A year passed away before I commenced to
_hunt_, instead of waiting to be hunted; but after another year I gave
it up, and came to the belief that Rachel was dead or married to
another. But the very minute that such a treasonable thought flashed
through my mind, my heart held up the image of her pure face and rebuked
me.
"I was discharged finally, for forgetting orders--I was thinking of
something else--then I commenced to pull myself together and determined
to control myself. I held the job in Arizona almost a year, but the mill
company busted; then I drifted down on to the Mexican National, when it
was building, and got a job. A few months later, it came to my ears that
one of our engineers, Billy Gardiner, was in one of their damnable
prisons, for running over a Greaser, and I organized a relief
expedition. I called on Gardiner, and talked over his trouble fully; he
was in a loathsome dobie hole, full of vermin, and dark. As I sat
talking to him, I noticed an old man, chained to the wall in a little
entry on the other side of the room. His beard was grizzly white, long
and tangled.
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