Under Handicap | Page 8

the other
table by the stout Mary. Hapgood cast one glance at the stew and
coarse-looking bread put before him, and pushed his plate away.
Conniston, who had had fewer high-balls and more fresh air, actually
enjoyed his meal. The men at the other table glanced across at them
once and seemed to take no further interest.
Hapgood waited, bored and conventional, until Conniston had finished,
and then the two went back into the bar-room. The sun had gone down,
leaving in the west flaring banners of brilliant, changing colors. The
heat of the day had gone with the setting of the sun, a little lost,
wandering breeze springing up and telling of the fresh coolness of the
coming night. And it was still day, a day softened into a gray twilight
which hung like a misty veil over the desert.
From the card-room came the voices of the proprietor and the men with
whom he was still playing. They had not stopped for their supper,
would not think of eating for hours to come.
"If you feel like excitement--" began Conniston, jerking his head in the
direction of the card-room.
Hapgood interrupted shortly. "No, thanks. I've got a magazine in my
suit-case. I suppose I'll sit up reading it until morning, for I certainly
am not going to crawl into that cursed bed! And in the morning--"
"Well? In the morning?"
"Thank God there's a train due then!"
Conniston left him and went out into the twilight. He passed by the
store, by the saloon, along the short, dusty street, and out into the dry
fields beyond. He followed the road for perhaps a half-mile and then
turned away to a little mound of earth rising gently from the flatness
about it. And there he threw himself upon the ground and let his eyes

wander to the south and the faint, dark line which showed him where
the hills were being drawn into the embrace of the night shadows.
The utter loneliness of this barren world rested heavy upon his
gregarious spirit. Sitting with his back to Indian Creek, he could see no
moving, living thing in all the monotony of wide-reaching landscape.
He was enjoying a new sensation, feeling vague, restless thoughts surge
up within him which were so vague, so elusive as to be hardly grasped.
At first it was only the loneliness, the isolation and desolation of the
thing which appalled him. Then slowly into that feeling there entered
something which was a kind of awe, almost an actual fear. A man, a
man like young Greek Conniston, was a small matter out here; the
desert a great, unmerciful, unrelenting God.
First loneliness, then awe tinged with a vague fear, and then something
which Conniston had never felt before in his life. A great, deep
admiration, a respect, a soul-troubling yearning toward the very thing
from which his city-trained senses shrank. He was experiencing what
the men who live upon its rim or deep in its heart are never free from
feeling. For all men fear the desert; and when they know it they hate it,
and even then the magic of it, brewed in the eternal stillness, falls upon
them, and though they draw back and curse it, they love it! The desert
calls, and he who hears must heed the call. It calls with a voice which
talks to his soul. It calls with the dim lure of half-dreamed things. It
beckons with the wavering streamers of gold and crimson light thrown
across the low horizon at sunrise and sunset.
Greek Conniston was not an introspective man. His life, the life of a
rich man's son, had left little room for self-examination of mood and
purpose and character. He had done well enough during his four years
in the university, not because he was ambitious, but simply because he
was not a fool and found a mild satisfaction in passing his examinations.
Nature had cast him in a generous physical mold, and he had aided
nature on diamond and gridiron. He had taken his place in society, had
driven his car and ridden his horses. He had through it all spent the
money which came in a steady stream from the ample coffers of
William Conniston, Senior. His had been a busy life, a life filled with

dinners and dances and theaters and races. He had not had time to think.
And certainly he had not had need to think.
But now, under the calm gaze of the desert, he found himself turning
his thoughts inward. He had been driven out of his father's house. He
had been called a dawdler and a trifler and a do-nothing. He had been
told by a stern old man who was a man that he was a disgrace to