Over the Pass | Page 7

the radiant tints of the afterglow.
"You don't like that one, O art critics!" we hear him saying. "Well, here is another before you have adjusted your _pince-nez,_ and I will brush it away before you have emitted your first Ah! I do not criticise. I paint--I paint for the love of it. I paint with the pigments of the firmament and the imagination of the universe."
The two did not talk of that sky which held their averted glances, while knowing hoofs that bore their weight kept the path. For how can you talk of the desert sky except in the banality of exclamations? It is _lèse majesté_ to the Eternal Painter to attempt description.
At times she looked back and their eyes met in understanding, as true subjects of His Majesty, and then they looked skyward to see what changes the Master's witchery had wrought. In supreme intoxication of the senses, breathing that dry air which was like cool wine coming in long sips to the palate, they rode down the winding trail, till, after a surpassing outburst, the Eternal Painter dropped his brush for the night.
It was dusk. Shadows returned to the crevasses. Free of the magic of the sky, with the curtains of night drawing in, the mighty savagery of the bare mountains in their disdain of man and imagination reasserted itself. It dropped Mary Ewold from the azure to the reality of Pete Leddy. She was seeing, the smoking end of a revolver and a body lying in a pool of blood; and there, behind her, rode this smiling stranger, proceeding so genially and carelessly to the fate which she had provided for him.
With the last turn, which brought them level with the plain, they came upon an Indian, a baggage burro, and a riding-pony. The Indian sprang up, grinning: his welcome and doffing a Mexican steeple-hat.
"I must introduce you all around," Jack told Mary.
She observed in his manner something new!--a positive enthusiasm for his three retainers, which included a certain well-relished vanity in their loyalty and character.
"Firio has Sancho Panza beaten to a frazzle," Jack said. "Sancho was fat and unresourceful; even stupid. Fancy him broiling a quail on a spit! Fancy what a lot of trouble Firio could have saved Don Quixote de la Mancha! Why, confound it, he would have spoiled the story!"
Firio was a solid grain, to take Jack's view, winnowed out of bushels of aboriginal chaff; an Indian, all Indian, without any strain of Spanish blood in the primitive southern strain.
"And Firio rides Wrath of God," Jack continued, nodding to a pony with a low-hung head and pendant lip, whose lugubrious expression was exaggerated by a scar. "He looks it, don't you think?--always miserable, whether his nose is in the oats or we run out of water. He is our sad philosopher, who has just as dependable a gait as P.D. I have many theories about the psychology of his ego. Sometimes I explain it by a desire both to escape and to pursue unhappiness, which amounts to a solemn kind of perpetual motion. But he has a positively sweet nature. There is no more malice in his professional mournfulness than in the cheerful humor of Jag Ear."
"It is plain to see which is Jag Ear," she observed, "and how he earned his name."
Every time a burro gets into the corn, an Indian master cuts off a bit of long, furry ear as a lesson. Before Jag Ear passed into kindlier hands he had been clipped closer than a Boston terrier. Only a single upstanding fragment remained in token of a graded education which had availed him nothing.
"There's no curtailing Jag Ear's curiosity," said Jack. "To him, everything is worth trying. That is why he is a born traveller. He has been with me from Colorado to Chihuahua, on all my wanderings back and forth."
While he spoke, Firio mounted Wrath of God and, with Jag Ear's bells jingling, the supply division set out on the road. Jack and Mary followed, this time riding side by side, pony nose to pony nose, in an intimacy of association impossible in the narrow mountain trail. It was an intimacy signalized by silence. There was an end to the mighty transports of the heights; the wells of whimsicality had dried up. The weight of the silence seemed balancing on a brittle thread. All the afternoon's events aligned themselves in a colossal satire. In the half light Jack became a gaunt and lonely figure that ought to be confined in some Utopian kindergarten.
Mary could feel her temples beating with the fear of what was waiting for him in Little Rivers, now a dark mass on the levels, just dark, without color or any attraction except the mystery that goes with the shroud of night. She knew how he