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.
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