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Vanamee's face was still that of an ascetic, still glowed with the rarefied intelligence of a young seer, a half-inspired shepherd-prophet of Hebraic legends; but the shadow of that great sadness which for so long had brooded over him was gone; the grief that once he had fancied deathless was, indeed, dead, or rather swallowed up in a victorious joy that radiated like sunlight at dawn from the deep-set eyes, and the hollow, swarthy cheeks.
Over the hills a haze of saffron light foretold the rising of the full moon. Nothing stirred. The silence was profound. Then, abruptly, Vanamee's right hand shut tight upon his wrist. There there it was. It began again, his invocation was answered. Far off there, the ripple formed again upon the still, black pool of the night.
Nearly all the other teams were harnessed, the drivers on their seats, waiting for the foreman's signal. "All ready here?" inquired the foreman, driving up to Vanamee's team in his buggy. "All ready, sir," answered Vanamee, buckling the last strap.
Presley told himself that it was impossible to look long into Vanamee's eyes without knowing that here was a man whose whole being had been at one time shattered and riven to its lowest depths, whose life had suddenly stopped at a certain moment of its development.
It was in Vanamee's strange history, the tragedy of his love; Angele Varian, with her marvellous loveliness; the Egyptian fulness of her lips, the perplexing upward slant of her violet eyes, bizarre, oriental; her white forehead made three cornered by her plaits of gold hair; the mystery of the Other; her death at the moment of her child's birth.
He ran down the track, crossing the culvert, over the irrigating ditch, and at the head of the long reach of track between the culvert and the Long Trestle paused abruptly, held immovable at the sight of the ground and rails all about him. In some way, the herd of sheep Vanamee's herd had found a breach in the wire fence by the right of way and had wandered out upon the tracks.
It was in Vanamee's flight into the wilderness; the story of the Long Trail, the sunsets behind the altar-like mesas, the baking desolation of the deserts; the strenuous, fierce life of forgotten towns, down there, far off, lost below the horizons of the southwest; the sonorous music of unfamiliar names Quijotoa, Uintah, Sonora, Laredo, Uncompahgre.
Harran gave him the news of the past week, Dyke's discharge, his resolve to raise a crop of hops; Vanamee's return, the killing of the sheep, and Hooven's petition to remain upon the ranch as Magnus's tenant. It needed only Harran's recommendation that the German should remain to have Magnus consent upon the instant.
They talked together till nearly sundown, but to Presley's questions as to the reasons for Vanamee's happiness, the other would say nothing. Once only he allowed himself to touch upon the subject. "Death and grief are little things," he said. "They are transient. Life must be before death, and joy before grief. Else there are no such things as death or grief. These are only negatives.
Annixter, whom he had spoken to first, had sent him across the ranch to one of his division superintendents, and this latter, after assuring himself of Vanamee's familiarity with horses and his previous experience even though somewhat remote on Los Muertos, had taken him on as a driver of one of the gang ploughs, then at work on his division.
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