HQNY IVERRALL
 
 The 
 
 New Commandment 
 
 ANTHONY VERRALL 
 
 ' 1 A neiv Commandment give I unto 
 you, that ye love one another" 
 
 New York 
 
 Edward J. Clode 
 
 Publisher
 
 COPYRIGHT, 1909, 
 BY EDWARD J. CLODE
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 CHAPTER 
 
 I. THE WAYS OF NATURE 
 
 II. THE HERITAGE OF HATE 
 
 III. A SECOND MEETING 
 
 IV. A DUEL OF WILLS . 
 
 V. THE PUPPETS OF FATE . 
 
 VI. THE DESOLATION 
 
 VII. A DESERT BATTLE-GROUND 
 
 VIII. THE NEEDS OF LIFE 
 
 IX. JUDITH'S FEAST 
 
 X. DISCOVERIES 
 
 XI. THE SAVAGE PASSION 
 
 XII. PRIMORDIAL BEINGS 
 
 XIII. THE LAND OF THE LIFELESS 
 
 XIV. THE CITY OF DREAMS 
 XV. THE ACHE OF LONELINESS 
 
 XVI. A SAVAGE PARTNERSHIP . 
 
 XVII. AN ADDED TORTURE 
 
 XVIII. THE DUEL WITH THE HEAT 
 
 XIX. A BATTLE IN THE NIGHT 
 v 
 
 PAGE 
 
 1 
 
 15 
 
 23 
 
 35 
 
 42 
 
 47 
 
 56 
 
 68 
 
 74 
 
 85 
 
 93 
 
 101 
 
 110 
 
 123 
 
 132 
 
 142 
 
 152 
 
 163 
 
 173 
 
 2138763
 
 CHAPTEB PAGE 
 
 XX. THE REVOLT OF HEAVEN . . .182 
 
 XXI. THE SEASON OF MOODS . . . .189 
 
 XXII. WHEN NATURE STIRS THE BLOOD . . 198 
 
 XXIII. THE MIGHT OF GOD . . . .212 
 
 XXIV. "THAT YE LOVE ONE ANOTHER" . 221 
 
 XXV. THE TORC OF GOLD . . . .230 
 
 XXVI. THE TRIUMPH OF NATURE . 237 
 
 vi
 
 THE NEW COMMANDMENT 
 CHAPTER I 
 
 THE WAYS OF NATUBE 
 
 DESPITE the charm and beauty of that per- 
 fect day of spring, despite the peacefulness 
 and glory of the afternoon when young 
 John Ghent and Judith Haines were to meet in the 
 way of things fateful, there was latent threat with 
 brewing violence impending in the air. 
 
 Not all Kentucky could display a mountain vale 
 more enchanting than this the vale that was red 
 with tragedy, where the Ghents and Haineses were 
 at feud. It was all a world of tender greens, with 
 blue and white for a sky. 
 
 New grass made the meadows and hillsides softly 
 inviting; new foliage trembled on the trees. Warm 
 breezes wafted faint fragrances across the land. 
 
 Out of the low, wide gap in the hills to the north 
 flowed the river, swelled half-way up to its thickly 
 wooded banks, and bearing great logs some lumber- 
 
 [1]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 man's harvest in herds and in pairs upon its surg- 
 ing bosom. The stream was divided at the head 
 of the valley, and a portion ordinarily no larger than 
 a fair-sized brook, but now quite a turbulent stream, 
 with some of the logs in its current, swept ma- 
 jestically around a wooded island of considerable 
 dimensions. This island was connected with the 
 mainland by a foot-bridge, rustic and slight. 
 
 Judith, a sturdy, outdoor child of twelve, bare- 
 footed, bareheaded, and roughly clad, was standing 
 alone upon the rustic bridge, watching the logs go 
 riding by as she leaned against the rail. She was a 
 handsome, well-developed little being, with dark-gray 
 eyes and hair of glossy black. 
 
 In the childish joy aroused in her nature by the 
 stream, the balmy sunshine, and the smell of spring, 
 she was utterly oblivious to a low, distant murmur 
 that came from far above. She even failed to hear 
 a strain of whistling from the mainland back there 
 behind her. 
 
 The whistler was young John Ghent, of the fear- 
 less tribe of Ghent. He, too, was barefooted, sun- 
 tanned, and sturdy. He was a handsome young- 
 ling of his clan, tall for his age, firmly muscled, well 
 built, and bearing upon him a youthful air of inde- 
 pendence. He came up the path by the streamside 
 
 [2]
 
 The Ways of Nature 
 
 leisurely, pausing and ceasing to whistle from time 
 to time, the better to watch some flitting bird or a 
 squirrel swiftly moving in the trees. 
 
 Engrossed in his silent scheme of observation, he 
 was presently startled by the low, increasing murmur 
 of the river. He ran a little forward, from the close- 
 growing woods, to scan the swollen stream. 
 
 For a moment he detected nothing at the curve 
 beyond the island. Then he suddenly discerned two 
 things at once the figure of the child upon the 
 foot-bridge, and a mighty wall of water, foam, and 
 logs tumbling downward through the channel in all 
 the confusion of a flood. 
 
 He cried out, but his voice was drowned in the 
 roar of the now divided waters. Judith, on the 
 bridge, looked up in time to see the frothing onrush 
 of the freshet. In its irresistible onsweep the logs 
 pitched and leaped like frightened whales. Fasci- 
 nated, awed to unconsciousness of the peril in which 
 she was involved, she made no attempt to leave the 
 bridge. 
 
 " Get off! Get off! " yelled young Ghent at the 
 top of his voice. He was running as fast as he 
 could travel toward the bridge, but the torrent of 
 water ran faster. It struck the flimsy structure at 
 its island end, then all along its length. It hurled 
 
 [3]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 logs and wolfish waves and riotous eddies against 
 it. 
 
 A grinding sound arose on the huger volume of 
 roaring, crunching, and seething. Logs came there 
 endwise, sidewise, and quartering. Some were 
 merely plunging, while others leaped clear of the 
 water's anarchy and charged like monsters stam- 
 peded to panic. 
 
 A herd of them dived beneath the bridge, and 
 one shot half-way out upon it. Then the structure 
 went down. It buckled like a thing of straw. Some 
 of it merely crumpled. The land end appeared to 
 melt in the torrent. 
 
 Judith went down with the flooring, still clinging 
 to the rail. A ten-foot section beneath her feet was 
 bodily lifted by some of the logs and snapped from 
 its moorings in a trice. On the bosom of the toss- 
 ing flood these logs and their burden shot along 
 down the stream, with more logs leaping before 
 them and others nosing from the rear. 
 
 Fully two hundred of these animated tree-trunks, 
 close-packed and apparently struggling for their 
 lives, rode in the turmoil of the flood. They occupied 
 the entire channel and tore down the overhanging 
 shrubbery, then swung, tossed, and dived, to go on- 
 ward as before. 
 
 [4]
 
 The Ways of Nature 
 
 Young Ghent had halted when the bridge col- 
 lapsed. Much as he loved the river and its spring- 
 time freightage of logs, he gazed in dread upon this 
 madness. He had quite expected to behold some 
 tragedy the grinding up and sinking of the piece 
 of bridge whereon the child was riding. 
 
 He saw her fall and immediately rise again. A 
 braver, finer little figure he knew he should never 
 behold in all his life. The something that rose in 
 his boyish breast was warmer than mere admiration. 
 
 " Hang on ! " he cried above the roar, and leap- 
 ing with youthful temerity out upon the nearest log, 
 he sped like some confident animal from one to an- 
 other of the heaving monsters till he came to the 
 raftlike float where Judith clung, and caught her in 
 his arms. 
 
 Together they swept on tremendously, the piece of 
 bridge with its railing now canted slantingly up in 
 the air. It lurched to go under, its edge at length 
 caught by some powerful undertow, sucking at its 
 bulk, and the two young creatures leaped together 
 to a log. 
 
 " Come on ! Now ! Quick ! " cried the boy, in 
 some swift-made decision. 
 
 His arm still circled Judith's waist. The log they 
 were riding sank beneath the surface with their 
 
 [5]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 weight. To another and another of the plunging 
 pack they sped, making toward the mainland as they 
 went. 
 
 A rod from the shore a log-end rose bodily, ten 
 feet high above the flood, and riding thus almost 
 erect, rammed half its length across the trunk of 
 an old fallen tree that lay slanted down upon the 
 bank. Instantly the log-herd was divided by this ob- 
 stacle. Young Ghent and Judith had approached 
 the bank with skill, when this sudden maneuver cast 
 them farther out again, with a violent commotion 
 about them. 
 
 The boy fairly hurled his small companion from 
 their temporary resting-place to the steadier footing 
 of a team of larger logs that nosed through the press 
 side by side. In the second that Judith caught her 
 balance on the pair, however, a wide gap opened be- 
 tween herself and the boy, and into the boiling flood 
 he pitched headlong. He went completely under. 
 
 The gap was swiftly closing, like a mighty pair 
 of jaws, when his hatless head reappeared above the 
 waves. Judith knelt quickly, caught him by the hair, 
 dragged him towards her, clutched him also by the 
 collar of his coat, and, exerting her utmost strength, 
 hauled him full length upon the logs. 
 
 He was up in a second, unhurt. 
 [6]
 
 The Ways of Nature 
 
 " Now's our chance ! " he cried aloud, and lifting 
 Judith stoutly, as he had before, leaped with her 
 quickly from one uprearing log to another, where 
 they grounded on a sloping spit of sand, and fetched 
 her, half falling, to the land. 
 
 They ran well up from the madness of the flood, 
 and turned to watch it roaring by. The boy pressed 
 his hands upon his hair, expelling the water. Then 
 looking fairly at the girl at his side, he smiled in 
 frank admiration of her courage. 
 
 She looked at him with equal candor, a dumb dec- 
 laration in her eyes. They had never met before 
 in all their lives, but the world had become theirs in 
 a second. It was not a long look that they thus 
 exchanged, for the boy became a trifle embar- 
 rassed. 
 
 " I thought I'd git a ducking," he said. " But I 
 don't care do you ? " 
 
 She said : " You were an awful long time coming 
 up. Do you feel very cold? " 
 
 " No," he answered, with his teeth slightly chat- 
 tering, " not a bit. It's a dandy old flood. Just 
 look at those logs ! " 
 
 She came closer to his side and gazed upon the 
 river. Then she glanced at his handsome boyish 
 face again, and presently once more at the torrent. 
 
 [7]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 Her hand went to his, unashamed, and his fingers 
 closed promptly upon it. 
 
 " I knew you'd get me back, just as soon as I saw 
 you coming," she said, in a tremulous utterance. " I 
 was scared before that." 
 
 " Oh, it's easy to run on the logs," he replied. 
 " You can see how close they are together." 
 
 After a moment of watching the fast-moving jam 
 of tortured monsters Judith tightened her hold on 
 his hand. 
 
 " It's a terrible place to be," she said. " All the 
 logs are in one great big bunch." 
 
 This was a fact. The wall of water, in its sudden 
 descent, had caught up so many of the lazily navi- 
 gating logs, to hurl them on in one gigantic drove, 
 that the turbulent stream behind them was almost 
 entirely free of anything floating upon it. Great 
 roily eddies boiled upward from below, however; the 
 current was riotous, and the roar was undiminished. 
 
 " Let's go up and see the river," said the drip- 
 ping boy. " It must be lots bigger than this." 
 
 Judith was more than merely willing. She was 
 happy intensely happy with this strong, unboast- 
 ful youth. She had never experienced such a feel- 
 ing before in all her sturdy young life. She nestled 
 her hand even closer in his, and silently they started, 
 
 [8]
 
 The Ways of Nature 
 
 side by side, their eyes to all intents and purposes 
 directed to the flood, their senses warmly centered 
 on each other. 
 
 The path was wide, and dappled with golden sun- 
 shine. They came to the place where the bridge had 
 been, and there Judith halted him gently. 
 
 " I thought I was going to be killed," she said, 
 " it went so quick." She pressed his hand in lieu of 
 further comment. 
 
 He understood, for he answered boyishly : " Well, 
 didn't you pull me out yourself? That makes us 
 even. Come on; it's going down already." 
 
 The waters were, indeed, already receding. The 
 river above was nevertheless a tawny ruffian of its ilk. 
 The path where the stream was divided made a bend 
 toward the bank, to avoid an exceptionally dense 
 growth of bushes. 
 
 Around this bend came the boy and the girl, shyly 
 daring to look each other in the face. They still 
 held hands. Judith's color had risen to her sun- 
 burnt cheeks and suffused her countenance with 
 maidenly radiance. Young Ghent, despite the fact 
 that he was wet to the skin, was likewise glowingly 
 warm. Neither of them chanced to see a man in 
 the pathway just ahead, where he stood looking out 
 upon the river. 
 
 [9]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 He turned alertly as the two young beings ap- 
 proached him and instantly an angry scowl of pas- 
 sionate emotion gathered on his brow. 
 
 " Judith ! " he shouted at the girl. 
 
 The young things started, and together beheld the 
 black-haired man with every sign of wrath upon his 
 countenance descending impatiently upon them. 
 
 Judith dropped her comrade's hand in haste. The 
 man before them was her uncle. He glared at the 
 youthful pair forbiddingly. 
 
 " So," he said, curling his lip in a scorn that 
 Judith could never endure, " this is the pride of a 
 Haines holding love-sick hands with a Ghent ! " 
 
 Both the young beings were silent. They edged a 
 little apart. Judith could scarcely realize the full 
 significance of all that her uncle had said. A Ghent 
 at her side! a member of the hated clan at war all 
 these years with her tribe! It seemed preposterous 
 impossible. 
 
 The glamour of her recent rescue from the river 
 was still upon her. In her bosom there were still the 
 warm, sweet pulsations of a newly awakened emo- 
 tion. She looked at her boy companion inquiringly, 
 scanning his handsome young face for the sign of 
 some deep-laid iniquity of spirit. 
 
 She was only a child, at the verge of womanhood; 
 [10]
 
 The Ways of Nature 
 
 she had been matured only in loathing of the Ghents. 
 But this young knight had saved her life. She had 
 given him more than childish gratitude. She wanted 
 the right to trust him, to love him with all her 
 warm and vigorous nature. She felt she must cry 
 out the story of his courage the deed he had done 
 and clear him from the accusation of being one 
 of the Ghents. 
 
 But the boy himself, abashed to have been thus 
 discovered in his first young heart-emotion, and 
 chagrined to learn that Judith was a Haines, re- 
 coiled from her presence and answered her look with 
 a stare that wounded her irrevocably. Her heart, 
 therefore, sank, at first slowly, then swiftly, as a 
 realizing sense of all that it meant came crushingly 
 upon her. A sickness took possession of her soul. 
 
 The man remained accusingly before them. 
 
 " Why don't ye kiss him? " he said to the girl, add- 
 ing humiliation to her already unbearable condition 
 of mind. " His uncle only killed your grandpa. 
 Why don't you tell me you love him if that's what 
 it's come to with your meetings ? " 
 
 The fact that a Haines had also slaughtered a 
 Ghent was not absent either from his memory or 
 Judith's, but it served to increase rather than 
 diminish his resentment.
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 His taunts bit far deeper into Judith's young 
 heart than anything else he could have uttered. If 
 only there had been some appeal, some softness of 
 light, in her young deliverer's eyes ! She might have 
 forgiven him his tribeship even now. 
 
 But there was none. He had been far quicker 
 than herself to feel the sting, and to realize all that 
 it meant to have been so discovered hand in hand 
 with a member of the hated house with which his 
 tribe were at feud. His eyes grew more hard and 
 accusing ; his face was flushed with shame and boyish 
 anger. 
 
 The words that her uncle had spoken burned hotly 
 in Judith's ears. It was young Ghent's attitude, 
 however, that turned all her previous ardor back 
 upon itself. Revulsion of feeling set in upon her ter- 
 ribly. Because she had loved her young champion 
 but a moment earlier, she began to hate him now. 
 
 Her pride was outraged ; her blood was galled ; her 
 budding nature crept back from the scorn of both 
 these beings, man and boy, abashed and mortified be- 
 yond expression. Young as she was, her nature was 
 intense. Her eyes blazed once, then her gaze was 
 lowered. Her cheeks burned hotly. She wished she 
 had died in the rage of the flood before this thing 
 could have happened. 
 
 [12]
 
 The Ways of Nature 
 
 " And you," said the man to the boy, with increas- 
 ing rancor, " this is the way you try to do your 
 family's dirty work, is it? Making love to this 
 child! If only you was grown to a man I'd choke 
 you to death and pitch your carcass in the river ! " 
 
 The boy still said nothing. To justify his pres- 
 ence here with Judith, to tell that he had been ig- 
 norant of her name, to explain that he had saved her 
 life these were things he scorned to vouchsafe to 
 any being of the hated clan of Haines. He, too, was 
 burning with anger and resentment. He wished he 
 had seen the girl go down before his eyes. 
 
 He had clung to some warm, fond feeling for a 
 brief time only, in the face of the man's scorn and 
 revelations, and having beheld Judith's nature react- 
 ing, in the one long gaze she had bent upon him, he 
 surrendered utterly to the suddenly altered tumult 
 of his being and repudiated her as completely as she 
 now repudiated him. His hand that had closed on 
 hers would gladly have hidden. Had he opened his 
 lips to answer he must certainly have cried for boy- 
 ish anger. 
 
 " Well," said her uncle, to Judith, as before, " if 
 you're going to kiss him good-by for the day, you'd 
 better git about it now." 
 
 Judith turned, with her face close-hidden in her 
 [13]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 arm for tearless shame, and stumbled off through the 
 woods in the direction of her home. 
 
 Haines took one last malevolent look at the boy. 
 " If ever I catch you with that child again," he 
 said, " I'm going to forgit you ain't a man." He 
 followed Judith, clenching both his fists. 
 
 Young Ghent remained there, still too angered to 
 move. At last he struck himself a savage blow upon 
 the face and returned down the stream, whence he 
 had come. 
 
 [14]
 
 CHAPTER II 
 
 THE HEEITAGE OF HATE 
 
 THE summer, with its heat and its labors, brought 
 many irritations to the clans at feud in the valley, 
 and when it had gone it left no balm in the house 
 of either Haines or Ghent. 
 
 Judith and John had met no more. Played upon 
 as only children may be by the taunts and spites of 
 their elders, they fostered a loathing toward each 
 other that increased with every day. They hated 
 as adults could not hate, since youth is more ardent 
 than age, and its moods and emotions enter more 
 deeply in the blood that nourishes the fibers of the 
 being. 
 
