Then he made
coffee in a cup, cooked some slices of bacon on the end of a stick,
and took a couple of hard biscuits from a saddlebag. Of these
his meal consisted. After that he removed the halter from Blanco
Sol, intending to leave him free to graze for a while.
Then Gale returned to his little fire, replenished it with short
sticks of dead greasewood and mesquite, and, wrapping his
blanket round his shoulders he sat down to warm himself and to
wait till it was time to bring in the horse and tie him up.
The fire was inadequate and Gale was cold and wet with dew.
Hunger and thirst were with him. His bones ached, and there was
a dull, deep-seated pain throbbing in his unhealed wound. For days
unshaven, his beard seemed like a million pricking needles in his
blistered skin. He was so tired that once having settled himself,
he did not move hand or foot. The night was dark, dismal, cloudy,
windy, growing colder. A moan of wind in the mesquite was
occasionally pierced by the high-keyed yelp of a coyote. There
were lulls in which the silence seemed to be a thing of stifling,
encroaching substance--a thing that enveloped, buried the desert.
Judged by the great average of ideals and conventional standards
of life, Dick Gale was a starved, lonely, suffering, miserable
wretch. But in his case the judgment would have hit only externals,
would have missed the vital inner truth. For Gale was happy with
a kind of strange, wild glory in the privations, the pains, the perils,
and the silence and solitude to be endured on this desert land.
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