Nothing before him as he jerked in his panting horse, nothing but the
desert, still, hot, thirsty, a great tortured thing under the
merciless sky. Nothing but long level stretches so bleak, so barren,
that a jackrabbit could not have hidden his gaunt, gray body. Nothing
as he looked with narrowing eye far to east and west, north and south,
but a vast, silent monotone of plain that would seem to conceal
nothing, as open under the bright rays of the sun as the palm of a
man's hand, an unsmiling, grave-faced, hypocritical thing which hid
and held from him all that he wanted in the world.
A frenzy of terrified rage upon him, he stiffened in his stirrups, he
shook his clenched fist at the quiet, jeering face whose very unmoved
stillness was like a deep contempt, and cursed it, his voice springing
harshly through his dry lips, rising almost into a sobbing shriek,
dying away without an echo, leaving the face of the desert quietly
contemptuous. For he grew suddenly as silent, a word cut in two by the
click of his teeth, the sound of his own voice in his ears tricking
him.
Breathless, a man turned to stone, he listened.
He had heard something--he _knew_ that he had heard a voice, not his
own, a voice hardly more than a faint whisper, calling to him, calling
again, then lost in the all-engulfing silence. About him the miles
were laid bare in the sunlight.
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