He put the diary into his dispatch-box. It was found there afterwards,

and published with a few other letters. Everybody knows that simple

straightforward record; it shows Tyson at his bravest and his best. If he

had tried to separate the little gold of his life from the dross of it he

could not have succeeded better. He looked over the postscript hurriedly.

When he came to the words, "Knowing myself to be incapable of the feeling

women call love," he compared it with the other letter, "There would have

been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the

feeling." The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could

he say? And it was too late to mend it now.

He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet's letter. It was short; it

gave the news of Molly's death with a few details, and these words: "In

any case it must have come soon. Your going away made no difference. It

began before you left--the fever was hanging about her; and they say her

brain could never have been very strong."

He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish

crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence

and death. O God! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he

had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was

futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he

could have gone without breaking Molly's heart. "Her brain could never

have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.

The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he

strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed

him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.

There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there

condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.

Ex oriente lux! It was as if illumination had come with that fierce

penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.

Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him

reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a

bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of

sand.

And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was

surrounded.

Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers

were still there in the box of cartridges.

He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he

died, and those damning documents were found, there would be a slur on

his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that

the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.




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