Evening star. [volume] (Washington, D.C.) 1854-1972, 1916-04-16


all in the earth and sky was soundless.
In the strange hush and silence she moved
stealthily about through the glmmering
darkness of her room. Her clothes We're
all in order, even to her riding boots be-
side the chair Her purse, hung from the
chairs back, clinked duly as she brushed
against it in passing.
At the big gate of the corral old Pedro
stood waiting, with her pinto saddled and
bridled. The horse had whinnied once,
shrill sound suddenly muiled. All, in
deed, was ready for her flight.
Soon the old dusty trail would CLEAN
out, broken ribbon leading to the east
out of this land of drought and soundless
dawns and uninterrupted, terrible days.
Down the trail an hour hence she would
have fled she who had come out of the
East with Kane Malloy ten years before.
In the room adjoining her own her hus-
band slept, his heavy Rhythmic breath
ing audible through the thin barrier of
curtain that served for door. He could
sleep so, she thought bitterly, with no
intuition of her silent preparation. Once
there had been subtle bonds between
them-bonds of sympathy, and under
standing born of the stronger, more peril
Gus bonds of love. For she had loved
him when she had turned her back on her
exotic life and followed him into the des-
ert, into the silence and the drought
IN the years that had come after, the
glory of conquest had been his, empty
failure hers. The life the unremitting
toll of hand and brain, had bronzed and
hardened him into grim and merciless
manhood, virile in its beauty-to her re-
pellent in its sheer brute power and
strength. But the same hot suns and re-
morseless winds, beating upon her, had
Drowned the whiteness of her face and
rasped and roughened the lily softness of
her hands, that had never learned to do
willingly the tasks set for women who
dwell in the wilderness. In the desoa-
ton her soul made no flights upward and
outward toward the vastness and breadth
of the world about her. Instead, her
spirit had sulked and shrunken and
dwindled, sitting in utter, brooding lone
illness. Her red lips sagged in ugly curves;
her agate-colored eyes had come to look
with peevish hate upon all things around
her, including even her husband.
1t was not his way to question, nor hers
to quarrel. The division had grown in
bitterness and silence Wrapped in her
own selfish misery she had never consid-
cred Kane's thought of her. Her own
thought was for hersef-to escape, to get
out from the southwest country forever.
She laced her boots with fingers that
tangled the strings in their haste; then
she tied on her hat and veil. The faint
light along the east was fast broadening
in mother-of-pearl against the gray earth.
The strange cry of bird rose piercingly
clear from the wide, blurred space beyond
the piazza She fastened the little bag of
clinking gold at her waist, and became
aware, all at once, that the sound of Mall
logs breathing had ceased to come from
the room beyond.
Her ear took alarm. She stood listen
ing, leaning against the beds railing.
There was the unmistakabe pad-pad of
slippered feet in Malloy's room-the
crackle of a match
A panic seized her-the forerunner of
an inexpressble terror. She wheeled and
sped wildly across the rooms space
toward the outer door Hpr foot cauvht