 The days of harvest, when they came at length, 
 brought new aggravations to the warring tribes. 
 Portent was rife in all the air. Then it came at 
 last the merciless hour of the long-embittered feud 
 and the sounds of the shots and the smoke of the 
 guns went floating away on a scene ironically peace- 
 ful. 
 
 [15]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 The vale's third mood of beauty was upon it. The 
 mountains, softened in the autumn haze, had robed 
 themselves in all the glory of red and gold and emer- 
 ald; the fields were mellowed levels of ripened grass 
 and stubble. Out of a cloudless sky the sun poured 
 a radiance caressful and comforting. In a clover- 
 field a few red cows were feeding homeward; and 
 above an orchard, out beyond, a thin blue column of 
 smoke was lifting the evanescent banner of a 
 hearth-stone and a home. 
 
 It was towards this habitation that Judith Haines 
 was blindly hastening. She was stumbling through 
 a narrow stretch of woods, returning home by a 
 species of instinct, since her senses were all in con- 
 fusion. Her eyes were wildly staring, her dress was 
 torn, and with all her strength she was dragging an 
 empty rifle, muzzle foremost, through the brush. 
 
 She did not cry, though her wide-open eyes be- 
 held nothing in all the world save a scene in which 
 the figure of her father lay loosely prostrate on the 
 earth, with a bullet through his heart, back there 
 behind her in the furrow. Terror was upon her, ter- 
 ror and awe and loathing of the Ghents. She knew 
 that she might not live to reach her mother's side 
 with all her story; she did not know, however, that 
 her Uncle Mose had been mortally struck, or that 
 [16]
 
 The Heritage of Hate 
 
 two of the Ghents had been slain by her kinsmen in 
 the fight. 
 
 Panting, and making a strange, dry sound of 
 grief and apprehension, the child came abruptly out 
 of the growth of trees and shrubs to find herself con- 
 fronted by the last dreadful scene of the tragedy. 
 
 Her uncle, dying in the very act, but fiercely vin- 
 dictive to the end, was drunkenly pursuing young 
 John Ghent, who ran before him helplessly. The 
 man had a hand-ax clutched in his relaxing fist; the 
 lad was utterly defenseless. 
 
 Judith beheld young Ghent trip on a root and 
 plunge headlong to the earth. The wounded man 
 behind him lunged forward and threw himself down 
 upon his victim. His dying action followed quickly. 
 It was a vicious but weak attempt at a terrible deed 
 with the ax. The effort cost him the last red spark 
 of life. 
 
 Then the boy struggled out from beneath the 
 leaden weight, his hand to his jaw, which was severed 
 in twain, and came running towards the place where 
 Judith stood, with blood swiftly flowing between the 
 fingers pressed against his face. 
 
 The meeting was not to be avoided. Young Ghent 
 was making for his sister's home; Judith could 
 hardly have moved to save her life. She stood her 
 [17]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 ground, still clutching the useless rifle, and the boy 
 approached, beheld her there, and halted momen- 
 tarily. Their childish glances met in a challenge of 
 hatred. 
 
 Judith was glad of the frightful wound inflicted 
 upon him by her uncle; the boy rejoiced that the 
 man was dead, and savagely he glared at the help- 
 less little girl who stood in the pathway before him. 
 
 He abhorred her as utterly as she loathed and 
 dreaded him. Fierceness burned in his blood to find 
 her thus here in his path; but he, like Judith, was 
 barely more than a child, and his hurt was terrible. 
 He, also, could not cry, and made no sound save 
 that of panting as he held his hand against his 
 reddened jaw. 
 
 They stood thus exchanging the poison of the feud 
 for fully a minute; then the lad passed on, and 
 Judith, dropping her gun, ran with all her strength 
 and all her fear to the house beyond the orchard. 
 
 In the days that followed there were prayers to 
 God in the houses of both Haines and Ghent, left 
 barely tenanted, for greater power with which to 
 hate and destroy. The bitterness of vengeances still 
 to be planned and wreaked was steadily increased 
 and intensified. 
 
 Judith was schooled in fierce antagonism against 
 [18]
 
 The Heritage of Hate 
 
 the clan and friends of all the Ghents ; young John 
 was healed on hatred and the madness to exact an 
 eye for an eye from his neighbors. 
 
 His severed jaw was knit a trifle crookedly ; a deep 
 red scar to the left of his chin lent to the lad's fine 
 countenance a sinister expression, like the hall-mark 
 of tragedy and passionate emotions. 
 
 But for all the venom that coursed in his boyish 
 veins, building up tissue of loathing for the tribe of 
 Haines in his strong young frame, there was gall 
 and fire of detestation gathering in the childish 
 bosom of little Judith against all thought of the 
 Ghents. 
 
 Mrs. Haines never married again. She would 
 neither accept nor beget another man creature, dear 
 to her body, to be offered as a mark for the feud. 
 She and Judith lived alone, a narrow life of hard- 
 ship and independence, in no day of which was the 
 hatred of the Ghents permitted to decrease. 
 
 She was an able woman, well instructed, self- 
 reliant, resourceful, and wiry. She imparted her 
 knowledge and expedients to the child in a hard, 
 joyless manner that wrought of Judith an extraor- 
 dinary young being of deep-lying, elemental moods 
 and incredible strength. Month in and month out, 
 in this environment, the intensity of her nature was 
 [19]
 
 concentrated on her hatred of young Ghent sole 
 male survivor of his clan. 
 
 For his part, the boy became a youth, and then 
 a man, before his day, hastened in the process by 
 what his life had been and by what it was. His 
 grown-up sister was barely less of a woman than 
 Judith's mother, and a man child requires far less 
 training in savagery, independence and aggressive- 
 ness than a female being, to achieve an equal station 
 in moods and manners elemental. 
 
 Young Ghent rarely moved from the cabin door 
 without a gun. He spent whole days in the moun- 
 tains, alone, learning the ways of things that run, 
 creep, and fly, as well as the ways of wind and cloud 
 and sun. He attended school, and took on knowl- 
 edge rapidly. He tramped across the country to a 
 town he wished to visit, sleeping alone on the earth 
 at night, and killing wild game for his food as he 
 traveled on his way. 
 
 His firm young body was as supple and muscular 
 as an Indian's. And the red man has yet to exist 
 whose memory of wrongs shall go deeper, or whose 
 sullen hatred of his enemies shall be more unquench- 
 able. The boy grew to young manhood, a hand- 
 some, restless being, fearless, isolated, and sinister. 
 
 In his nut-brown eyes burned a quick sharp light 
 [30]
 
 The Heritage of Hate 
 
 of alertness that nature had meant for a sparkle 
 of merriment. His face was clean-shaven and 
 strongly modeled. 
 
 On his chin he bore that scar defiantly, determined 
 that no persistent growth of beard should conceal 
 it from the world. This was his sign of the debt 
 he owed and the hatred he bore to all the tribe of 
 Haines who must one day pay him drop for drop 
 of his blood. 
 
 He and Judith had rarely met when at last his 
 wish for a modern education had taken him far from 
 the woods and mountains of Kentucky. The girl had 
 not even been made aware of his departure, and 
 meantime, despite the passions of both herself and 
 her mother, nature had laid certain womanly beauties 
 upon her day by day. She had evolved to a majesty 
 of physical charm inseparable from feminine health 
 and strength. 
 
 She was tall, straight, and only less muscular than 
 a well-developed man. Arms, limbs, and body, she 
 was as rounded and pliant as a goddess. Her head 
 was crowned by a mass of glossy black hair; her 
 brows were heavy; her dark-gray eyes deep-set and 
 fearless. Even the look of strength about her mouth, 
 chin, and neck merely added to the beauty of her 
 countenance. 
 
 [21]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 She was exceptionally handsome, in a somber, tragic 
 manner that was splendid to behold. The sternness 
 of her level gaze bestowed a dignity and exaltation 
 upon her expression that stamps an unusual type. 
 Nevertheless, so thoroughly had abhorrence of the 
 Ghents been infused in the currents of her life that 
 neither the burgeoning of womanhood, the final death 
 of her mother, nor her own departure from Ken- 
 tucky, to return no more, could allay that bitter 
 passion within her breast. 
 
 Thus they two had lived and grown their ways 
 the boy and girl, the youth and maid; and now at 
 last fate had apparently divided forever the man 
 and the woman with the heritage of hate. 
 
 [22]
 
 CHAPTER III 
 
 A SECOND MEETING 
 
 AT the end of a certain late-summer afternoon 
 John Ghent, far out of his true environment, after 
 years of wandering, and now a lonely man in all 
 the jostling throng of sightseeing people at the ex- 
 position to which he had come through curiosity, 
 moved aimlessly outward towards a distant exit, 
 through a narrow street of attractions, and felt him- 
 self wearied and satiated utterly by the miles and 
 miles of displays and marvels past which he had 
 loitered for ten long hours of the day. It was a 
 wonderful achievement, this fair of mighty nations. 
 He acknowledged the fact, but it had palled upon 
 him, particularly this garish show-thoroughfare. 
 
 To right and left his eyes and ears were assaulted 
 by open-air exhibitions and open-air clamor of voices, 
 musical instruments, and abominable devices for at- 
 tracting the jaded attention of the crowds. He 
 had lost all interest in music, people and wonders. 
 The air was stifling. Men, women and children were 
 [23]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 overheated, dusty, and irascible. The sun had de- 
 scended behind a gilded dome, leaving banks of 
 frowning clouds in the sky to press the sultry heat 
 upon the earth. 
 
 Ghent was impatient for air. His mountain-lov- 
 ing body was caged and fretful in this poverty of 
 oxygen. Only by an effort could he manage to re- 
 strain the impulse of his arms to clear a way ruth- 
 lessly through the slow-moving horde to outside air 
 and liberty. 
 
 Five years earlier the man would have crushed 
 his way to the open, but to-day, at twenty-seven 
 years of age, he was master of his being, and con- 
 trolled his passions and emotions as a trainer might 
 control a puma whelp. 
 
 At length beyond the invasion of a shrill musette 
 and the haunting percussions of a beaten drum, 
 Ghent firmly shouldered his way to the outermost 
 edge of the torrent of human beings and made prog- 
 ress more rapidly. Presently he halted. There, 
 above the top of a fence surrounding a large en- 
 closure, he beheld the monstrous dark sphere of a 
 captive balloon, a fascinating object as it bulged 
 against the sky, slowly, majestically oscillating as it 
 tugged and strained at its moorings. 
 
 A man outside was raucously bawling an invitation 
 [24]
 
 A Second Meeting 
 
 to the horde to enter and explore the upper reaches 
 of the planet. The view, the safety, the sensation, 
 and the thrill of a wonderful balloon-ride all these 
 and more were fluently depicted, and, what was more 
 to the purpose, the balloon was " going right up." 
 
 Whether an old-time boyish longing, or a hunger 
 for cleaner air and elevation lay at the root of his 
 impulse Ghent neither knew nor inquired. He sud- 
 denly determined to experience the novel delight of a 
 lifting away from the earth. He bought a ticket and 
 passed within, finding much in the mere apparatus 
 about the captive to goad his weary senses to fresh 
 en j oyment. 
 
 The balloon was a huge contrivance, impressing 
 Ghent as an animal might have done, endlessly sway- 
 ing back and forth like a caged beast pacing the 
 confines of its narrow house in a never-ending rest- 
 lessness of spirit. The basket was sufficiently large 
 to accommodate a number of passengers, but at 
 present it contained two persons only, a woman and 
 the regular attendant. 
 
 The woman, whose back was turned towards 
 Ghent, was talking to friends on the ground two 
 other women, who either lacked the courage or the 
 desire to undertake the ascension. The woman pas- 
 senger was tall, superbly molded, and bore certain 
 [25]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 unmistakable signs of youth despite the fact that 
 her face was not to be seen. In a mood of partial 
 indifference Ghent mentally acknowledged the dar- 
 ing of her spirit. She was evidently unalarmed by 
 the prospect of making the voyage alone save for 
 the presence of the regular conductor, whom she 
 had never seen before. 
 
 Ghent glanced the big bag over, then the car. 
 There was nothing superfluous in or about the bal- 
 loon except a lantern with a large bright lens, pro- 
 vided for display after dark. The basket was se- 
 curely attached to a stout manilla rope which was 
 wound about the barrel of the engine, and which 
 would first permit the restless ship to rise and then 
 would haul it ingloriously down again to earth. 
 
 An official, eager to get away to his dinner, ap- 
 proached Ghent brusquely. 
 
 " If you're goin' up, git in," he said. " I ain't 
 goin' to wait here all night." 
 
 Ghent promptly entered the basket and turned 
 about to watch the engine and the men. 
 
 " Let her go, Harry," said the official, and in- 
 stantly, as if in the joy of action, the great bag 
 steadied and began to rise. 
 
 To Ghent it seemed that the earth abruptly sank 
 away in a quiet, orderly manner, broadening out and 
 [26]
 
 A Second Meeting 
 
 flattening down with a sort of terrestrial animation 
 new to his ken. He presently saw the crowded 
 street wherein he had been a moving unit so brief a 
 time before. 
 
 How filled it was with humanity! And what a 
 creeping mass of black insects his kind presented! 
 Then the larger panorama of the exposition, with its 
 wonderful structures, peristyles, lawns, and lagoons 
 of water, spread out below him like a wonderful map 
 alive, gigantic a fairyland prodigiously mag- 
 nified. 
 
 His lungs filled with uncontaminated air. Joy 
 leaped in his breast. He gazed out afar to the smoky 
 city that had given birth to this dream-creation be- 
 low him. He looked above into heaven's vault. The 
 very sky seemed increasing in size. There were 
 newer majesty and mightier threat in the storm- 
 clouds piled up in ominous masses a mile or more 
 beyond. 
 
 He finally wheeled about to behold the scene un- 
 folding on the farther side of the world they were 
 steadily deserting. The attendant sat unconcernedly 
 on a stool, bored, indifferent, staring at the bottom 
 of the basket, his thoughts all clustered on his even- 
 ing meal, for which he felt a need and a strong de- 
 sire. The young-woman passenger was still absorbed 
 [27]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 in gazing out upon the earth-planet rolling in space 
 beneath her vision. 
 
 She, too, presently thought of the view which the 
 farther side of the car must be affording. When she 
 turned, she and Ghent were face to face. He was 
 momentarily conscious that a magnificently hand- 
 some young woman, with dark-gray, deep-set eyes 
 and the blackest of hair was staring at him with a 
 look of singular intensity. Then he knew that her 
 strong right hand was slowly becoming a fist, and 
 he felt some fierce hurtling of antagonism spring 
 from her being and give him challenge where he 
 stood. 
 
 It was Judith Haines before him. She had 
 changed remarkably, while he had not. She knew 
 him instantly, and he was utterly ignorant of her 
 identity. By the scar on his jaw, by the light in his 
 eyes, by the unaltered shape of his skull and face, 
 he had been revealed the boy she had hated all these 
 years more than she hated either deadly sin or hell. 
 
 Her look held him motionless. He neither compre- 
 hended nor dreamed what it signified to feel such 
 a scorn and abhorrence instantly directed upon him 
 by a woman strange to his acquaintance. He only 
 knew that venom was not content to lurk in this 
 strong young creature's gaze, but must leap and 
 [28]
 
 A Second Meeting 
 
 dart upon him,, rousing a very demon of response 
 in all his nature. 
 
 He thought that perhaps the woman might be 
 crazy suddenly made demented by this flight above 
 the earth and his hands grew tense and his muscles 
 hard, as if in preparation for defense in some ter- 
 rible encounter that might perchance result. 
 
 How long the two confronted each other thus 
 across the frail structure that held them, neither was 
 ever to know. Their exchange of mental and psycho- 
 logical fulminate was interrupted by a sharp ex- 
 clamation from the guard. 
 
 He said: "Good Lord!" 
 
 Ghent started like a creature attacked from an 
 unexpected quarter. He saw the attendant's face 
 abruptly blanch. Then the man leaned far out 
 over the car-edge and bawled at the top of his lungs : 
 
 " Pull her down ! Pull her down, Hank ! For 
 God's sake, pull her down ! " 
 
 A terrific flash of lightning and a roar and deto- 
 nation like the sudden explosion and rending of the 
 very firmament came out of the sky. A huge black 
 mass of clouds had swept upon them, driven by a 
 cyclone of wind, loosed at last upon the sultry up- 
 per reaches. 
 
 Ghent beheld a cheap frame building on the earth 
 [29]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 below suddenly scatter into a thousand separate 
 planks and scantlings that hurtled away and upward 
 like a flight of unheard-of monsters. A gyrating 
 storm had struck it and torn it literally into frag- 
 ments, all of which were flung aloft in a maelstrom 
 of dust and smoke that rushed towards the great bal- 
 loon with a speed and fury indescribable. 
 
 One of the demolished building's sections of roof 
 was driven end foremost upward through the air. 
 Just below the basket it struck the rope that an- 
 chored the tugging balloon to solid earth and parted 
 its fibers as it might have cut the merest strand of 
 soap. The rotating air-torrent pounced upon the 
 helpless bag with a fierceness not to be resisted. 
 
 The car was tilted as it might have been by a 
 landslide. The attendant, still leaning far out over 
 the basket's edge, let out one terrible shriek when his 
 balance was lost and plunged straight downward, 
 wrapped in the whirlwind's confusion. 
 
 With one wild leap the balloon shot upward, rid- 
 ing the wrack like a bubble on the waves, and spin- 
 ning in buoyant fury with the twist of the cataclys- 
 mic air. The darkening heavens enveloped every- 
 thing visible. With lightning, roar, and devastation 
 for its wild companions, the liberated gas-ship was 
 bowled cyclonically westward, now rising, now borne 
 [30]
 
 A Second Meeting 
 
 downward, and rising once again in the utter con- 
 fusion of the storm. 
 
 The man and the woman thus abruptly left to- 
 gether in the car had caught at the basket instinct- 
 ively to save themselves from death. Ghent's hat 
 had been snatched from his head at the first mighty 
 pounce of the cyclone. Judith's was stripped from 
 her now as she clung to the car. 
 
 Some of her hair was torn out by the roots in 
 the violence of the action. The coils upon her head 
 were savagely unbraided. Her long black tresses 
 whipped about her face and were tangled in the 
 ropes that supported the basket. She held with fine 
 young strength to her place, still staring at Ghent, 
 half in hatred, half in terror, as if she felt him in 
 some way responsible for all this prodigious might 
 and wrath of the elements. 
 
