-year we've lived here together, and the gold-dust
we've gathered in now and again--slipped it all, have you?"
Harry stood up. The motion brought a temporary dizziness, but it passed.
He walked to the door and gazed out on the pleasant green of the
hillside. On a tree near-by was nailed a rough, weather-beaten board on
which was scrawled "The Little Paymaster Claim." He saw the grass-grown
gravel-trenches, evidence of abandoned work. He had been a miner. That
in itself was honest toil. Across the waving foliage he could look down
to the distant straggling street with its huddles of houses and its
far-off swinging signs. Some of these signs hung above resorts of
clicking wheels and green baize tables; more than once in the past month
on such tables he had doubled many times over a paltry stake with that
satiric luck which smiles on the uncaring. His eye ran back up the
slope.
"The claim is good, then," he said over his shoulder. "We found the
pay?"
Prendergast contemplated him a moment in grim silence, with a scowl.
"You're either really fuddled, Hugh," he said then, "or else you're a
star play-actor, and up to something deep. Well, have it your own
way--it's all the same to me. But you can't pull the wool over my eyes
long!"
There was mockery and threat in his tone, but more than both, the evil
intimacy in his words gave Harry a qualm of disgust. This man had been
his associate. That one hour in the town had shown him what his own life
there had been.
What should he do? Forsake for ever the neighborhood where he had made
his blistering mark? Fling all aside and start again somewhere? And
leave behind this disgraceful present, with that face that had looked
into his from above the dusty street?
If fate intended that, why had it turned him back? Why had he been
plucked rudely from his purpose and set once more here, where every
man's hand was against him--every one but this sorry comrade? There was
in him an intuitive obstinacy, a steadfastness under stress which
approved this drastic coercion. If such was the bed he had made, he
would lie in it. He would drink the gall and vinegar without whimpering.
Whatever lay behind, he would live it down. This man at least had
befriended him.
He turned into the room. "Perhaps I shall remember after a while." He
took the saucepan from Prendergast's hand. "I'll cook the breakfast," he
said.
Prendergast filled his pipe and watched him. "I guess there _are_ bats
in your belfry, sure enough, Hugh," he said at length. "You never
offered to do your stint before."