第14章

But he had not changed, not in the very least.His beard had not grown an inch.Aha! The rascal, never to give warning, to drop down, as it were, from out the sky.Such a hermit! To live in the desert! A veritable Saint Jerome.Did a lion feed him down there in Arizona, or was it a raven, like Elijah? The good God had not fattened him, at any rate, and, apropos, he was just about to dine himself.He had made a salad from his own lettuce.

The two would dine with him, eh? For this, my son, that was lost is found again.

But Presley excused himself.Instinctively, he felt that Sarria and Vanamee wanted to talk of things concerning which he was an outsider.It was not at all unlikely that Vanamee would spend half the night before the high altar in the church.

He took himself away, his mind still busy with Vanamee's extraordinary life and character.But, as he descended the hill, he was startled by a prolonged and raucous cry, discordant, very harsh, thrice repeated at exact intervals, and, looking up, he saw one of Father Sarria's peacocks balancing himself upon the topmost wire of the fence, his long tail trailing, his neck outstretched, filling the air with his stupid outcry, for no reason than the desire to make a noise.

About an hour later, toward four in the afternoon, Presley reached the spring at the head of the little canyon in the northeast corner of the Quien Sabe ranch, the point toward which he had been travelling since early in the forenoon.The place was not without its charm.Innumerable live-oaks overhung the canyon, and Broderson Creek--there a mere rivulet, running down from the spring--gave a certain coolness to the air.It was one of the few spots thereabouts that had survived the dry season of the last year.Nearly all the other springs had dried completely, while Mission Creek on Derrick's ranch was nothing better than a dusty cutting in the ground, filled with brittle, concave flakes of dried and sun-cracked mud.

Presley climbed to the summit of one of the hills--the highest--that rose out of the canyon, from the crest of which he could see for thirty, fifty, sixty miles down the valley, and, filling his pipe, smoked lazily for upwards of an hour, his head empty of thought, allowing himself to succumb to a pleasant, gentle inanition, a little drowsy comfortable in his place, prone upon the ground, warmed just enough by such sunlight as filtered through the live-oaks, soothed by the good tobacco and the prolonged murmur of the spring and creek.By degrees, the sense of his own personality became blunted, the little wheels and cogs of thought moved slower and slower; consciousness dwindled to a point, the animal in him stretched itself, purring.A delightful numbness invaded his mind and his body.He was not asleep, he was not awake, stupefied merely, lapsing back to the state of the faun, the satyr.

After a while, rousing himself a little, he shifted his position and, drawing from the pocket of his shooting coat his little tree-calf edition of the Odyssey, read far into the twenty-first book, where, after the failure of all the suitors to bend Ulysses's bow, it is finally put, with mockery, into his own hands.Abruptly the drama of the story roused him from all his languor.In an instant he was the poet again, his nerves tingling, alive to every sensation, responsive to every impression.The desire of creation, of composition, grew big within him.Hexameters of his own clamoured, tumultuous, in his brain.Not for a long time had he "felt his poem," as he called this sensation, so poignantly.For an instant he told himself that he actually held it.

It was, no doubt, Vanamee's talk that had stimulated him to this point.The story of the Long Trail, with its desert and mountain, its cliff-dwellers, its Aztec ruins, its colour, movement, and romance, filled his mind with picture after picture.The epic defiled before his vision like a pageant.

Once more, he shot a glance about him, as if in search of the inspiration, and this time he all but found it.He rose to his feet, looking out and off below him.

As from a pinnacle, Presley, from where he now stood, dominated the entire country.The sun had begun to set, everything in the range of his vision was overlaid with a sheen of gold.

First, close at hand, it was the Seed ranch, carpeting the little hollow behind the Mission with a spread of greens, some dark, some vivid, some pale almost to yellowness.Beyond that was the Mission itself, its venerable campanile, in whose arches hung the Spanish King's bells, already glowing ruddy in the sunset.

Farther on, he could make out Annixter's ranch house, marked by the skeleton-like tower of the artesian well, and, a little farther to the east, the huddled, tiled roofs of Guadalajara.

Far to the west and north, he saw Bonneville very plain, and the dome of the courthouse, a purple silhouette against the glare of the sky.Other points detached themselves, swimming in a golden mist, projecting blue shadows far before them; the mammoth live-oak by Hooven's, towering superb and magnificent; the line of eucalyptus trees, behind which he knew was the Los Muertos ranch house--his home; the watering-tank, the great iron-hooped tower of wood that stood at the joining of the Lower Road and the County Road; the long wind-break of poplar trees and the white walls of Caraher's saloon on the County Road.