 Ghent recognized her suddenly in the midst of 
 his swift conviction that disaster and death were 
 their portion. The wildness of her aspect, as once 
 again she faced him with both death-presence and 
 death-menace in the air they breathed, had restored 
 to his memory the picture of a white-faced child with 
 a rifle in her hands standing in his pathway and 
 flinging her hatred upon him from her eyes, while 
 out in the field lay four men dead, two kin of his 
 [31]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 kin and two clan of her clan, and the feud still rag- 
 ing unended. 
 
 He knew her by the set of her mouth, the black- 
 ness of her hair, and the undying venom in her chal- 
 lenge. He knew her, and loathed her intensely, with 
 matured and pent-up hatred that could live above 
 all thought of the storm or any mad scheme of de- 
 struction that nature could devise. 
 
 He could almost have laid his hands upon her 
 throat and hurled her from the car. It was not the 
 terrific fury or the peril of their ride that stayed his 
 impulse it was simply that Judith was a woman 
 and he scorned, like a strong male animal, to harm 
 a fellow creature of her sex. 
 
 She saw that she was known at last. She was 
 glad he understood the utter abhorrence of her na- 
 ture for all that he was and represented. She, too, 
 could almost have done some deed of violence. 
 Could any mad spasm of the cyclone they were rid- 
 ing have flung him earthward from her sight, her 
 laugh of joy and derision must have pierced all 
 space, but she would have sent it to his ears. 
 
 Death, the frenzy of the universe abandoned to 
 this devastating storm yea, even God Himself all 
 were forgotten in her mental processes as she con- 
 centrated all her being on her hatred of this man, 
 [32]
 
 A Second Meeting 
 
 her fellow passenger. She clung there, saving her 
 life to hate him; she hoped to be spared some fatal 
 outcome of the voyage that she might go on hating 
 this creature, John Ghent. 
 
 The man's strong face had grown white and hard. 
 His eyes harbored fires no longer merely smolder- 
 ing. The deep red scar on his chin burned crimson 
 in the fading light a sinister emblazonment of all 
 that coursed in his blood. 
 
 He clutched the basket as he might have clutched 
 a Haines, and tightened his powerful grip in a mood 
 that knew no ways of mercy. With all his heart 
 he wished that Judith Haines had been a man, de- 
 livered thus to his company to fight out the feud 
 with naked hands, in all this fury of the elements 
 and in all this isolation of the heavens. 
 
 Meantime, the cyclone had abated nothing of its 
 rage, and the darkness of descending night, intensi- 
 fied by clouds of tangible blackness, had closed upon 
 the wild balloon. Like a creature bred for the up- 
 per atmosphere, and bred in strength and love of 
 life, the gas-ship struggled with the storm that had 
 so suddenly engulfed them. 
 
 It seemed to dodge the whirlwind's vicious lunges ; 
 it spun on its axis with the wind's rotation, opposing 
 nothing to the will of the tortured air. It rose at 
 [33]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 times, and was sucked and driven downward as a tad- 
 pole goes down in the water. It gave itself utterly to 
 the whims of the corkscrew of wrack and dust by 
 which it was engulfed, yet its trend was ever to rise 
 and rise above the earth. 
 
 The roar of nature's frenzy was undiminished. 
 The storm and the balloon were traveling with in- 
 credible velocity. Below, the earth was invisible. 
 Had it vanished into stellar space its apparent de- 
 sertion could have been no more complete. Utter 
 blackness claimed all the universe at the end of half 
 an hour. 
 
 On opposite sides of the tilting car two human 
 beings continued to cling, with a hatred greater than 
 the raging storm between them. 
 
 [34]
 
 CHAPTER IV 
 
 A DUEL OF WILLS 
 
 ALL night the balloon rode aloft upon the sea of 
 agitated air, hurled onward with the storm. All 
 night the two antagonized beings clung to opposite 
 sides of the basket, wrapped in the utter blackness 
 of the universe. 
 
 If the cyclonic quality of the wind-current some- 
 what abated in the early hours of the morning, there 
 was no diminution of the mighty force that still bore 
 the great ship headlong through the air, preventing 
 its loftier ascension. 
 
 When the first faint streaks of daylight invaded 
 the wind-swept heavens Ghent was seated in the car, 
 staring into the gloom with sleepless eyes, his body, 
 arms, and legs half deadened by the strain and the 
 long-continued fixity of a cramped position. He had 
 not slept throughout the night. He knew that Judith 
 had also remained awake and sharply alert in all 
 her senses. She, like Ghent, had been actuated by 
 one great instinct only self-preservation. 
 [35]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 The increasing light at length revealed her crouch- 
 ing in the basket, a haggard being with eyes that 
 blazed and with hair all wildly streaming. She had 
 forced her powerful fingers through the meshes of 
 the wicker car, and her white arm was tense and 
 corded, so long had the muscles been drawn. 
 
 The stress of the gas-ship had somewhat dimin- 
 ished. Ghent took occasion to inspect the sky and 
 the void beneath the basket. It was a wild, red 
 dawn that had come in the east, gashed and daubed 
 as if with blood. 
 
 Earthward there was nothing visible save billow- 
 ing clouds that faintly reflected the portent of the 
 sunrise. The roaring of the gale had ceased. The 
 celestial silence, profound and absolute, was broken 
 insignificantly by the creaking of the car, that 
 strained at a slight inclination behind the bag as the 
 huge balloon drove through space with the steadily 
 traveling wind. 
 
 Where they were and whither they might finally 
 land could not have been ascertained by a trained 
 aeronaut. Ghent was merely aware that their flight 
 had been tremendous, that their speed was still very 
 high, and that their trend was westward. 
 
 Judith finally arose to her feet, stiffly, and half 
 turned her back to her fellow passenger, whom she 
 [36]
 
 A Duel of Wills 
 
 watched from the corner of her eye. She could 
 imagine nothing concerning the possible outcome of 
 the voyage save fatality, but she had long been past 
 all terror of her own predicament as a victim of the 
 cyclone or the uncontrolled balloon. 
 
 Vaguely she felt a willingness to perish if only 
 John Ghent could perish first. Her life had been 
 grim, and her mode of thought was grim. She had 
 lived for years in fear of murder from ambush; she 
 had no fear of death met face to face. She was 
 capable of fighting for life like a tigress, however, 
 should occasion demand a struggle or fate permit 
 an opportunity. 
 
 The trials of the all-night vigil, in momentary ex- 
 pectation of the end, had affected the man and 
 woman equally. The faintness incident to hunger 
 and thirst after exhaustion and stress was not to be 
 avoided. 
 
 There was, however, nothing to be done. Some 
 change in the meteoric conditions of the upper at- 
 mosphere occurred with the actual breaking of day. 
 The air became less depressing to the gas. With 
 the warmth of the sun's rays at length expanding 
 the hydrogen, the balloon began to ascend. 
 
 Ghent was not aware of the alteration of the 
 altitude till he felt a sense of bodily oppression. 
 [37]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 Then vaguely, as one who knows a few impractical 
 things about ballooning, he looked about for a valve- 
 rope or something with which to effect a descent to 
 lower levels, if not to earth itself. 
 
 So far as he could ascertain, the gas-ship was of 
 special construction. He saw nothing that appealed 
 to his judgment as affording control of the car. That 
 the bag and all had been fashioned for captive- 
 balloon purposes only he realized at once. Mean- 
 time, the rarefied air into which the contrivance was 
 climbing had begotten a horrible dizziness in his 
 brain and a sickening sensation of engorgement in 
 his veins. 
 
 He attempted to arouse himself from a species of 
 lethargy stealing insidiously upon him. He realized 
 abruptly how far his physical weakness had pro- 
 ceeded without his knowledge. He stumbled as he 
 tried to move towards a rope that he hoped might 
 open some orifice in the bag. 
 
 Obliged to clutch at the basket to prevent himself 
 from falling headlong on the floor, he clung there, 
 helplessly swaying, and saw that Judith Haines 
 was similarly stricken and was all but ready to 
 drop. 
 
 A blurring of her vision had been Judith's first 
 intimation of their impending doom. She knew less 
 [38]
 
 A Duel of Wills 
 
 of aerostation than did Ghent; she remembered ac- 
 counts she had read of balloonists overcome by the 
 rarefied air of lofty altitudes, and of frantic strug- 
 gles they had made to open an outlet for the gas, but 
 her memory was dim. She had seen Ghent stumble; 
 she had recognized the sign of his weakness. 
 
 Responding to her habit of mind so long fostered 
 by the feud, she underwent a faint sense of exulta- 
 tion. The altitude would kill him first ! She should 
 live to see him perish before her very eyes! After 
 that what matter how soon she might be doomed to 
 follow ? 
 
 Perhaps some telepathic hint of what was in her 
 mind was vouchsafed to the man. A grim smile 
 played momentarily upon his features, rendering his 
 expression more sinister than before. He, too, had 
 suddenly comprehended that he and Judith were 
 helpless, and, like the woman, he cared for one thing 
 only to outlive the being of his hatred, perchance 
 for one brief second. 
 
 He gave up all thought of a possible valve that 
 might be pulled to lower the drifting balloon. He 
 concentrated all his efforts on the one thought of 
 surviving, retaining his senses, and standing erect 
 till Judith should topple at his feet. 
 
 It became a duel of wills that vacillated, faded, 
 [39]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 and returned again to the conflict as the thin air 
 starved them to nullity. Judith filled her aching 
 lungs in a stubborn, mad desire to outlive John 
 Ghent, flung with her here by the Fates in a realm 
 that was neither earth nor heaven. 
 
 Ghent was exercising a superhuman power to re- 
 tain his grasp on consciousness. Already the bag 
 above him had become a hideous presence formless, 
 indefinite and terrible. Like some monster created 
 for slavery and become a master, the thing seemed 
 possessed of animation, sentient power, and dia- 
 bolical cruelty. He felt as if its weight rested solely 
 on his head, even while it lifted relentlessly upward 
 into the straying wisps of atmosphere. 
 
 Judith was staring at him now with fixed, lack- 
 luster eyes that could scarcely focus on his counte- 
 nance. He swam in a haze before her vision. Al- 
 ready he seemed to be mocking as she felt herself 
 slipping from reason. 
 
 The red sky beyond him appeared to receive its 
 tinge from that scar upon his chin the one thing 
 still clearly discerned. She heard the voice of her 
 mother, praying for strength to smite the house of 
 Ghent. She felt her knees giving way, as if their 
 substance had melted. With one tremendous sum- 
 moning of her strength, she resisted the impulse to 
 [40]
 
 A Duel of Wills 
 
 wilt upon the floor and beheld John Ghent go 
 down. 
 
 He appeared to crumple slowly, and as one whose 
 limbs had softened like putty. Then he lay face 
 upward, propped in a half-sitting posture by the 
 wall of the car, his eyes wide open, his scarred chin 
 buried in his chest. 
 
 Judith, stricken down in that second, staggered 
 once, then fell with her head upon one of her arms, 
 and knew no more. Her hair, entangled with a slen- 
 der cotton rope that went upward to the bag, was 
 held out straight and taut by the weight of her 
 body and this cord was attached to the valve. 
 
 [41]
 
 CHAPTER V 
 
 THE PUPPETS OF FATE 
 
 DESPITE the fact that a portion of the gas was at 
 length escaping from the great balloon, there was 
 no immediate descent. The drifting airship en- 
 countered a powerful current of the upper strata 
 that bore it slightly north of west at a reaccelerated 
 speed. 
 
 When a thousand feet of descent had finally been 
 accomplished Judith stirred, and rolled to an easier 
 position. The strain on her hair was relieved. The 
 valve was immediately closed. 
 
 Through unmeasured regions of cloud and mist, 
 across vast reaches of space, and over unseen miles 
 of the earth's expanse the balloon was blown, with 
 its two unconscious passengers. Hour after hour 
 they lay there, unmoving, but alive helplessly 
 drifting over forest, plain and mountains. Thus 
 went the day. Twilight and darkness at length en- 
 veloped all the world and sky, and the gas-ship was 
 steadily sinking. 
 
 [42]
 
 The Puppets of Fate 
 
 It was not until night had fairly come upon them 
 that the man and woman lapsed from a comatose 
 condition into sleep. They still remained utterly 
 helpless, for their slumber was one of exhaustion. 
 
 It was late in the night when at length Ghent 
 suddenly started awake and scrambled to his feet 
 from some horrible dream. His foot struck Judith as 
 he floundered about in the car to establish his balance, 
 and she was awakened instantly. She, too, arose in 
 haste, as bewildered as Ghent till recollection of their 
 helpless plight came relentlessly surging upon her. 
 
 Ghent had immediately clutched the rim of the 
 basket, over which he stared for a glimpse of the 
 earth. The whole adventure, even to the final mo- 
 ment in which he had sunk like a dead man to the 
 floor, crowded upon his memory like the rush of 
 some nightmare grotesquely telescoped. In the sky 
 there were stars and clouds together. What he saw 
 below him might have been either earth or floating 
 mist. The night was exceedingly dark. 
 
 A fresher, more boisterous wind had caught the 
 partly emptied balloon and was driving it ahead by 
 fits and starts, jerking and straining its ropes and 
 fibers for a time, then puffing it more steadily on- 
 ward. Nevertheless, the balloon had nearly run its 
 course. It continued to drop towards the great dark 
 [43]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 earth, over the surface of which the wind was blow- 
 ing with augmented violence. 
 
 Ghent and Judith were greatly weakened. Their 
 bodies were tortured with pains of hunger and physi- 
 cal stress. At midnight they had sunk once more 
 to the floor of the basket, in sheer exhaustion. 
 Abruptly, without the slightest warning, the car 
 collided with some obstruction. It was wrenched 
 violently as the wind drove the gas-ship on its 
 course. One of the ropes that supported the car 
 was broken. The basket sagged. Its occupants 
 were all but thrown over its edge. Then the great 
 creature steadied, as before, and swung along with 
 undiminished velocity. 
 
 Both Ghent and Judith, standing up and clinging 
 to the cordage, looked down from the rim of the 
 car. In the dim light supplied by the stars a mon- 
 strous upheaval of earth was visible, lost at its base 
 in shadows of prodigious dimensions. The balloon 
 had grazed the ridge of a granite peak. They had 
 crossed a range of mountains. 
 
 It was not until two in the morning that the car 
 struck again. That death by some vicious maneuver 
 of the stricken balloon was imminent Ghent realized 
 thoroughly. Judith was no less well aware of the 
 hopelessness of the situation. When at length she 
 [44 ]
 
 sank in the basket, stunned by a blow that crushed 
 in a portion of the car, Ghent was far too engrossed 
 to observe that she had fallen. 
 
 The balloon was striking with greater frequency 
 and force. It was bowled along in the path of the 
 wind like a monster toy created for destruction. 
 Ghent withstood the shocks and travail for an hour; 
 then in some collision of exceptional might his senses 
 were suddenly blotted out and he fell, with Judith, 
 to the floor. 
 
 The basket had struck between two post-like ob- 
 jects, short, thick, and not to be torn from their foot- 
 hold. There the last remaining ropes were snapped. 
 A portion of the bag was blown through a rent that 
 was torn in the net of cordage. The gas flowed 
 rapidly outward to swell this liberated portion of the 
 vessel. Ripping and jerking as the wind laid hold 
 upon it, the whole silk envelope was presently dragged 
 from the wreckage, and away it went, rising rapidly, 
 and crumpling and rolling in the air as it lost its 
 gas and vanished in the gloom. 
 
 The remains of the basket and cordage had 
 dropped at the foot of the fibrous posts. The two 
 stunned beings in its hold were rolled in one inert 
 heap at the bottom, flung down like mere worn-out 
 puppets of which the Fates had grown weary at last. 
 [45]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 When the wind died away, a brief time only before 
 the dawn, a silence of almost terrible intensity 
 brooded on the world. 
 
 The daylight came, the sun rose, and the morning 
 was hot and well advanced when at length John 
 Ghent regained his senses and, sore and bruised, 
 crawled from the basket to look upon the scene. 
 
 The man could scarcely credit his senses. He 
 passed his hand across his brow and stood there star- 
 ing about him in swiftly crystallizing awe. 
 
 Judith had disappeared. 
 
 He was alone, beside a pair of ugly cactus-plants, 
 in a treeless land of desolation a desert, glaring, 
 forbidding, and rimmed about by lifeless hills of 
 adamant, shimmering already in the heat. 
 
 [46]
 
 CHAPTER VI 
 
 THE DESOLATION 
 
 WEAKENED, as he was, by the long endurance of 
 stress and privation, Ghent felt a new sense of help- 
 lessness take possession of his being as he turned from 
 one barren aspect to another of this region blasted 
 by nature's deadly curse. Time after time he looked 
 once more in the basket to convince himself that 
 Judith was gone. He circled the wreckage about. 
 He tried to recall what had occurred in that last 
 mad hour of their flight. He could remember noth- 
 ing. 
 
 His companion might have been hurled from the 
 basket twenty miles from this final anchorage, for all 
 that he could determine. There was nothing in or 
 about the basket save a snarl of the woman's hair 
 to prove that she had ever been there in his com- 
 pany. The lantern he had noted on that day when 
 he boarded the fated engine of flight was still in 
 place, lashed firmly to the unsmashed portion of the 
 [47]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 car. Its bulging lens glittered hotly in the sun, like 
 a monstrous mocking eye. 
 
 The man was famishing for food and drink. 
 The heat began to harass him. Pie searched all the 
 vast expanse of desolation for any sign of green- 
 ery. There was none. The land was gray where 
 it was not black with the ancient upheavals of vol- 
 canic rock, and even the few scattered cactus-plants 
 were parched and brown and dry. 
 
 The brush that covered the sandy floor of the 
 valley was ankle-high, stiff, and practically leafless. 
 Of bird, beast, or reptile there was not so much as 
 a sign. The sky was cloudless; the wind had died 
 away, to blow no more till afternoon. 
 
 If a grim reminiscence of his feud with all the 
 house of Haines prompted the man to a certain 
 sardonic triumph in the thought that Judith had 
 doubtless been flung or dragged to death, his ex- 
 ultation was brief as he contemplated this land of 
 silence and lifelessness wherein he was cast, already 
 exhausted and famishing. 
 
