Perhaps, in spite of his gruesome boast as to dead men, it was as much

to satisfy his own spirit as to comfort Joan's that Prosper actually

did undertake a journey to the cabin that had belonged to Pierre. It

was true that Prosper had never been able to stop thinking, not so

much of the tall, slim youth lying so still across the floor, all his

beauty and strength turned to an ashen slackness, as of a brown hand

that stirred. The motion of those fingers groping for life had

continually disturbed him. The man, to Prosper's mind, was an

insensate brute, deserving of death, even of torment, most deserving

of Joan's desertion, nevertheless, it was not easy to harden his

nerves against the picture of a man left, wounded and helpless, to die

slowly alone. Prosper went back expecting to find a dead man, went

back as a murderer visits the scene of his crime. He dubbed himself

more judge than murderer, but there was a restless misery of the

imagination not to be quieted by names. He went back stealthily at

dusk, choosing a dusk of wind-driven snow so that his tracks vanished

as soon as made. It was very desolate--the blank surface of the world

with its flying scud, the blank yellow-gray sky, the range, all iron

and white, the blue-black scars of leafless trees, the green-black

etchings of firs. The wind cut across like a scythe, sharp, but making

no stir above the drift. It was all dead and dark--an underground

world which, Prosper felt, never could have seen the sun, had no

memory of sun nor moon nor stars. The roof of Pierre's cabin made a

dark ridge above the snow, veiled in cloudy drift. He reached it with

a cold heart and slid down to its window, cautiously bending his face

near to the pane. He expected an interior already dark from the snow

piled round the window, so he cupped his hands about his eyes. At once

he let himself drop out of sight below the sill. There was a living

presence in the house. Prosper had seen a bright fire, the smoke of

which had been hidden by the snow-spray, a cot was drawn up before the

fire, and a big, fair young man in tweeds whose face, rosy, sensitive,

and quiet, was bent over the figure on the cot. A pair of large, white

hands were carefully busy.

Prosper, crouched below the window, considered what he had seen. It

was a week now since he had left Landis for a dying man. This big

fellow in tweeds must have come soon after the shooting. Evidently he

was not caring for a dead man. The black head on the pillow had moved.

Now there came the sound of speech, just a bass murmur. This time the

black head turned itself slightly and Prosper saw Pierre's face. He

had seen it only twice before; once when it had looked up, fierce and

crazed, at his first entrance into the house, once again when it lay

with lifted chin and pale lips on the floor. But even after so scarce

a memory, Prosper was startled by the change. Before, it had been the

face of a man beside himself with drink and the lust of animal power

and cruelty; now it was the wistful face of Pierre, drawn into a

tragic mask like Joan's when she came to herself; a miserably haunted

and harrowed face, hopeless as though it, too, like the outside world,

had lost or had never had a memory of sun. Evidently he submitted to

the dressing of his wound, but with a shamed and pitiful look.

Prosper's whole impression of the man was changed, and with the change

there began something like a struggle. He was afflicted by a crossing

of purposes and a stumbling of intention.




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