Desert Gold | Page 7

silence ensued. A cool wind blew up the canyon, sifting the
sand through the dry sage, driving away the last of the lingering heat.
The campfire wore down to a ruddy ashen heap.
"I had a daughter," said Cameron's comrade. "She lost her mother at
birth. And I--I didn't know how to bring up a girl. She was pretty and
gay. It was the--the old story."
His words were peculiarly significant to Cameron. They distressed him.
He had been wrapped up in his remorse. If ever in the past he had
thought of any one connected with the girl he had wronged he had long
forgotten. But the consequences of such wrong were far-reaching. They
struck at the roots of a home. Here in the desert he was confronted by
the spectacle of a splendid man, a father, wasting his life because he
could not forget--because there was nothing left to live for. Cameron
understood better now why his comrade was drawn by the desert.

"Well, tell me more?" asked Cameron, earnestly.
"It was the old, old story. My girl was pretty and free. The young bucks
ran after her. I guess she did not run away from them. And I was away
a good deal--working in another town. She was in love with a wild
fellow. I knew nothing of it till too late. He was engaged to marry her.
But he didn't come back. And when the disgrace became plain to all,
my girl left home. She went West. After a while I heard from her. She
was well--working--living for her baby. A long time passed. I had no
ties. I drifted West. Her lover had also gone West. In those days
everybody went West. I trailed him, intending to kill him. But I lost his
trail. Neither could I find any trace of her. She had moved on, driven,
no doubt, by the hound of her past. Since then I have taken to the wilds,
hunting gold on the desert."
"Yes, it's the old, old story, only sadder, I think," said Cameron; and his
voice was strained and unnatural. "Pardner, what Illinois town was it
you hailed from?"
"Peoria."
"And your--your name?" went on Cameron huskily.
"Warren--Jonas Warren."
That name might as well have been a bullet. Cameron stood erect,
motionless, as men sometimes stand momentarily when shot straight
through the heart. In an instant, when thoughts resurged like blinding
flashes of lightning through his mind, he was a swaying, quivering,
terror-stricken man. He mumbled something hoarsely and backed into
the shadow. But he need not have feared discovery, however surely his
agitation might have betrayed him. Warren sat brooding over the
campfire, oblivious of his comrade, absorbed in the past.
Cameron swiftly walked away in the gloom, with the blood thrumming
thick in his ears, whispering over and over:
"Merciful God! Nell was his daughter!"

III
As thought and feeling multiplied, Cameron was overwhelmed. Beyond
belief, indeed, was it that out of the millions of men in the world two
who had never seen each other could have been driven into the desert
by memory of the same woman. It brought the past so close. It showed
Cameron how inevitably all his spiritual life was governed by what had
happened long ago. That which made life significant to him was a
wandering in silent places where no eye could see him with his secret.
Some fateful chance had thrown him with the father of the girl he had
wrecked. It was incomprehensible; it was terrible. It was the one thing
of all possible happenings in the world of chance that both father and
lover would have found unendurable.
Cameron's pain reached to despair when he felt this relation between
Warren and himself. Something within him cried out to him to reveal
his identity. Warren would kill him; but it was not fear of death that put
Cameron on the rack. He had faced death too often to be afraid. It was
the thought of adding torture to this long-suffering man. All at once
Cameron swore that he would not augment Warren's trouble, or let him
stain his hands with blood. He would tell the truth of Nell's sad story
and his own, and make what amends he could.
Then Cameron's thought shifted from father to daughter. She was
somewhere beyond the dim horizon line. In those past lonely hours by
the campfire his fancy had tortured him with pictures of Nell. But his
remorseful and cruel fancy had lied to him. Nell had struggled upward
out of menacing depths. She had reconstructed a broken life. And now
she was fighting for the name and happiness of her child. Little Nell!
Cameron experienced a shuddering ripple in all his being--the physical
rack of an emotion born of a new