 A wild sort of desperation seized him. He re- 
 fused to perish here upon the sands of this terrible 
 place. Water there must be somewhere, and food 
 he must find, if only enough for a day! In some 
 of the mountains, divided by huge ravines, he might 
 [48]
 
 The Desolation 
 
 come upon a spring and shade. He felt he must 
 soon find shade, or wither and crack in his clothing. 
 
 He started for the nearest range of mountains, 
 taking nothing from the ruins of the car. He soon 
 removed his coat and held it above his head in lieu 
 of a hat. After half an hour of walking he tore 
 a piece of the light gray cloth from the coat and 
 threw the remainder away. The piece was suffi- 
 cient for his head, and all added weight was a 
 burden. 
 
 Near as the range of hills had appeared, it was 
 more than an hour before Ghent arrived at the 
 foot of a steep ascent. The heat had become mad- 
 dening ; the glare of the sands was afflicting the 
 man's hot brain with torture. All the landscape 
 vibrated endlessly as the air rose in visible irradia- 
 tions from the blistering rocks and gravel. 
 
 Ghent had been attracted by the purple tints of a 
 canon filled with shadows. By the time he had 
 come there the sun had risen to an eminence from 
 which it searched to the very floor of the chasm. 
 The gorge was still slightly cooler than the slopes, 
 however, and for more than an hour he labored up 
 its narrow bed in the hope of discovering a spring. 
 
 Obliged, at length, to abandon all hope of relief 
 to be found in this ancient channel, he could think 
 [49]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 of one more expedient only to climb to some height 
 and obtain a wider view of the desert and its ranges, 
 trusting that somewhere the emerald sign of God's 
 indulgence might greet his aching eyes. He started 
 for the summit of the ridge that rose on his right. 
 It was not so steep as the rise on his left, but its 
 whole vast bulk was appallingly barren. 
 
 He toiled up the rocky acclivity with painful 
 slowness. He was pinched with hunger; he was 
 parched with thirst; he was weak in everything save 
 the will to live. Over seams of lava that had 
 cracked like slabs of dirt-colored crockery he 
 stumbled, the broken fragments slipping from be- 
 neath his feet and giving forth clear metallic tinkles. 
 The heat rose and engulfed him. He fell on the 
 loosely sliding drift from time to time, and felt the 
 rocks incredibly hot in the blaze of the sun. 
 
 Struggling persistently upward, he came, at 
 length, upon a singular deposit that lay like a road- 
 way of glass along the undulating conformations of 
 the slope. It halted him abruptly. Had the chil- 
 dren of some primeval race of Titans strewn bits of 
 broken mirror here, crudely to represent a river 
 along the rises and acclivities where no river could 
 have run, the sight could have been no more phe- 
 nomenal. Thousands on thousands of the glitter- 
 [50]
 
 The Desolation 
 
 ing fragments of stuff lay scattered in a belt, or 
 pathway, fully fifteen feet in width and half a mile 
 in length, stretching along till it disappeared be- 
 yond the brow of a rounded elevation, glaring in a 
 hard, hot, terrible manner as the sun beat full 
 upon it. 
 
 Ghent stared at it in wonder. The stuff was ob- 
 sidian natural glass hoisted forth from some vol- 
 canic workshop of the past, where a slave of the 
 nether abysses, laboring incessantly in molten seas 
 of mineral, had spent himself to blow prodigious 
 bubbles that time and shock had shattered into a 
 million formless pieces and cast upon this scrap- 
 heap of the world. 
 
 There were pieces as clear as morning dew, pieces 
 as black as varnished ebony, and pieces 'half clear 
 with a feathery streak of smoke incased in their sub- 
 stance. Thousands of chips were as thin and sharp 
 as knife-blades, and nearly all were broken on a 
 curve. There were larger pieces here and there, 
 broken on the concave lines of a saucer or rounded 
 on the top like monster buttons. 
 
 Across this litter from the halls of ancient gods 
 
 the famishing man plunged heavily. Above him rose 
 
 the summit, from the height of which he hoped to 
 
 discover some haven of water and rest. When he 
 
 [51]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 came there, after half an hour of labored climbing 
 in the heat and rocks, he found it a flat sort of 
 table-land, which must still be traversed before he 
 could look upon the canons and rises beyond. He 
 almost surrendered in his disappointment; yet he 
 staggered on, bruising his knees and his hands as 
 he fell to the blistered sands and rocks beneath his 
 feet, and thus arrived at length upon the farther 
 side. 
 
 Here, indeed, he beheld a vast panorama of the 
 desert. The waterless valley lay below him, drunken 
 with the heat. Its breath rose in quivering fumes ; 
 its sands glared back at the sun. Nearer at hand 
 more canons and ravines laid wide open to the sky, 
 as if the very mountains had split in the heat, re- 
 vealing rocks for their mighty bones and sinews, 
 all parched and cracked and forbidding. 
 
 Ghent felt despair and horror grip at his vitals. 
 He knew he could stagger onward no more than an- 
 other fearful hour at the utmost. There was not a 
 hint of greenery in all that scene of death. Weakly 
 he turned toward a ledge of rock that cast a meager 
 shade upon the sand. 
 
 About to fling himself beneath its shelter, per- 
 haps to rise no more, he suddenly started back with 
 his nerves all keenly tingling. A great black rattle- 
 [52]
 
 The Desolation 
 
 snake lay there, coiled in the sun, where the man's 
 heavy foot had so nearly been planted. With the 
 quick, uncompromising instinct to kill bestirring 
 him, Ghent looked hurriedly about to catch up a 
 rock. He paused in the movement, however, his 
 eye abruptly caught by a tint far down below him 
 in a wrinkle of the hill. Then a hoarse cry escaped 
 from his lips. The tips of some growing things, far 
 down the slope, were fringing the hill's huge bulk 
 of gray and excitement sent a flood to his brain 
 and heart. 
 
 On his eager thought, even as he ran towards this 
 promise of relief, sprang the suggestion that even 
 the snake, by its presence here, advertised water 
 near at hand. He waited for no reasoning, how- 
 ever, but with hope inspired and strength renewed 
 plunged madly down the runway of some bygone 
 freshet and beheld the jewel of emerald expand and 
 lengthen out below him. 
 
 He came to the upper limits of a narrow oasis, 
 panting wildly. He crashed his way into the 
 growth of stunted willow, alder, and brush, startling 
 a covey of quail from cover, till on whirring wings 
 they scattered in every direction. The growth here 
 was meager, and closely confined to the bed of a 
 gulch. 
 
 [53]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 In his haste to come to water the man plunged 
 entirely across the gully and out to the farther 
 edge of the greenery without encountering a hint 
 of moisture. Back again to the bed of the shallow 
 ravine he thrust his desperate way, and struggled 
 through the undergrowth, down-hill, in pursuit of 
 the water he knew must rise to the surface some- 
 where below. 
 
 He came to it presently a hole no more than 
 six inches deep and less than two feet across, but 
 filled with clear, cold water that flowed a little 
 through the sand and then sank to rise no more. 
 
 In his famished condition he did not hear a sound 
 of something moving, a little removed from the 
 spring, but, concerned with restraining his natural 
 impulse to drink to satisfaction and doubtless make 
 himself ill, he threw himself down upon the dampened 
 gravel, and filling his mouth, underwent an ecstasy 
 that nearly made him faint. He fairly embraced 
 the earth on which he was stretched, laying his face 
 in the cool damp sand where the outflow disap- 
 peared and thrusting his hands in the trickling 
 stream to cool and moisten his flesh. Then he 
 drank again, barely a sip, and rolled on his back to 
 resist the temptation offered by this miracle this 
 sign of God's mercy in the desert. 
 [54]
 
 The Desolation 
 
 At length he had taken a quarter as much of the 
 precious fluid as his famished body demanded, and 
 he rose to look about. He had barely turned, in 
 his rapid survey of the place, when once again he 
 was startled to the depths of his being. There in 
 the shade stood Judith Haines, her eyes fixed de- 
 fiantly upon him, her aspect that of a creature of 
 the wild in the lair she had made for her own. 
 
 [55]
 
 CHAPTER VII 
 
 A DESERT BATTLE-GROUND 
 
 FOR a long, poignant minute the man and the 
 woman cast here together by the whim of chance 
 faced each other in their long-fostered spirit of an- 
 tagonism, which the struggle for existence must 
 presently re-embitter between them. They were a 
 desperate-looking pair, in a desperate plight, she 
 with her black hair all disheveled and her tragic 
 gaze intensified by the prospect before her, he a 
 coatless, half-crazed being, with his sinister expres- 
 sion deepened on his face. Some savage instinct of 
 self-preservation, bequeathed them by ancestors who 
 had survived through a brutal fitness for the fight, 
 stirred vaguely in their veins. Each was determined 
 to live if life were possible though this terrible 
 place might afford but sustenance for one. Each 
 understood and accepted the unspoken challenge of 
 the other, in a mood already conforming to the 
 rude, elemental conditions into which they had both 
 been flung. 
 
 [56]
 
 A Desert Battle-Ground 
 
 It was Ghent into whose nature an impulse of 
 chivalry and generosity came warmly stealing as he 
 gazed upon his fellow being in the plight to which 
 fate had reduced them. He was a strong, virile 
 being, as selfish as the needs of nature might de- 
 mand, nevertheless a certain tenderness, akin to 
 pity or to sympathy towards Judith, took posses- 
 sion of his being as they stood there face to 
 face. 
 
 He started in her direction, slightly, responding 
 to the dictates of his finer, magnanimous self. The 
 movement was wholly involuntary, an obedience to 
 his nobler instincts as a man. He was almost on 
 the point of speaking, but the look in her eyes for- 
 bade him, and he halted where he stood. Her hatred, 
 her utter distrust of all that his tribe had repre- 
 sented, awoke once more the old antagonisms in his 
 being and gave them, if possible, a new intensity. 
 He would make no advances ; there could be no sym- 
 pathy between them. 
 
 It was Judith who turned away at last. Her 
 hair was snarled and her dress was torn. Never- 
 theless, it was a strong, able figure she presented as 
 she parted the trees to leave the place. No cave- 
 woman, bred to a wild environment, could have 
 seemed more self-reliant, more supple, alert, or mus- 
 [57]
 
 cular, than she. Yet, her limbs were aching, and 
 hunger gnawed fiercely at her body. 
 
 Like one already familiar with the place, she 
 made her way down through the narrow vale of 
 greenery for a considerable distance, then climbed 
 the right bank of the gorge to a ledge of rocks 
 pierced by a rude sort of cave, at the mouth of 
 which she finally halted, determined to guard the 
 shelter she had taken against any possible intrusion 
 on the part of Ghent. 
 
 Already she felt the sense of ownership that prior 
 discovery and pre-emption engender. Her coming 
 here had been amazingly direct. She had been 
 aroused from her stunned condition within an hour 
 of the air-ship's final wreckage at the foot of the 
 two dried cactus-plants, and over the prostrate 
 form of Ghent she had clambered out while dark- 
 ness still lay upon the world. The wind that had 
 driven the helpless balloon across the desert had 
 continued to blow till nearly dawn, sweeping upon 
 the solitary figure of the woman from some huge 
 cleft channeled in the mountains. 
 
 Subjected, as she and Ghent had been, to thirst 
 and hunger for almost two entire days, her one de- 
 sire had been, like Ghent's, to find some good supply 
 of water with the shortest possible delay. Unaware, 
 [58]
 
 A Desert Battle-Ground 
 
 in the darkness, that the land about her was a 
 desert, and guided by some faint, evanescent fra- 
 grance of growing things that came on the wind 
 from the canon, she had gone almost unerringly to 
 the mouth of the great ravine. At dawn she had 
 climbed its forbidding vestibule, past scattered boul- 
 ders and towering walls that stood like the portals 
 of a massive open gateway to the precious oasis 
 above, and so had come to the spring and relief fully 
 three or four hours ahead of Ghent. 
 
 She had startled a few wild denizens of the place 
 from their haunts, she had drunk to satisfaction at 
 the spring, she had bathed her face and hands in 
 physical gratitude, and then she had started up 
 and down the slender field of life and along the 
 hillsides in a vain, half-frenzied effort to kill some 
 living creature for her food. 
 
 She had found the cave, she had looked on the 
 mighty desolation, and a sense of terror and help- 
 lessness had been succeeded in her mind by a fierce 
 desire to live, even here, while throughout the very 
 fiber of her being long-latent instincts and emotions 
 primordial had faintly stirred with her blood. 
 
 Wearied, and with hunger increasing her despera- 
 tion, she had returned to the spring more than half 
 a dozen times, and at length had beheld the arrival 
 [59]
 
 of the man, John Ghent, from whom she had turned 
 in her hatred. 
 
 Ghent, in the meantime, had gratified his body as 
 far as mere water could appease its demands. As 
 Judith had done before him, he promptly began an 
 exploration of the place. He clambered up the hill- 
 side above the fringe of green, and walked there in 
 the sun-heat to make his first reconnaissance. He 
 saw that the life-giving water had encouraged a 
 singular growth, as if the seeds of eager plants, 
 borne on the air or carried by wandering birds, had 
 descended here like things of prey upon the damp- 
 ened soil, where the struggling and shouldering for 
 root-hold had been waged relentlessly, according to 
 some law that knew nothing of mercy. 
 
 Willows, oak-shrubs, alders, and underbrush 
 fought for the bed of the canon, where the moisture 
 was seeping underground. At the outer edge, 
 where moisture and absolute dryness met, a few red- 
 armed manzanita bushes disputed the soil with scat- 
 tered nut-pine trees, juniper, and brush. Grasses 
 filled all the interstices, some of them tall and gone 
 to seed. 
 
 Up the slope, content with a hint of moisture in 
 the air, were mountain shrubs, stunted, stout, and 
 harsh. A few wild-gooseberry bushes maintained 
 [60]
 
 A Desert Battle-Ground 
 
 themselves in the tangle. Altogether, the growth 
 was as heterogeneous and incongruous as the land 
 made possible. It extended for several hundred 
 yards down the bed of the gorge, terminating just 
 above the perpendicular walls that Judith had 
 passed on her upward climb, and bounded on either 
 side by the rocky, barren slopes that were finally 
 flanked by the mountains. 
 
 In the haunts it afforded there were squirrels, rab- 
 bits, two or three coveys of quail, at least one flock 
 of grouse, snakes, lizards, and mice. There were 
 evidences, also, that larger beasts came here at 
 times to prowl, if they did not, indeed, live near at 
 hand. 
 
 All this Ghent discovered soon. His woodcraft, 
 his sharp, observant eyes, and his powers of out- 
 door deduction, developed in the school of nature, 
 informed him promptly of the salient facts concern- 
 ing this small inhabited world in the vast expanse 
 of desert lifelessness. Emerging from the thicket 
 of alders and willows near the center of the limited 
 oasis, he beheld the one additional factor looming 
 large in this game of the Fates Judith and her 
 cave. 
 
 He saw her across the ravine as she still stood 
 guard before the shelter she had claimed, a figure 
 [61]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 of energy, determination, and defiance. His gener- 
 ous impulse having been spurned, he rejoiced that 
 she had not weakened and thrown herself upon his 
 care in the culminating hour of their calamity. 
 
 He cared not whether she lived or perished ; he felt 
 no renewal, of his emotion of sympathy for the 
 woman in her loneliness and plight ; and the needs 
 of his body were crying for self-attention. He 
 thought that he, too, must provide some manner of 
 shelter. Hers he would never molest, or even ap- 
 proach. He knew he must presently eat, or be weak- 
 ened and starve. 
 
 He cast a look far out upon the desert, and be- 
 gan to realize something of what the situation meant. 
 
 He had, in a manner, recognized the place for 
 what it was. No man could look upon its barren 
 expanse and fail to realize its terrible nature. 
 Where it was he did not know. There was no means 
 of ascertaining even so much as the State in which 
 it was situated. 
 
 A slender hope that man, in his spirit of adven- 
 ture, might penetrate its silences and lifeless areas, 
 perchance in quest of gold, wavered in his thoughts. 
 He felt, however, a certain conviction of helpless- 
 ness so far as assistance from the outside world was 
 concerned. He was here, cast upon a desert, with- 
 [62]
 
 A Desert Battle-Ground 
 
 out weapons, tools, provisions, extra clothing for 
 his body, or a bed. 
 
 He was starving, and to eat must kill some wary 
 creature of the greenery with nothing save his hands 
 or the rocks he could take up and fling. For a day 
 or two at the least he must make his oasis his abid- 
 ing-place and prepare himself for escape to some 
 outlying town or farm from which he could journey 
 to the east. 
 
 He searched through his pockets, taking inven- 
 tory quickly of all his personal possessions. He 
 had a bunch of keys, a pocket-knife, a pocketbook 
 containing fifty-odd dollars in bills, a handful of 
 silver and nickel coins, a handkerchief, a watch, a 
 number of letters, a pencil, some of his cards, a 
 crushed cigar, and a folder of yellow paper matches. 
 He was coatless, hatless, and dressed in thin gray 
 trousers, a negligee shirt with a dirty, crumpled 
 collar, and low-cut shoes of summer thinness. 
 
 Singularly enough, the man felt no impatience 
 with his plight. He certainly had no fear of the 
 stripped condition in which he found himself thus 
 face to face with the very first principles of life. 
 He was young, vigorous, healthy, ready to match 
 his wits and cunning against the naked scheme of 
 existence, and even eager to begin. 
 [63]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 All this line of thought had been traversed by 
 Judith Haines before the man's arrival at the spring. 
 She, too, had comprehended what the desert sig- 
 nified; she, too, had entertained some thought of 
 remaining here only long enough to recruit her 
 strength for a bold attempt to win a way out to 
 haunts of her kind. 
 
 Beyond a purse of money and a tiny watch which 
 one of her falls had broken, she was wholly without 
 the slightest useful trinket. Even her hairpins had 
 been scattered and lost in the storm which had driven 
 the airship to the desert. 
 
 Like Ghent, she was dressed in light summer at- 
 tire. From her shirt-waist one of the sleeves was 
 almost entirely torn away. Her skirt had been 
 ripped in a three-cornered tear on the side; her soft 
 kid shoes had been bruised and cut by the rocks over 
 which she had clambered. 
 
 Actuated equally by the pangs of hunger, the 
 man and the woman both finally descended to the 
 slender field of life and greenery with intent to slay 
 and eat. Ghent returned to the upper limits of the 
 growth, in quest of the covey of quail he had fright- 
 ened from cover when he came. He found them at 
 last, and then, with stones, to hurl whensoever he 
 could see one, he followed the swiftly running or 
 [64]
 
 A Desert Battle-Ground 
 
 flying birds about for two hot hours, all in vain, his 
 animal savagery increasing as he found himself ut- 
 terly baffled. 
 
