He was a queer fellow, she told herself with careful tolerance and a
little condescension. A true product of the desert; as changeable and as
sphynxlike and as impossible from any personal, human standpoint. Look
how beautiful the desert could be, how terribly uplifting and calm
and--and big. Yet to-morrow it might be either a burning waste of heat
and sand and bare rock, or it might be a howling waste of wind and sand
(if one of those sand storms came up). To herself she called him the Man
of the Desert, and she added the word mysterious, and she also added two
lines of the song because they fitted exactly her conception of him as
she knew him. The lines were these:
From the desert I come to thee,
On my Arab shod with fire.
This, in spite of the fact that Rabbit had none of the fiery traits of an
Arabian steed; nor could he by any stretch of the imagination be accused
of being shod with fire, he who planted his hoofs so sedately! Shod with
velvet would have come nearer describing him.
So Helen May, who was something of a dreamer when Life let her alone long
enough, rode home through the moonlight and wove cloth-of-gold from the
magic of the night, and with the fairy fabric she clothed Starr--who was,
as we know, just an ordinary human being--so that he walked before her,
not as a plain, ungrammatical, sometimes profane young man who was
helping her home with her goats, but a mysterious, romantic figure
evolved somehow out of the vastness in which she lived; who would
presently recede again into the mysterious wild whence he had come.
Pages:
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114