Jim had
no ties, few memories, and the desert was claiming him.
Thorne and Mercedes, however, were living, wonderful proof
that spirit, mind, and heart were free--free to soar in scorn
of the colossal barrenness and silence and space of that
terrible hedging prison of lava. They were young; they
loved; they were together; and the oasis was almost a paradise.
Gale believe he helped himself by watching them. Imagination had
never pictured real happiness to him. Thorne and Mercedes had
forgotten the outside world. If they had been existing on the
burned-out desolate moon they could hardly have been in a harsher,
grimmer, lonelier spot than this red-walled arroyo. But it might
have been a statelier Eden than that of the primitive day.
Mercedes grew thinner, until she was a slender shadow of her former
self. She became hard, brown as the rangers, lithe and quick as
a panther. She seemed to live on water and the air--perhaps, indeed,
on love. For of the scant fare, the best of which was continually
urged upon her, she partook but little. She reminded Gale of a
wild brown creature, free as the wind on the lava slopes. Yet,
despite the great change, her beauty remained undiminished. Her
eyes, seeming so much larger now in her small face, were great
black, starry gulfs. She was the life of that camp. Her smiles,
her rapid speech, her low laughter, her quick movements, her
playful moods with the rangers, the dark and passionate glance,
which rested so often on her lover, the whispers in the dusk as
hand in hand they paced the campfire beat--these helped Gale to
retain his loosening hold on reality, to resist the lure of a
strange beckoning life where a man stood free in the golden open,
where emotion was not, nor trouble, nor sickness, nor anything but
the savage's rest and sleep and action and dream.
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