 Judith could throw no billets of rock. She had 
 broken a twigless branch from an alder-tree, and 
 having for an hour attempted, without success, to 
 strike a plump gray grouse that appeared to have 
 no fear of a human being, but which nevertheless 
 avoided her onslaughts with exasperating ease, she 
 finally ran a rabbit to its hole beneath a ledge of 
 stone, and then stood there to wait till it should 
 again come forth, to be pounced upon and slain. 
 
 No four-footed creature bred in the wiles of prey- 
 ing and slaughter ever waited more silently, more 
 alertly, than she. Rigid, yet ready to strike at the 
 first soft patter of the rabbit's feet upon the ground, 
 she watched till her muscles ached with the strain. 
 Her grouse went walking by, out of reach of her 
 club, and she would not break the silence she had 
 kept in her vigil for the cottontail. Then at last, 
 from the cover of brush near by, a great rattle- 
 snake crawled, on his way to the hole where the 
 rabbit had sped for security. 
 
 Judith, intent upon her savage business, failed to 
 note the reptile's approach till the creature was al- 
 most close enough to strike her foot. Then a sound 
 [65]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 of startlement and loathing abruptly burst from her 
 lips, and she brought down her club with a blow that 
 broke the rattler's back and left it writhing in death 
 upon the sand. She beat him again and again, till 
 his head was crushed and his decorated tail was 
 twisted belly upward to the sun. The creature's 
 skin was broken along its back, revealing the whitish 
 flesh beneath. 
 
 Judith remained there no longer. She went down 
 through the greenery, startled by everything that 
 made a sound about her. She was all unstrung for 
 hunting. What creatures she saw appeared to flee 
 from her path in a new sort of terror. In despair 
 of securing meat, she examined the acorns and man- 
 zanita berries growing in the place. They were 
 hopelessly green. 
 
 Meantime, Ghent had learned a lesson in the use- 
 lessness of throwing at birds that ran with such 
 amazing swiftness or sought the shelter of bushes 
 too thick for either a missile or his sight to pene- 
 trate, to fly from beneath his very feet when at 
 length he came upon them. He heard the scat- 
 tered members of the covey softly whistling their call 
 as they slowly reassembled. He had gone to the 
 spring again for water. 
 
 Cunning made rapid growth in his being. He 
 [66]
 
 A Desert Battle-Ground 
 
 answered the quail-whistle, imitating readily the 
 simple note that they repeat. Around him half a 
 dozen of the brothering little creatures responded. 
 He had taken up two great fistfuls of stones when, 
 beholding four of the plump brown birds dart 
 swiftly to the cover of a shrub so dense that he 
 failed to see where they concealed themselves be- 
 neath it, he suddenly altered his plan. Quietly dis- 
 carding the fragments of rock he had gathered, he 
 took up a large hunk of porphyry lying near his 
 feet, and raising it arm's length above his head, 
 cautiously approached the shrub. While he was 
 moving on the hiding-place two more quail scamp- 
 ered to its shelter with their fellows. 
 
 Standing within five feet of the place, Ghent 
 hurled the rock with all his might fairly down 
 through the branches of the shrub, from which a 
 number of the startled quail flew out instantly. He 
 plunged upon the brush himself, and beneath the 
 stone and crushed-in branches two of the birds were 
 lying, stunned or killed, and his eager hands 
 descended upon them fiercely. 
 
 Exultation leaped in his blood. He would eat ! 
 
 [67]
 
 CHAPTER VIII 
 
 THE NEEDS OF LIFE 
 
 THE fire on which he cooked the first of his cap- 
 tured bits of game was fanned by the breeze that 
 arose at last a breeze that wafted smoke and the 
 unmistakable odor of scorching meat to the nostrils 
 of Judith Haines. It made her savagely hungry 
 and fiercely jealous. Ghent had evidently procured 
 some bird or animal for his needs, while she had failed. 
 
 She had climbed once more to her shelter, to make 
 an observation of the field from this place of van- 
 tage. She beheld the man, across and up the great 
 ravine, stooping above his tiny fire with something 
 in his hands. Apparently, the man had chosen a 
 loose heap of boulders for his camp. The situation 
 was nearer the spring than was Judith's cave, but 
 unless he should labor to pile the rocks in order it 
 would afford him little protection. 
 
 Indifferent as to what he might do, but with her 
 hunger intensified by the fragrance on the air, she 
 [68]
 
 The Needs of Life 
 
 returned once more to the hunt for meat, at which 
 she spent the day, with failure at the end. 
 
 Ghent, in the meantime, had made no mistake at 
 the prompting of his appetite. He had roasted 
 and eaten but one of his quail. The other he kept 
 against the possible disappointments of his next ex- 
 cursion for food. But, tremendously refreshed and 
 strengthened by his meager meal, he paused to plan 
 for a betterment of the crude conditions into which 
 he had been so abruptly cast. He reckoned entirely 
 without Judith. In a grim, unmoved manner he re- 
 flected that she would probably perish, in her cave, 
 of privation and hunger. If she should, it would 
 be the solemn judgment of the Fates on the feud 
 of the two depleted families. 
 
 The man's first precaution was to hide his un- 
 cooked quail where no prowling beast could find it. 
 He thought of the coolest shade about the spring, 
 but determined upon a cavity dug in the earth. 
 This was a simple expedient, quickly concluded. 
 He scraped out a hollow with a piece of flattened 
 rock, then laid a similar fragment at the bottom, 
 and with pieces at the sides and a slab on the top, 
 soon had his " cupboard " complete, with the meat 
 inside. 
 
 Two things he knew he must fashion without de- 
 [69]
 
 la'yl One was a shelter, here among the boulders, 
 with some sort of bed on which to sleep ; the other 
 was that first, most universal of primitive man's 
 weapons, a bow. A mirthless smile passed across 
 his features as he thought of being obliged by cir- 
 cumstance to whittle himself a bow and arrows with 
 which to hunt for the game he would need, and may- 
 hap to defend his life. Inasmuch, however, as a 
 bed would be required before the weapon, he set to 
 work at once to construct him a house in which to 
 lay his couch. 
 
 Despite the fact that the sun beat down upon 
 the slope with a merciless glare, he determined to 
 build his shelter here above the oasis, not only for 
 the wider outlook it afforded, but also because the 
 wild things living in the greenery must not be need- 
 lessly affrighted and thereby rendered difficult of 
 approach, for on these he depended for his food. 
 
 During all the remainder of the afternoon he la- 
 bored stoutly in the sun. At the end of this first 
 fever of creation he had piled up three rough walls 
 and leveled the gravel floor, so that what he pos- 
 sessed was a roofless retreat, open at the front, and 
 flanked at the rear by a number of massive gray 
 boulders. The sun was sinking when his task was 
 done. He began to wonder what manner of cover- 
 [70]
 
 The Needs of Life 
 
 ing and mattress the oasis would afford him for 
 his bed. 
 
 He thought of branches and leaves of vrillow, but 
 shook his head in doubt of their utility. While he 
 stood there debating and puzzling, his attention was 
 attracted by a movement far down on the opposite 
 side of the canon. Then he discerned the figure of 
 Judith, toiling up the slope to her cave, with her 
 cloth skirt bulkily laden. When she threw down 
 her load at the mouth of her shelter Ghent knew 
 what it was dried grass which she had pulled 
 from the earth with her hands. She returned for 
 more of this natural hay, and the man's vexatious 
 problem had been solved. 
 
 There was much of the seeded grass among the 
 trees and shrubs, but it grew in tufts and bunches, 
 often far apart. Until dark, Ghent toiled with his 
 knife and hands to supply his wants for a bed; then 
 he carried it all to his shelter, making several trips 
 for the purpose. 
 
 Judith had made her resting-place as comfortable 
 as a rock floor and a total absence of bedding would 
 permit. Her hunger had gone unappeased. Worn 
 out when at length the night descended on the world 
 of mountain silences, she sat for a time before her 
 cave grimly wondering what would result on the 
 [71]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 morrow, and the day after that, and all the days to 
 come in this land of desolation where she found her- 
 self, worse than alone. 
 
 The stars had appeared in greater profusion and 
 brilliancy than she had ever seen. A silence as if 
 of fear had settled on the narrow oasis of life en- 
 compassed by the gorge. A certain sort of majesty 
 came upon the mountain land, so absolutely austere 
 and desolate. Despite the heat that had gushed all 
 day from earth and sky alike, the air was slightly 
 chill. Its cleanness and freshness were phe- 
 nomenal. 
 
 Presently, out of the darkness, gathering in 
 masses on the mountain-slopes, and welling miles 
 deep in the chasms, a red glow of light made a 
 jeweled spot upon the slope, up the canon. Ghent 
 had lighted a fire for his comfort. It shone out, 
 a beacon, like a sign of home, and something in 
 Judith's nature was stirred, despite the fact that 
 John Ghent had ignited the blaze. 
 
 For an hour she sat there, starving, chilling, 
 alone, her nature once more rigid and uncompromis- 
 ing, her determination to live rekindled to a frenzy. 
 When the fire across the chasm died on the back- 
 ground of night she entered the cave and lay upon 
 her mat of fragrant grass. She did not sleep, for 
 [72]
 
 The Needs of Life 
 
 hunger was gnawing at her vitals and her mind was 
 vividly alive with worrying thoughts. 
 
 Ghent, in his roofless fort of rock, had likewise 
 thrown himself down to rest for the night. Like 
 Judith, however, he did not close his eyes. He had 
 much to plan and much to do, for he meant to es- 
 cape this living death and return to the world of 
 men and deeds. 
 
 Sometime in the slowly moving hours of darkness 
 a lone coyote startled the silence with a long, weird 
 howl and a chatter of woe, and a wail as if for the 
 dead. It came to Judith in her mountain cave, 
 and to Ghent on his pallet of straw. To both it 
 brought a momentary chill, but to neither did it 
 bring alarm or fright. The thought that came to 
 both was bred of the plight of life in this small 
 green spot It is one more animal to pursue the 
 birds and rabbits ; it is one more mouth to be filled 
 where the meat may be only sufficient to supply the 
 needs of one. 
 
 [73]
 
 CHAPTER IX 
 
 JUDITH'S FEAST 
 
 GHENT had finally slept. He awoke at daylight, 
 completely rested, and tremendously alert for the 
 business of the day. Promptly as he went to the 
 spring Judith had been there before him. He noted 
 the trifling signs of water splashed about the rim 
 of the hole, and understood their meaning. Of her- 
 self, however, there was nothing to be seen. As a 
 matter of fact, she had arisen at the first approach 
 of dawn, aroused from her troubled slumber by the 
 hunger that preyed upon her body. 
 
 Intent upon accomplishing much of the labor he 
 had planned for the day, Ghent concluded his toilet 
 rapidly and returned to cook and devour his second 
 quail for breakfast, after which he meant to cut the 
 material for bow and arrows from a clump of wil- 
 lows he had noted the previous day far down the 
 mountain oasis. 
 
 Once more the pungent odor of his fire and crude 
 scorching of meat was floated in tantalizing gusts 
 [74]
 
 Judith's Feast 
 
 to Judith, who had been baffled, as before, in her 
 efforts to slay a wild creature for food. Some mad, 
 vague notion of creeping stealthily upon John 
 Ghent and striking him down to snatch away his 
 supply of meat played fantastically upon her 
 thoughts, only to aggravate her further by its utter 
 absurdity. 
 
 She had come once more to the ledge of rock 
 beneath which a cottontail had its burrow. There 
 lay her rattlesnake, cold and stiff. If the prowling 
 coyote of the night before had come upon it he had 
 left it and gone his way in quest of a warmer vic- 
 tim. But Judith looked at the ugly form at- 
 tentively, her gaze held, fascinated, by the one spot 
 on the reptile's back where the skin had been broken 
 away, showing clean white meat. 
 
 Great hunger has no compunction. Judith had 
 passed the stages of delicate demands; she was 
 famished for food ; she was savage with the need to 
 eat. Her thoughts ran swiftly to fire with which 
 to cook. She had no matches; she knew nothing 
 of the manner of making a spark with flint and steel, 
 and possessed neither the one nor the other of these 
 two requisites, no matter how much she might have 
 known of their employment. 
 
 Suddenly confronted with this new dilemma, she 
 [75]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 underwent her first deep-laid alarm. Fire would be 
 absolutely essential to her existence to-day, to-mor- 
 row, and every day to come. A reactionary des- 
 peration surged through her veins almost instantly. 
 She would have both fire and meat ! She would live ! 
 She would revert to savagery, but she would not 
 die! 
 
 In the purely animal mood that possessed her she 
 took up the snake by the tail and carried it away 
 to her cave. There she laid a heavy rock upon its 
 ugly head, and then with a sharper fragment of 
 stone loosened more of the skin on the reptile's 
 back, and presently succeeded in skinning the eel- 
 like body to the tail. With two sharp-edged rocks, 
 one to strike with, the other to strike upon, she 
 hacked the clean white meat into pieces a few inches 
 long, then cast an eager scrutiny towards the camp 
 of the man, up the canon. 
 
 He was not at home. A thin blue column of 
 smoke arose from the dying embers of his fire, where 
 he had cooked and eaten his bird, but Ghent him- 
 self had disappeared. She presently noted a sway- 
 ing of the slender trees below her in the gorge. It 
 was Ghent, passing down through the growth, in- 
 specting the various materials afforded for his bow. 
 
 Judith was breathing in a quick, excited manner 
 [76]
 
 Judith's Feast 
 
 as she watched. When the man had finally passed 
 to the lower portion of the greenery she sped down 
 the hill to the cover, then up the ravine, and so to 
 his camp, with all her speed. She had caught up 
 a handful of yellowed grass and a number of dried- 
 out twigs as she went. She even tore a shrub from 
 its hold in the sand, and thus was prepared with 
 inflammable fuel before she came upon the dying 
 fire. 
 
 Without a look at the structure Ghent had built, 
 without the slightest curiosity as to any possessions 
 he might have gathered, she knelt upon the ground 
 at once and, blowing upon the graying embers, ig- 
 nited the grass, and then her twigs and brush, to a 
 crackling flame, and fled with the blazing torch to 
 the natural protection of the trees. 
 
 Replenishing her stock of twigs as she hastened 
 along, and pausing from time to time to foster the 
 flames that seemed disposed to perish in her hands, 
 she came at length to her cave again, where she 
 hastily uprooted stunted brush to feed to the fire 
 she had stolen. 
 
 The pieces of meat that she finally roasted on a 
 spit above the coals were streaked with fat that 
 browned them invitingly. The breakfast that Ju- 
 dith presently devoured was good. The flesh was 
 [77]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 clean, juicy, and sweet. She ate the pieces in her 
 fingers with a certain animal enjoyment she had 
 never known before, and when she had finished she 
 concealed the uncooked portion of her supply in the 
 cool dark end of her cave. 
 
 As Ghent had done when his first crude meal had 
 been concluded, the woman began to reflect on the 
 needs which every succeeding day would thrust upon 
 her here. She knew that she could not depend on 
 a club as her only weapon for providing meat ; she 
 was aware that no woods that grew about the place 
 could be relied upon to furnish fuel that would keep 
 her fire going night and day, even could she man- 
 age to fell the largest trees and reduce them to logs. 
 Fire she must have, and fire she must therefore be 
 prepared to ignite, as occasion should demand. 
 
 Her mind reverted to her childhood days the 
 days before the feud when she had played in the 
 forest with one of her cousins, a boy whose passion 
 had been tales of the Indians and adventurous spirits 
 who lived by their own clever resources, out in the 
 wilds. She and he had enacted these tales. She 
 remembered their disappointing efforts at kindling 
 a fire with two sticks rubbed briskly together. 
 
 She almost smiled as her memory recalled the 
 burning-glass which had finally been adopted under 
 [78]
 
 Judith's Feast 
 
 pretense of its being flint and steel. That burning- 
 glass had been so splendidly reliable. She wished 
 she had it with her now. She began to puzzle her 
 brain to remember where she had seen something like 
 it recently quite recently, indeed. Then abruptly 
 she knew the lantern she had noted lashed to the 
 car of the captive balloon, and the bulging lens with 
 which it was provided. 
 
 For a moment she feared that Ghent had likewise 
 remembered that priceless lens and had gone to the 
 wreckage, below on the desert, to secure it. She was 
 tremendously excited. She left her cave at once, 
 and hastening along the rocky slope to come to a 
 ridge from which she knew she could scrutinize the 
 desert, she beheld the man returning upward, to- 
 wards the spring, bearing a bundle of cut-wood ma- 
 terial in his arms. 
 
 There were no preparations she could make for 
 her journey. She had no receptacle in which to 
 carry water, even had she thought of such a pro- 
 vision. She waited for nothing, therefore, but made 
 her way down to the bed of the green oasis, and 
 so to the great perpendicular walls at its lower ex- 
 tremity, then past the scattered boulders and down 
 through rock and gravel where the delta of the huge 
 ravine debouched upon the desert. 
 [79]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 The day was intensely hot again, especially here 
 on the plain. Judith kept a straight, determined 
 course, however, and at the end of nearly two hours 
 of walking came in sight of the wreckage she sought. 
 Once more the fear that Ghent might have taken 
 the lens when he first left the place brought a sick- 
 ening dread to her mind. She hastened on, and at 
 last a beam of unendurable light flashed from the 
 ruins of the basket a gleam from the bulging piece 
 of glass, reflecting the glare of the sun. She ran, 
 and when she came there fairly threw herself upon 
 the precious lantern, in the lens of which lay the 
 latent power to ignite the very world. 
 
 Obliged to wrench and break the device from its 
 place, she tore the broken wickerwork apart with 
 ruthless hands. The prize she coveted was hers at 
 last, lens, lamp, and all, and into her keen mind 
 crept the thought of snares and traps for rabbits 
 and birds devices she had helped to construct with 
 that same young woodsman, her cousin. She there- 
 fore took nearly half of the tangled cordage which 
 had formerly served to enmesh the bag of the captive 
 balloon, and with this and her lantern for a burden 
 she returned the long, hot way to her mountain 
 retreat. 
 
 Ghent, in her absence, had toiled in a fever of 
 [80]
 
 Judith's Feast 
 
 impatience to whittle out his bow and a number of 
 arrows. He had gone to the spot where the wings 
 from his quail had been thrown the day before, and 
 having extracted the best of the feathers to bind 
 upon his shafts, had assailed his task with joy. 
 
 Long before noon he had completed the tapering 
 down of his weapon. He had smoothed and notched 
 it before he was finally confronted by the problem 
 of furnishing a string. He had quite overlooked 
 this vitally important feature. He thought of rob- 
 bing his clothing to secure the threads from which 
 to braid or twist a cord, but he realized at once that 
 the plan was impracticable. 
 
 He puzzled his brain for an hour. Dejection 
 came upon him. Failure mocked him at the height 
 of his hopes. Then he, like Judith, remembered the 
 portion of the wrecked balloon, below on the desert 
 by the cactus-plants, and dropped all employment to 
 hasten to secure what remained of the cordage. 
 
 He was on his way down when he and Judith 
 passed in the lower reaches of the greenery. She 
 was at the farther edge of the growth as he hastened 
 downward on his way. They beheld each other, but 
 beyond the challenge that their eyes exchanged, no 
 sign was made between them. Not even Judith's 
 plunder was noticed by the man, intent as he was 
 [81]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 upon things and affairs that concerned himself 
 alone. When at length he came upon the battered 
 car he knew she had been there before him. The 
 lantern, however, he did not miss. It had been for- 
 gotten in his stress of other needs, and his thoughts 
 were concerned exclusively with the cords he re- 
 quired for his bow. 
 
 That Judith had taken first choice of these he 
 was promptly aware. All that remained of ropes 
 and net he cut away ; and reflecting on uses to which 
 the wicker basket might be put, he hacked out some 
 unbroken portions, secured them in a pack, and 
 plodded in Judith's trail across the desert and up 
 the slope and into and past the oasis, till he came 
 once more to the work he had been obliged to aban- 
 don for a time. 
 
 Before sunset he had finished his weapons suffi- 
 ciently to take them in hand and go upon a hunt. 
 He shot at two quail and a rabbit, all of which 
 he missed. One of his arrows was broken, a second 
 was lost, and the third was too crooked for useful- 
 ness. In his disappointment and impatience he at- 
 tempted to repeat his success of the evening before 
 at hunting with a heavy piece of rock. In this he 
 failed. To add to his helpless discomfort, he caught 
 his pocket on a toughened shrub and tore it entirely 
 [82]
 
 Judith's Feast 
 
 open. His matches were lost, a fact undiscovered 
 at the time. 
 
 Fiercely hungry again on his diet of one small 
 bird a day, the man was forced to retreat to his 
 camp for the night, chagrined and defeated. Com- 
 fortless, wearied, and with blistered hands and ach- 
 ing body, he sat on a stone at the door of his fort 
 while the world rolled deeper into gloom. Discov- 
 ering the loss of his matches now, when with stiff, 
 bruised fingers he had pulled and fetched some brush 
 fuel to the place for a fire, his impatience was 
 rendered complete. 
 
 He cursed at the twig that had torn his pocket 
 open and found himself thrust face to face, as Ju- 
 dith had been, not only with the wretchedness of a 
 fireless evening at his camp, but also with the prob- 
 lem of obtaining fire for the morrow, and the days 
 to follow after that. A realizing sense of Judith's 
 discomfort of the night before was finally vouchsafed 
 him. He thought he might be able to adopt some 
 plan or trick which man in all ages had invented to 
 strike a spark and kindle flame, but she was a woman 
 and would know no crafts of outdoor ingenuity. 
 
 A certain triumph in his sex and his strength lent 
 momentary comfort to his thoughts. He told him- 
 self, stubbornly, that he felt no hint of softness or 
 [83]
 
 sympathy towards the fellow creature cast here upon 
 the desert with himself; she must prove her fitness 
 to survive, or surrender to the law of life and perish 
 with others of the weaklings ; nevertheless, she was 
 a fellow human, and something of his best, most 
 chivalrous self glowed undyingly in his breast for 
 her presence in the place. 
 
 He turned his sinister gaze down the great black 
 chasm toward the cave where Judith made her 
 abode. He beheld a light that leaped, then disap- 
 peared. It returned, and remained there, bright, 
 red, unmistakable, for the man to behold in his 
 wonder. 
 
 Judith had lighted her fire before the sun went 
 down, and with smoldering twigs and embers she 
 had kept it alive in the shelter of the cave. She had 
 thought to endure her hunger till the morrow, when 
 she might have the fortune to snare a cottontail. 
 A fierce desire for the taste of meat had brought 
 her forth, however, after dark; and while Ghent 
 was watching her fire from afar, she was roasting 
 and eating the remainder of her " kill." 
 
 [84]
 
 CHAPTER X 
 
 DISCOVERIES 
 
 GHENT was sufficiently famished in the morning 
 to slay an animal with his naked hands and devour 
 it raw upon the spot. At dawn he arose to resume 
 the work upon his arrows. At six o'clock he had 
 feathered four. Half an hour later he had slain 
 that same unfrightened old grouse that Judith had 
 pursued without avail. Despite the savage thoughts 
 that had driven him forth, he knew he must cook 
 this meat before he could eat it. 
 
 He spent considerable time in a fruitless search 
 for his matches before he finally thought of that 
 singular deposit of obsidian, the river of glass, over 
 which he had passed on his way to this oasis. 
 
 Reasoning that anything so hard and flint-like 
 would render up a spark at a stroke from the steel 
 of his knife, and wondering impatiently how Judith 
 had managed to ignite a fire, he lost no time in 
 caching his fowl, then clambered up the steep ascent, 
 [85]
 
 past the ledge of rock where he had seen the snake, 
 and over the table-land and down its farther de- 
 clivity till he came to the glittering belt of stuff 
 from a piece of which he hoped to conjure fire. 
 
 There were fragments of almost any shape and 
 size required for his uses. He selected one after 
 another and struck at them sharply with his steel, 
 but with no results in incandescent sparks. Not 
 even with his knowledge of flint-lock guns, the 
 methods of which he tried to imitate, could he summon 
 forth the fire that might have been locked in the 
 volcanic glass by some ancient god-alchemist long 
 before gone to his silence. 
 
 When at length Ghent came upon a large rounded 
 " button " of clear obsidian he was forcibly struck 
 by its resemblance to a magnifying-lens. As con- 
 versant as Judith had been with the functions of a 
 burning-glass, he tried excitedly to procure a focus 
 of the sun's hot rays through this natural substance, 
 so nearly formed for the purpose, but without re- 
 sults. Hope had risen and fallen in his breast in 
 half a minute. His excitement continued, however, 
 for it seemed as if in some way the pin-head of fire 
 he must snatch from the naked elements must an- 
 swer to his mastery through the medium of these bits 
 of shining glass. 
 
 [86]
 
 Discoveries 
 
 He searched the place in a fever of desire. The 
 glare of it mocked him. The heat that was already 
 rising made him dizzy and faint. He began to 
 suffer thirst again, especially at the memory of those 
 hours of his toiling in these barren hills. With his 
 energies bent upon the task of finding a piece of 
 this stuff that might be chipped to a lens, he sud- 
 denly remembered his watch, an old-fashioned time- 
 piece bulging a pocket of his trousers. 
 
 He could hardly have snatched it forth with 
 greater alacrity had it been a dreaded scorpion. 
 In a wild impatience he pried up the crystal with 
 the blade of his knife, and turning it quickly to the 
 sun, held his hand below it and moved it up and 
 down to find the focus. A great disk of light shone 
 clear on his skin till he drew it down smaller and 
 smaller. It vanished utterly in his haste, and then 
 the rays all fell in a concentrated spot of brilliance 
 as small as a freckle and Ghent flung his hand 
 out, satisfactorily burned, and shouted aloud in 
 delight. 
 
 Eager for nothing but to hasten to camp, make 
 a fire, and roast his breakfast, he started at once 
 from the center of the river of glass, crunching his 
 way across it rapidly. He had left it behind fully 
 fifty yards before he halted, turned, and came back, 
 [87]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 to gather a lot of the fragments in his pockets for 
 the possible uses that might arise at his fort. 
 
 With a knowledge in his mind of the general lo- 
 cation of the green oasis in relation to this obsidian 
 deposit, the man determined he could reach his camp 
 by a roundabout way involving less climbing of the 
 slopes. The route he chose was longer than he had 
 imagined. It took him far around the base of the 
 table-land, and so, at length, to an upper division 
 of the great ravine in which the spring had its 
 rise. 
 
 He recognized the fact that this was a branch 
 of* the larger canon, and followed it down at a rapid 
 pace till he came upon a great dike of porphyry 
 fully as large as a house. He walked beneath the 
 shadow of this mighty mass of rock, looking upon it 
 in wonder till he found himself halted at its base by 
 an extraordinary spectacle. 
 
 Hollowed in the bulk of the towering, cliff-like 
 ledge was a 'blackened cave or recess, fully ten 
 feet deep, and quite as wide. On a rude sort of 
 table made of rocks, against one of its walls, inside, 
 lay something that glittered in the light. Out on 
 the gravel at the mouth of the cavern lay two of 
 the most utterly grewsome objects John Ghent had 
 ever beheld the skeletons of a pair of human be- 
 [88]
 
 Discoveries 
 
 ings, bleached to dazzling whiteness in the glare, 
 the skulls of both split open. 
 
 For a moment the man could do nothing but 
 stare at these empty frameworks of what had once 
 been men. Dread and awe chilled the lust of life 
 that flowed with his blood. Two men had perished 
 here two, who should have been able to support 
 existence so much better than one. What terrible 
 agency of destruction had wrought this deed? 
 What tale of suffering had prefaced an end so 
 ghastly? It seemed incredible that these two com- 
 panions could have died for lack of water, with the 
 spring hardly half a mile away. What other death 
 might lurk unseen to smite a man down in his 
 strength ? 
 
 The men had been dead so long that no clothing 
 remained upon their naked bones nothing save 
 some effigies of thick-soled boots, now warped and 
 shriveled to mere suggestions of what they once had 
 been. The sight was terrible to Ghent, alone, as he 
 felt himself to be, in this mountain desolation. He 
 looked about the cavern inquiringly. 
 
 Fires long since dead had blackened the walls of 
 
 the hollow an enduring sign which the two human 
 
 beings had left behind, their only annals after life 
 
 and toil and rest. Amazed at the lack of utensils 
 
 [89]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 or the objects of a camp, Ghent presently discov- 
 ered a third frail skeleton that of a rifle, set to 
 rest against the wall of porphyry and never moved 
 again, by man or beast or the elements themselves. 
 
 Only the barrel, the lock, and other iron furnish- 
 ings remained as they once had been fashioned. 
 The stock was a slender piece of rotted wood, al- 
 most ready to crumble in the wind. All the steel 
 was coated with rust. It was an old-fashioned muz- 
 zle-loading weapon, the ramrod of which had wasted 
 to a wisp of woody fiber. When Ghent took the 
 gun in his hands the stock fell away and the lock 
 lay with it in the sand. 
 
 Filled with grim forebodings of a similar fate for 
 himself, the man examined the cavern dumbly. His 
 gaze returned to the table that the cave's two oc- 
 cupants had made of stone within the shelter. The 
 shining object that lay upon it attracted his at- 
 tention. He walked inside, and beholding what it 
 was, felt a thrill go down his spine. It was gold 
 a large golden nugget, untarnished, still mockingly 
 bright, and fashioned by nature with a hole through 
 its mass, as if it symbolized the circle and the hol- 
 lowness of life. 
 
 The thrill Ghent felt was not in response to the 
 value of the metal. It was worthless to him. He 
 [90]
 
 Discoveries 
 
 thrilled at the thought of the two men, dead and 
 forgotten, who had dared the desert and its hor- 
 rors for this bit of shining dross. He took up the 
 nugget, but cast it down again, a bitter smile play- 
 ing on his lips. 
 
 The quick, sharp scrutiny to which the cave was 
 subjected brought nothing further to light. The 
 former occupants had apparently possessed but 
 little more property than he himself could muster 
 at his camp. Not even the remnants of any bed- 
 ding they might have had remained on the floor. 
 
 About to leave, with one more look at the lump 
 of gold, the visitor's attention was caught by a 
 round, dark object, hidden by the shadow of a rough 
 projection of stone. He stepped closer, and found 
 it was an old canteen, still covered with rotted felt, 
 and suspended from a wooden peg driven into a 
 crevice of the rock, on a leather strap that broke 
 like a piece of stiff, dry wood when he took the re- 
 ceptacle down. 
 
 Rejoicing to find an article so essential to his 
 needs against the day when he should make an at- 
 tempt to escape from the desert, Ghent started once 
 more for his fort, pausing beside the skeletons only 
 long enough to reflect that, inasmuch as the two 
 men had been enabled to come here across the deso- 
 [91]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 lation, he should be able to retreat and find the hu- 
 man habitation from which they had come. With 
 the rusted barrel of the rifle and the well-preserved 
 canteen in his possession, he went on his way down 
 the branch ravine deeply sobered by what he had 
 beheld. 
 
 Arrived at his camp, he lighted a fire, cooked his 
 grouse, and when he had eaten, sat for an hour be- 
 side the spring, to plan the outwitting of death.
 
 CHAPTER XI 
 
 THE SAVAGE PASSION 
 
 JUDITH spent that day in devising and fashioning 
 means for the capture of game. She had nothing 
 with which to carve out a bow, even had she pos- 
 sessed the skill for its manufacture or the ability to 
 use such a weapon once made. She knew nothing of 
 the great deposit of obsidian on which Ghent had 
 chanced, certain pieces of which might have served 
 for knives. Her memory of the traps and snares 
 she had helped to construct in her girlhood was hazy. 
 
 Her cousin, in those days, had made a net in 
 which birds had been entangled; he had also tied 
 a noose to a willow and bent it down, securing the 
 loop of a cord upon some trigger, set in the runways 
 of the rabbits, to catch and strangle unwary cot- 
 tontails ; and he had baited a trap that fell upon 
 its victims, either to crush or prison them beneath 
 its weight. 
 
 All three of these contrivances Judith meant to 
 [93]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 attempt, to multiply her chances for obtaining meat. 
 There was nothing to think of but hunger, nothing 
 to work for but the means of quieting her body's 
 cry for food. Everything else of life had vanished. 
 Only this savage need remained. She set to work 
 upon the cordage. It was tied already as a net, 
 but the meshes were far too large for any snare. 
 She labored in patience to separate the strings, 
 which she then untwisted that she might obtain more 
 slender material. 
 
 The snare that she finally finished was crude and 
 useless, but, unaware of its deficiencies, she carried 
 it down to the thicket where quail must sometimes 
 travel, and there she secured it betwen two clumps 
 of shrubbery, trusting to capture something soon. 
 The noose to hang a rabbit eluded all the efforts of 
 her mind, either at memory or invention. She post- 
 poned its manufacture in favor of a rude sort of 
 drop that she had planned. 
 
 Thoughts of the stout wicker car of the wrecked 
 balloon had prompted her ingenuity in this simple 
 craft. She went to the thickest growth of willows, 
 and breaking out an armful of long, slender 
 branches, took them to the shade and wove a large, 
 flat mat, like a section from the bottom of the basket 
 left stranded on the desert. It was a stout piece 
 [94]
 
 The Savage Passion 
 
 of work, nearly three feet square when she had 
 finished. 
 
 She next provided a stiff piece of willow a foot 
 in length with a long cord tied to its center, and 
 then, with a number of heavy stones that she readily 
 gathered, she was ready to proceed. 
 
 Pondering the problem of what the quail could 
 find in this oasis to subsist upon, she discarded all 
 thought of the green little berries on the manzanita, 
 as well as all consideration of the unripe acorns on 
 the oak-shrubs. What quail she had seen had been 
 running about the harsh-looking mountain bushes 
 that grew above their greener neighbors. On these 
 she discovered small, dark seeds, a quantity of which 
 she gathered to strew upon the sand for her lure. 
 
 Having selected a spot well tracked by the feet 
 of the small brown birds, she fetched her trap to 
 the place. The mat she had woven was placed, 
 bearing several stones upon its top, with one edge 
 resting on the ground, while under the opposite edge 
 she stood her foot-long stick with the cord attached 
 to its center in such a manner that it propped and 
 supported the weight of the loaded fall. 
 
 Her intention was to sit, concealed below, with the 
 farther end of the cord in her hand, to wait till the 
 unsuspecting quail should gather beneath the trap 
 [95]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 at their eager feeding. Then she would jerk away 
 the prop and down would come the fall, made deadly 
 by the weight of rocks upon it. A glitter of fierce- 
 ness and satisfaction was in her eyes as she finally 
 took her seat on a shaded bank of gravel to await 
 developments. 
 
 It was a long and wearisome vigil to which she 
 was compelled by her desperate hunger. She had 
 not yet discovered that the quail invariably visited 
 the spring at noon for a drink and then lay con- 
 cealed in the shade till the heat should be somewhat 
 abated. All the long, hot hours of the early after- 
 noon she sat in her hiding-place alertly, watching 
 for prey. If her body grew stiff, however, her na- 
 ture grew more determined. 
 
 When at length the shadows began to lean east- 
 ward from the declination of the sun she heard the 
 comfortable little sounds of a covey of quail feeding 
 slowly along on the slope. Her breath came quickly 
 as a number of the restlessly darting little fowls ap- 
 peared by the side of her trap. Three of them fed 
 with avidity upon the seeds she had scattered on 
 the ground. Then, as she leaned tensely , forward, 
 the cord in her hand drawn taut, a pair of the birds 
 moved unsuspectingly beneath the loaded mat. 
 
 With a sharp exclamation on her lips, Judith 
 [96]
 
 The Savage Passion 
 
 jerked out the prop, and instantly leaping to her 
 feet, ran to the place and had the wild satisfaction 
 of beholding one of the helpless quail pinned flatly 
 to the earth. The others had flown in alarm. In 
 her eager haste she snatched up the mat to clutch 
 her prize. The bird had been mortally hurt, with 
 a wing-bone snapped and its back cut and bruised, 
 yet it scrambled to its feet, its instinct for life still 
 strong upon it, and darted away towards the cover. 
 
 Judith sped after it instantly. It ran down the 
 hill to the shaded oasis. As savagely as a fam- 
 ished tigress the woman flung herself forward on 
 the earth to catch it in her hand. She missed it, and 
 rose to dash on again, tearing her clothing on the 
 brush as she ran, and keeping her eyes upon the 
 wounded bird relentlessly. 
 
 It halted in the thickness of a bunch of willows. 
 She pounced upon it with animal ferocity, crush- 
 ing the willows down upon the trembling form with 
 all her weight. When she extricated the crumpled 
 bit of meat and feathers, a moment later, the last 
 spark of life had gone out in a flutter of fear. 
 
 By the fast-failing rays of the sun she ignited a 
 
 fire at her cave, and had soon scorched and eaten 
 
 her dinner. Then, half appeased only, she looked 
 
 upon the mere streak of greenery presented by the 
 
 [97]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 watered oasis the all of her world and from that 
 to herself and her clothing, half torn from her body, 
 and her mind was stimulated to crafts and cunning 
 for her needs. 
 
 She knew she must manage to lay more traps 
 than one, and that all must be practically auto- 
 matic. Food she must and would have till she could 
 leave this desolation, and on traps alone could she 
 rely for birds or rabbits. With straws and sticks 
 she began a study, on the ground, to invent the 
 means of preparing a trap that the creatures would 
 spring upon themselves. 
 
 She noosed a cord, and studied intently to recall 
 the methods that her young boy cousin had once 
 employed to hang a cottontail. When at length 
 she fancied she had solved the mechanical problem, 
 she was baffled by the need of a knife with which 
 to cut the necessary twigs, with their notches and 
 triggers. 
 
 Indeed, a cutting-edge had become indispensable 
 to her life. She could neither use her teeth nor 
 any bit of stone, in the labors she knew she must 
 achieve. 
 
 She thought of herself as a prisoner, here in the 
 desert a dungeon prodigious in size. She thought 
 of all the desperate deeds that prisoners perform 
 [98]
 
 The Savage Passion 
 
 to gain one dash for liberty of how they have 
 often been known to cut through solid bars of iron 
 with some utterly preposterous implement. How 
 she wished for the meanest bit of steel that anyone 
 had ever possessed! 
 
 The darkness engulfed her while she sat there 
 pondering her problems. All the mountain world 
 of desolation once more took on the beauty lent 
 by night and the pageantry of stars, but Judith, 
 oblivious to everything, sat before her cave with a 
 mind reverting to savagery and elemental moods. 
 
 Until the chill of the higher mountain air crept 
 down upon her she remained there, wrapped in 
 study. Her inventions had come to a halt for the 
 sheer lack of tools. Her strong, able hands were 
 insufficient; she could snatch no edged flints from 
 the earth. 
 
 Yet as nothing could ever wholly eliminate the 
 lingering germ of animalism that bided in her blood, 
 so nothing could ever wholly quench that spark of 
 something burning in her mind that made of her 
 species the dominant creature of earth. She threw 
 herself down upon her bed of grass at last, still 
 feverish with the riddle of her needs. 
 
 She slept, and her mind was free to labor un- 
 trammeled in its way of mystery. Some time late 
 [99]
 
 in the night she was suddenly awakened. She sat 
 up in bed, tremendously excited. The sleuths of 
 her brain, in search for needed implements, had 
 scented steel at last the steel strips bedded in her 
 corsets. 
 
 In the utter darkness of her cavern she laid her 
 hands and teeth to the task of ripping out the 
 priceless blades of metal, and when she had finished 
 she clutched them fast and returned to her sleep 
 like a child. 
 
 [100]
 
 CHAPTER XII 
 
 PRIMORDIAL BEINGS 
 
 ONLY an eager inventor or an artisan skilled in 
 creating forms in wood and metal may comprehend 
 the fever in which Judith labored in the morning to 
 make herself a knife. She was out of her cave at 
 dawn, the corset-steels in hand. 
 
 Two of the steels were large and strong; the re- 
 mainder were smaller and thinner. Even the pair 
 that promised good results were much too long and 
 pliant. She pounded one in the center with a 
 sharp-edged rock, and finally succeeded in breaking 
 it in twain. 
 
 The pieces were abundantly provided with small 
 brass catches along the outer edge. Utilizing these 
 projections, Judith bound the strips of steel to 
 roughly prepared handles, after which she was ready 
 to begin the task of grinding the blades to practical 
 keenness. 
 
 There was one method only, by which it could 
 [101]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 be done, and this was tedious honing on a rock. 
 Back and forth and back and forth she rubbed the 
 steel for hours, applying first one side then the 
 other to the stone, till a saw-like sharpness was 
 effected. 
 
 All that day she labored and went hungry. She 
 cut twigs for her traps and branches to drive in 
 the ground. She sharpened stakes for digging and 
 scratched out a pitfall for the rabbits, covering its 
 top with consummate skill. To drive her pegs she 
 utilized a stone, until she thought of making herself 
 a needed hammer. For this she cut a handle from 
 a tree and lashed a lump of rock upon the end. 
 Everything she made was produced by painful labor. 
 Her tools were clumsy and inefficient ; her hands be- 
 came blistered and sore. 
 
 That afternoon, when hunger made her fierce, she 
 attempted to repeat her trapping of quail. The ef- 
 fort failed. In her desperation she thought of gath- 
 ering all the seeds about the place, to starve the 
 birds into her devices. This was utterly im- 
 practicable. 
 
 She found one of John Ghent's arrows. Envy 
 
 possessed her, for she had no conceit that she could 
 
 either make or use a bow. When, however, a sling 
 
 for hurling a fistful of pebbles was suggested to her 
 
 [102]
 
 Primordial Beings 
 
 mind her wit rose to meet the occasion. Frow the 
 willows she cut two slender wands and roughly 
 carved a pair of knitting-needles. 
 
 That a sling is no more than a pouch suspended 
 like a hammock between two strings a half-yard in 
 length Judith was amply aware. Not only had 
 David's all-wonderful weapon of biblical lore been 
 explained and pictured to her understanding, but in 
 her tomboy days she had broken the windows of the 
 farmhouse, in an effort to master the forces at com- 
 mand with such a device. 
 
 The sling that she. remembered had been leather. 
 The only material she had at hand in this environ- 
 ment was cord. The pouch she knitted was there- 
 fore a web with a firm and closely knotted mesh. 
 At sundown the thing was completed. 
 
 There was something splendid in the figure that 
 Judith presented as she filled the pouch with pebbles 
 and whirled it in circles above her head. At that 
 moment she antedated Diana. She was far more 
 elemental, far more fierce and hungry. Her arm 
 was bare, her black hair had fallen from the coil 
 she attempted to keep upon her head. Her supple 
 body, freed of restraint, swayed with the motion of 
 her hand. 
 
 When she cast the pebbles from the knitted sling 
 [103]
 
 they scattered widely, far from the brush at which, 
 in a manner, she had aimed, but they tore through 
 the shrubbery at high velocity, humming a song of 
 their force. 
 
 The weapon was one more appliance with which 
 to kill, and she knew she could learn its grimmest 
 use. The days of her hunger and her savage de- 
 scent upon the small, helpless creatures of the growth 
 had barely commenced. 
 
 While she labored thus, creating and devising at 
 her cave, Ghent had been scarcely less active. His 
 determination to escape from the desert had been 
 tremendously augmented by his recent discoveries. 
 The thought of the two bleached skeletons, lying 
 suggestively near, persistently haunted his dreams. 
 Possession of a sound canteen for carrying water 
 made an exploration of the desert possible. 
 
 Impatience coursed in his veins, yet the man was 
 wise in his sense of the dangers with which the deso- 
 lation abounded. Of these, starvation was the first. 
 He could make no attempt to leave this strip of 
 life and greenery till he could slay and prepare a 
 number of birds or rabbits, to be carried, like his 
 can of water, agaist the demands of his body. 
 
 Meantime, he had never been anything but 
 hungry, night or day, and between himself and Ju- 
 [ 104]
 
 Primordial Beings 
 
 dith was waged a silent competition for the living 
 creatures on which they must both of them prey. 
 Some of Judith's contrivances he found in the run- 
 ways of the animals. What success she had 
 achieved in killing meat for food he could not know. 
 For himself, he had whittled new arrows, since his 
 bow was still his only weapon, and upon them he de- 
 pended wholly for supplies. 
 
 He had learned new ways of stealth in threading 
 through the growth in search of game. Skill was 
 swiftly coming to his hands, just as keener vision 
 and deadlier accuracy developed in his eyes. Al- 
 ready, however, the native wild creatures of the strip 
 were become more wary, more frightened of the two 
 sinister beings that daily made victims of them all. 
 
 Thus went the days in the canon. Judith con- 
 tinued to be far more starved than Ghent. Despite 
 her snares, traps, pits, and sling, her means of se- 
 curing food were far less certain than the man's. 
 Time after time she was driven to return to her first 
 crude deadfall, which she watched for half-days at 
 a time. 
 
 At other times, half famished and superhumanly 
 
 alert, she was roving that limited theater of life for 
 
 meat, visiting her nooses or creeping stealthily upon 
 
 some unsuspecting victim, her sling-shot silently cir- 
 
 [105]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 cling her head and ready at a second's notice to dis- 
 charge its half-dozen pebbles with astonishing vio- 
 lence at the timid creatures of the brush. 
 
 All day, when not otherwise engaged, she la- 
 bored with mind and hands to produce new engines 
 of destruction with which she must wage a battle 
 for life against the helpless denizens, birds, animals, 
 and snakes, whose world was the limited oasis. 
 
 She became like a wild thing, cunning, deadly, 
 and fierce, as she crept and glided through the un- 
 dergrowth. Her clothing was daily being shredded 
 from her person. Her hair was unkempt and in 
 the way. She rolled it on sticks and fastened it up 
 as best she might, but she wished for a pair of scis- 
 sors with which to remove it once for all. 
 
 If either she or Ghent ever paused to reflect upon 
 the results of remaining here indefinitely, it was 
 only for a moment. The thought was terrible. 
 The two entertained the same vague hope of final 
 escape; but while Ghent's desire took a definite 
 shape, Judith's was the merest shadow of a 
 dream. 
 
 She had looked upon the barren land that 
 
 stretched so far in the withering heat of every day, 
 
 and something within her had sunk despairingly. 
 
 With amazing rapidity her whole scheme of exist- 
 
 [106]
 
 Primordial Beings 
 
 ence had settled down to the day-to-day problem 
 of obtaining food. 
 
 Ghent, only barely less hungry than Judith, and 
 even more active and aggressive, had become an ap- 
 parition of animal ferocity. His clothing, like hers, 
 was tattered. Like Judith, he was hatless. His 
 beard had become an ugly stubble that failed to 
 conceal the scar upon his jaw. His eyes glittered 
 sharply and aggressively. He was thinner. The 
 look of the famished was upon him. 
 
 Bow in hand, creeping close upon some object of 
 his need, or, in camp, crouched above his fire to 
 roast some bit of raw meat on a spit, he typified 
 nothing so much as a savage of the neolithic age, 
 trained to match the wolves and leopards in their 
 craft. 
 
 When he and Judith met at the spring or in pur- 
 suit of creatures of the brush, never a word passed 
 between them. They faced each other for a mo- 
 ment in unabated hatred that was daily increased 
 rather than diminished by the plight of living to 
 which they had both been reduced. By tacit agree- 
 ment, Ghent remained almost exclusively in posses- 
 sion of the upper half of the oasis, while to Judith 
 fell the lower extent of the narrow realm of green- 
 ery the slender bridge of life. 
 [107]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 Out of sheer necessity, Judith had constructed or 
 gathered more appliances than Ghent. Beyond his 
 shelter and his bow and arrows, he had made him- 
 self nothing at all. Judith, at the end of a period 
 of feverish employment, had accumulated an aston- 
 ishing number of properties. 
 
 In addition to her burning-glass and the lamp 
 which the lantern had afforded, she had two woven 
 traps, several large balls of cord, two knives, her 
 heavy stone hammer, a bushel of seed with which to 
 lure the quail, a fireplace with a large flat stone 
 to fry her meat, her sling and a heap of selected 
 pebbles for ammunition, the skins of two snakes and 
 one rabbit, dried and cured by the sun, many nooses 
 and triggers, her knitting-needles, her hair-sticks, 
 a large reserve of cordage, and a hollow stone of 
 considerable size, which she had found upon the hill, 
 and in which she was able to carry fully two quarts 
 of water from the spring. 
 
 Ghent had scorned all thought of provision save 
 that of sufficient food to assure his escape. As if 
 at last the gods of chance smiled benignly on his 
 enterprise, he had the singular good fortune to kill 
 three quail and a grouse on an evening when Judith 
 finally completed and set the most skilfully contrived 
 of all her traps. 
 
 [108]
 
 Primordial Beings 
 
 He therefore determined to delay no longer, but 
 to make a particular effort towards securing another 
 brace of birds at dawn, and with all his meat and 
 his can of water to leave the place forever and 
 Judith to her fate. 
 
 [109]
 
 CHAPTER XIII 
 
 THE LAND OF THE LIFELESS 
 
 UP and silently haunting the greenery with bow in 
 hand, before the day had fairly broken the following 
 morning, Ghent roved from one end to the other of 
 the canon's growth without securing so much as a 
 shot. Impatient and half determined to start upon 
 his migration with the one grouse and quail that 
 would still remain after eating his breakfast, he pres- 
 ently emerged from one of the thickets and discov- 
 ered Judith's latest trap, with two live quail be- 
 neath it, striving vainly to escape. 
 
 For a moment the man stood there astonished 
 at the sight. The cave-woman's craft awoke some 
 slight tribute of his admiration even as he hungered 
 for her prey. He glanced about. She was not in 
 sight. Desperation had intensified the feud between 
 them. Their battle went deeper than tribal hatred; 
 it sounded the final abysses of life and death. Meat 
 [110]
 
 The Land of the Lifeless 
 
 was meat, and no more hers than his. Life was 
 life and the fittest would survive. 
 
 He hesitated for a moment only, then killed the 
 quail and took them from the trap. In a way of 
 sardonic reasoning, if not of self-justification, he re- 
 flected that inasmuch as he was leaving the place, 
 he was leaving his share of the game, all to be pres- 
 ently the possession of Judith alone. And since she 
 had managed to capture these, she could readily 
 capture more. 
 
 For his breakfast he ate but a single bird. He 
 had three cooked quail and a grouse to carry for his 
 needs. The sun was gilding the loftier peaks of the 
 world of mountain austerity when at length he made 
 
 -S 
 
 ready to depart. There was nothing to take save 
 meat and water, yet he glanced about his camp for 
 a final time before he should fill his canteen at the 
 spring and make his way out of the mountains. 
 
 An insignificant heap of bones, the walls of his 
 shelter, his bed of grass, his bow and arrows, a heap 
 of cordage, and the rusted barrel of the rifle he had 
 found were all that marked the spot as a human 
 habitation. He was eager to leave them all behind. 
 
 While he stood there Judith had come forth from 
 her cave, and, having started for the spring, now 
 beheld the man, and caused to wonder at his actions. 
 [Ill]
 
 On his back she saw a bundle, wrapped in grass and 
 leaves. In his hand he held the empty canteen. 
 
 While she was silently watching he turned away 
 from his camp, went rapidly down to the spring, 
 and filling his can, slung it on his shoulder and strode 
 rapidly forth on the farther side, heading straight 
 up the canon. 
 
 Judith knew that he was going, doubtless to re- 
 turn no more. She felt it by instinct. Her own 
 wild longing to escape this place and flee back to 
 friends and civilization had rendered her sympathies 
 acute. The bundle and the filled canteen told her 
 all she could have wished to know. 
 
 Ghent was leaving her alone in this measureless 
 land of desolation. And with feud and antagonism 
 still between them, he would tell no living soul of 
 her plight in this meager oasis, but would rather re- 
 joice in the thought of her perishing here in her ut- 
 ter loneliness. 
 
 Not for the price of a kingdom would she have 
 raised her voice to call him back. Succeeding the 
 momentary pang she felt at a realization of all that 
 it meant to be abandoned in such a place, even by her 
 enemy, came a species of rejoicing in her bosom. 
 The strip would all be hers ! The meat birds, rab- 
 bits, even snakes would all be hers alone! And if 
 [112]
 
 The Land of the Lifeless 
 
 death should one day stiffen her form upon some of 
 the pitiless rocks, at least John Ghent would not 
 be here to triumph in the sight! 
 
 She drank at the spring, and bathed her face and 
 arms, then visited her traps, found them empty, and 
 went all that day without a taste of food. 
 
 Ghent had determined to cross the range and at- 
 tempt his escape by the north. In a world all desert 
 there had been but little choice as to which way he 
 should go. Southward, below the canon's debouch- 
 ment, lay the desert valley, where the wrecked bal- 
 loon had gone to pieces. 
 
 Already aware of the barrenness and horrors of 
 this depression, Ghent had simply concluded to top 
 the range and proceed in the other direction, partly 
 because of his hope that the land beyond might be 
 less forbidding, partly because, for some unknown 
 reason, he fancied the two dead miners, whose bleach- 
 ing bones lay by the cave up the branch ravine, had 
 come to the place from a northerly city or farm. 
 
 He climbed up the bed of the gorge at a rapid 
 pace, for the shadow was cool and the air amazingly 
 refreshing. A mile up the titanic channel he came 
 upon a singular feature of the canon. It widened 
 out to a veritable amphitheater of stone. 
 
 The floor of the vast ravine was almost level here ; 
 [113]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 the walls, which were fully two hundred yards apart, 
 were almost perpendicular, except at the farther- 
 most end, and masses of rock, strewn all about, and 
 tons upon tons of gravel, sluiced from heights above, 
 attested the violence with which the elements had 
 striven to reduce peaks and valleys to one great 
 plain of desolation. 
 
 Not a shrub or a wisp of growing stuff had foot- 
 hold here. It was nothing but rock and ground-up 
 rock, red, black, gray, and yellow. To such a thea- 
 ter the gods might come, in their age-old austerity, 
 to hold solemn counsel of the tragedies of life. What 
 a caldron of heat the place would become when the 
 noon sun should beat down within it, Ghent could 
 faintly imagine. 
 
 The stillness was terrible. He walked ahead hur- 
 riedly beneath the vast shadow of its eastern wall. 
 Half-way along the solid barrier he found a rift, 
 where torrents had washed away a substance softer 
 than the cliffs themselves. And here he paused, for, 
 dug in the bank on the northern side of nature's 
 excavation, was a hole that none but men could have 
 made. It was the mine where the two men long 
 since dead had delved in the rock for gold. 
 
 Ghent understood the story of two men's labors 
 here as well as if some one had been present to relate 
 [114]
 
 The Land of the Lifeless 
 
 the annals of their hopes, privations, and toils. 
 Their diggings, mute and abandoned, were neverthe- 
 less eloquent of strife. The men had tunneled a short 
 distance only into the rock, but with what a lure to 
 draw them on! By the light of reflected sun-rays 
 Ghent could see it in the hole gold as pure as the 
 earth's great alchemist can make, bedded in a 
 crooked seam, like a prisoned stroke of lightning, 
 tracking down the wall. 
 
 Fascinated and marveling, Ghent gazed on this 
 treasury of wealth, locked in this vast bulk of moun- 
 tains that the lifeless desert guarded so forbiddingly. 
 He all but forgot his own desperate mission, and was 
 slowly approaching the magnet of metal, when he 
 saw at his feet a gleaming pile that, once held in a 
 bag, now lay heaped where the elements had strewn 
 it when the substance of the canvas pouch had frit- 
 tered away in wind and rain. 
 
 Someway the mere ghostly fabric that still re- 
 mained of the cloth drove the man's meditations to 
 the pair of bleaching skeletons, lying far back there 
 at the door of their final camp. He shook his head 
 at the worthless gold, and started once more on his 
 way. 
 
 Long before noon he had come upon the summit 
 of the range and was looking down upon a rugged 
 [115]
 
 valley, towards which he must toil across a second 
 low barrier of mountains. In the clear, still air far 
 out on the northern horizon it seemed to Ghent that 
 he beheld a hint of green, stretching east and west, 
 with promise of life and nature's verdure. 
 
 Field or forest or river's path, any world of green 
 where houses were planted and men made their homes, 
 it would all be one to Ghent. He hastened down 
 the rocky slope, eager to breast the lesser range be- 
 low and so reach the valley that stretched away 
 to greenery beyond. 
 
 The sun had climbed the cloudless vault, and all 
 the earth was shimmering. With his head protected 
 by only a square of cloth, on the under side of which 
 some leaves had been secured, Ghent found the heat 
 almost insupportable. He was a strong man, how- 
 ever, with a will exceptionally forceful. When the 
 withering heat forced him finally to drink he took 
 but a sip from his precious supply and forged ahead 
 persistently. 
 
 Glare and quiver and hell itself seemed blended 
 together in the parching air when he came at length 
 to the summit of the lower range of hills and made 
 his way across their flat plateau. On the farther side 
 he descended through a series of ravines, some of 
 which were shaded. His emergence upon the plain 
 [116]
 
 The Land of the Lifeless 
 
 below was remarkably abrupt. At one moment shut 
 in and unable to behold an open space a hundred 
 yards before him, he was suddenly out of the pass, 
 upon a gentle slope, with a vast plain spread flatly 
 for miles. 
 
 No sooner had he seen it than a sound of gladness 
 broke from his lips. Down the slope, and looming 
 above the stunted brush that grew upon the desolate 
 land, was apparently the figure of a man, who was 
 slowly moving backward and forward in the glare. 
 Too far away to be signaled, the figure could never- 
 theless be overtaken. Ghent started towards it in 
 a fever of joy and excitement. 
 
 Through the shimmering atmosphere it moved in 
 a jerking, ghostly way that did not at first impress 
 the traveler. Despairing at the thought of losing 
 this fellow human from his sight, Ghent ran with all 
 his speed. He was gaining rapidly. 
 
 Presently he halted. The figure was hardly two 
 hundred yards away. It had now become singu- 
 larly still. Puzzled, and beginning to feel some sick- 
 ening doubt, Ghent went onward, stumbling a trifle 
 in his eagerness, and panting with heat and breath- 
 lessness. 
 
 It must be a man ! It had to be a man ! 
 
 But fifty yards from the thing that had lured 
 [117]
 
 him down the slope he was ready to sink in disap- 
 pointment to the earth. 
 
 It was merely a cactus-plant, grotesquely like the 
 figure of a man. The dancing air of the desert had 
 seemed to impart the motions of life to its form. 
 
 It was almost unbelievable that the thing could 
 have mocked him so utterly. He had seen it move 
 walk turn around! Its identity, however, could 
 be no longer doubted. It was less than the ghost 
 of a man; it was merely the ghost t>f a plant the 
 effigy of a tree, dry, lifeless, and bearing the same 
 relationship to a growing, living thing that a skele- 
 ton bears to a living, breathing man. 
 
 Ghent did not approach it nearer. The truth had 
 jarred upon him with a shock. In the heat and 
 dancing of the air he had need to pause and make 
 an effort to remember what it was he had been striv- 
 ing to achieve when the vision of this desert com- 
 panion had been thrust upon him. Yes he remem- 
 bered he had been hastening northward, out of this 
 hideous desert. He started again, his desperate hope 
 to reach some haven of men and open farms. 
 
 From time to time he sipped from his can of tepid 
 water. A mile farther on he came to a shelving ter- 
 race in the valley, above a lower floor. Down in that 
 sunken depression, the air took on a newer, more 
 [118]
 
 The Land of the Lifeless 
 
 fantastic manner of dancing, and the land was popu- 
 lous with cacti, near and far, that resembled human- 
 beings. 
 
 Had the plain been some new inferno, where 
 spirits of the desert's dead had come to abide eter- 
 nally, the region could scarcely have seemed more 
 haunted and weird. It was almost incredible to 
 Ghent that the things he beheld could be anything 
 but men. Some of the cacti stood in groups, as if 
 several stalwart Westerners were traversing the plain 
 in a company. Others were alone. Some appeared 
 to be walking about in their shirt-sleeves ; some to 
 carry picks and guns. One group resembled a man 
 and a burro. All of them moved. All were terribly 
 silent. 
 
 Ghent felt that they would drive him mad. He 
 was mocked as no man had ever been mocked be- 
 fore. They were not to be ignored. As he moved, 
 so they moved. When he halted, they moved less 
 certainly, but some appeared to turn about, or to 
 sway in their tracks, or to change their positions 
 while his eyes were turned away. He knew they were 
 grisly yucca plants mere Joshua trees like the 
 one he had approached, yet they took on such mo- 
 tions and looks of life that his one crazed impulse 
 was to run from one to another of the parched, for-
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 bidding things, crying for companionship and guid- 
 ance. 
 
 He tried to proceed on his way. More and more 
 of the stalks, made animate by the quivering of the 
 atmosphere, loomed out of the brush on every side. 
 A great fear began to possess him. Some of them 
 might really be men, and he would pass them, in his 
 baffled state of mind, unable to distinguish a living 
 fellow creature from these terrible effigies that danced 
 and swayed in the overpowering silence of the desert. 
 
 Among them all, there was one on his right that 
 he was certain was a man. Reason informed him 
 it was like the rest ; doubt of his own mental steadi- 
 ness assailed him and warned him; nevertheless, he 
 raced towards it only to be mocked again and 
 lured in another direction by yuccas that bore even 
 greater resemblance to his kind. 
 
 With all his strength of will he forged northward, 
 more alone than before, in all this grisly company. 
 A thought that those behind were pursuing him be- 
 gan, at length, to haunt his mind. A hundred times 
 he turned abruptly about and faced the ghosts that 
 appeared to dog his trail. 
 
 In the vibrating air there were some that seemed 
 to turn their backs upon him, others that raised an 
 arm as if to point in another direction, some that 
 [120]
 
 The Land of the Lifeless 
 
 crouched, aware that they were caught in the act 
 of hounding him, and one seemed laughing silently, 
 its shoulders rising and falling in horrible merri- 
 ment. 
 
 For miles and miles the things continued. It 
 seemed to Ghent that the same ones remained about 
 him always. Those he approached, in the course of 
 his onward trend, revolved themselves swiftly into 
 ugly plants which apparently no imagination could 
 have distorted into men ; yet, once behind him, they 
 again took human form and danced in the revel of 
 the heat. 
 
 It finally seemed to Ghent that the silence was 
 more oppressive than the sun the silence and lone- 
 liness in this valley of haunting presences. He 
 thought of Judith Haines, a human being, and he 
 almost wished for sight of her again. He turned and 
 looked backward, across all the miles he had traveled. 
 
 Blistering, barren and hard loomed the mountain 
 range to the southward, its summit cleft by a mighty 
 V where the great ravine, with its small green oasis, 
 broke the fearful desolation with its greenery. 
 
 But, green though it was, and a heaven compared 
 
 with this, he would not go back. Life was in him, 
 
 and life was calling him out to the world that he 
 
 knew and loved. Back in the canon was a living 
 
 [121]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 death in the company of a Haines, between whom 
 and himself the feud could never perish. 
 
 The thought of his life-long hatred of Judith 
 added fuel to his temper and new resolution to his 
 will. He went on. He cursed the Joshua trees, 
 doomed forever to this dance of death, to which they 
 would fain entice him. He was strong ; he had water 
 and meat; he would keep his course and come upon 
 human habitations. Yet there came an hour when 
 the heat was no longer supportable. With a brain 
 on fire and senses reeling drunkenly, amid all the 
 quivering of the air, he staggered ahead till he knew 
 he could go no more. 
 
 Something in one of the yuccas off to the left 
 abruptly suggested his father, gone to his long 
 eternity. Like a helpless child the man stumbled 
 weakly through the stunted brush, making for the 
 form. As he came there it steadied, ceasing to move, 
 then developed in all its desert ugliness, a stiff, bare 
 thing, as little like a parent as a gallows. Neverthe- 
 less, Ghent threw himself down on the scorching sand 
 where the post-like trunk cast a band of shade upon 
 the earth, and with all his head and a portion of 
 his body thus protected from the glare, he lay parch- 
 ing at its feet. 
 
 [122]
 
 CHAPTER XIV 
 
 THE CITY OF DREAMS 
 
 FOR nearly an hour Ghent remained at the foot 
 of the yucca. By then the sun was so nearly perpen- 
 dicular above it that the shade had diminished to a 
 hatful. He arose. In every direction the ghost-like 
 forms were moving in that silent, stealthy manner, 
 each one promising a larger patch of shade and pro- 
 tection than the other. Ghent reeled across a burn- 
 ing stretch of sand to one that held out its arms 
 to give him welcome. When he reached there its 
 shade "was a mockery, its welcome a grisly joke. 
 
 He went on to the next, and then to another of 
 the cacti. His brain was dancing with the air. 
 More than ever before the yuccas seemed like mov- 
 ing men, each one a lonely figure in the silent place. 
 Seeking the shade of one after another, and sipping 
 a little fluid from his hot canteen, Ghent lay at 
 length, exhausted and all but ready for death, be- 
 [123]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 neath the shade that a fragment of rock, as if in 
 pity, cast from the westering sun. 
 
 He had no desire to eat the food he had brought 
 in his bundle. He baked with the baking earth, shut- 
 ting his eyes, that ached and bulged outward from 
 long endurance of the glare and the heat-saturated 
 atmosphere. 
 
 It was not until the sun went down that he rose 
 and continued on his chosen course. He would not 
 surrender to the destiny which had prisoned him here 
 in this awful desolation with the woman of his hate. 
 He would travel in the twilight and darkness. He 
 would traverse the mighty desolation and win his 
 way out to the lands of God and man. 
 
 Until nine o'clock he forged straight northward, 
 as before. Having then arrived, in the darkness, at 
 a low but exceptionally rugged backbone of moun- 
 tains, at which weariness abruptly claimed his mind 
 and body, he cleared a space upon the earth and made 
 his camp. One of his birds and a short drink of 
 water sufficed him for his needs. Then he slept pro- 
 foundly. 
 
 Charged, as it was, with the need for an early 
 
 arousing, however, his mind bestirred itself an hour 
 
 before the dawn, and Ghent was once more facing 
 
 a day in this terrible region of lifelessness. He 
 
 [124]
 
 The City of Dreams 
 
 breakfasted sparingly, and drank but little of the 
 cool, sweet water from his can. His business was to 
 walk and conserve his supplies. 
 
 By the steadily increasing light of dawn he 
 selected his trail across the rocky uprise, rejoicing 
 at last to find that he had left the valley of cacti 
 behind him and that northward was a gently rolling 
 plain that, though utterly barren of anything sug- 
 gestive of life or greenery, nevertheless was easy 
 traveling, with constant promise of a vista when each 
 rising swell should be topped. 
 
 Far ahead, softened by the purple tints and 
 shadows that lay in their yawning canons when the 
 sun arose, were hills in which Ghent determined he 
 would rest when the heat of the day should reach its 
 maximum. Beyond them he was certain the desert 
 must be broken. God would relent and lay the beni- 
 son of water, grass, and trees upon the earth that 
 His hand had created. The way would be long to 
 that cool-looking range, but in three hours' travel- 
 ing its shadows might possibly be reached. 
 
 In all the courage of his hope the man journeyed 
 steadily onward. The sun rose higher above the 
 barren earth and began once more its merciless quest 
 for moisture. Until ten o'clock Ghent endured it 
 doggedly, having recourse but seldom to his can. 
 [125]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 By then the same horrible dance of the air had re- 
 commenced, his brain was beginning to seethe, and 
 the mountain range before him had not only receded, 
 but its cool, dark shadows had shrunk from the glare 
 of the cloudless sky. 
 
 Ghent halted at the top of a knoll of rock and 
 gravel to gaze across the shimmering plain between 
 him and his goal. Ten million particles of mica 
 shone upon the sand like tiny mirrors, blazing back 
 at the sun. The land was an open oven. Ghent, in 
 his can and in his body, possessed the only hint of 
 moisture in all that desert scene. A little of the 
 madness that comes with the heat and glare of such 
 a region already cast fantastic films upon his brain. 
 His senses were dizzied; his eyes had begun once 
 more to bulge and ache. 
 
 Slowly he turned from his contemplation of the 
 distant hills and looked to the westward. Then the 
 man cried out in a way of agonizing ecstasy and 
 raised his hand to his forehead. He could scarcely 
 credit his senses, yet out there, not more than five 
 miles away, lay a city, built beside a lake, with the 
 mists of its smoke and the green of its trees softly 
 blended together for its setting, and white and dark 
 houses and tapering steeples distinctly cut against 
 the sky. 
 
 [126]
 
 The City of Dreams 
 
 Nothing in the world so inspiriting had ever been 
 vouchsafed to Ghent's vision. A sound like a sob 
 broke abruptly from his lips as he started eagerly 
 forward to gain this haven of cooling waters, rest, 
 and fellowship with men. 
 
 He marveled that he had not beheld it sooner, but 
 his one concern was to hurry there as fast as his 
 reeling senses could direct him. A new grasp on his 
 faculties was afforded by the sight. He knew he 
 could traverse the distance; he knew that his power 
 of will would sustain him to reach the goal, despite 
 the dreadful increase of the heat. 
 
 For half an hour he plunged straight onward. 
 At the end of that time a depression in the plain 
 was before him. It was small; he would cross it in 
 less than five minutes and gain its farther side. In 
 the meantime, he must lose sight, briefly, of that 
 precious abiding-place of men. 
 
 Down the sloping side of the dry, rocky swale he 
 hastened, and up on the opposite rise. For a mo- 
 ment, when he came again upon the higher level 
 of the valley, he could see no sign of town or lake. 
 It was there, however, slightly more to the south 
 than he had fancied. That his brain was revolving 
 in his skull was a thing he felt. Naturally, it turned 
 him around. 
 
 [127]
 
 At the end of another long period of his onward 
 plunging he paused, at last, to drink from his can. 
 Slowly absorbing a priceless mouthful, and closing 
 his eyes for the pleasure and the self-denial that he 
 felt he must practice, he suffered another strange 
 turning about. His city and lake had moved yet 
 farther towards the south. Worried, yet far too 
 grateful to complain, he went on as before, conscious, 
 in a dull, half-acknowledged way, that the city and 
 water seemed no nearer than when he had started. 
 
 There came a moment when, with his aching eyes 
 strained and fixed upon the vision before him, he 
 suddenly beheld it disappear evaporate in the mer- 
 ciless glare and fade from the face of the earth. He 
 thought for a moment that the sun had smitten him 
 blind at least, to objects at a distance. He rubbed 
 his hand across his forehead and the city reap- 
 peared. 
 
 More desperately, more feverishly, than before he 
 hastened towards it, his one idea to reach its cool- 
 ing shade and protection from the sun before he 
 should go stark, raving mad or lose his sight and 
 perish in his helplessness here, so short a distance 
 from the town. 
 
 In his frenzied haste, watching only the goal, he 
 stumbled over something dry and brittle that 
 [128]
 
 The City of Dreams 
 
 crunched beneath his feet. Some white thing was 
 glaring in the sand. It halted him sharply, and 
 strongly drew his gaze. 
 
 It was a skull a human skull split open and 
 bleached by the sun. Some of the rib-bones of what 
 had once been a human being's citadel of life had 
 been snapped and crushed by his weight. 
 
 Recoiling in horror from this spectacle, Ghent 
 cried out, " Pardon ! Pardon ! " and would have 
 passed, in his haste, but when once again he raised 
 his eyes from the earth his city had reversed itself 
 in the dancing air and lay, lake and all, inverted 
 against the cloudless sky. 
 
 The man made a sound of despair. He winked, 
 and still another city was created in the blue, im- 
 posed upon that which was wrong side up. The 
 groan he might have uttered died away in his throat 
 from his weakness. He knew it at last this city of 
 dreams the empty mirage that beckons his kind to 
 their doom! 
 
 No shattering of hope could have been more abso- 
 lute. The man's brain, dominant amid his trials of 
 heat, fatigue, privation, and suffering, might reel in 
 a dizzy whirl, but one or more of its thoughts were 
 almost too clear and sane to be supported. He was 
 finally aware that no man alive could make his way 
 [129]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 out of the desert unguided and alone. That the deso- 
 lation might extend for hundreds of miles was more 
 than possible; and a prescience informed him that 
 the man who had perished a yard from where he 
 stood had doubtless pursued the same mirage till his 
 skull had burst from the heat and mental agony and 
 he had fallen on his face to move no more. 
 
 A sickening sense of his helplessness gave way to 
 a greater emotion in Ghent's stubborn being. He 
 would not give up! He would not die in this open 
 hell ! He would live and defy the very fates ! It 
 meant going back all the long way back to the 
 mountain oasis back to the spring, the struggle 
 and to Judith Haines! 
 
 He laughed aloud, in a terrible manner. He 
 called out to the skeleton, " Not yet, brother, not 
 yet ! " and started dizzily southward, facing the 
 quivering desert he had traveled. 
 
 How he staggered at noon to the scant protection 
 of a friendly shelf of rock he could never have told. 
 How long he lay there, panting and barely retaining 
 his sanity, concerned him not in the slightest de- 
 gree. As much by instinct as by design, he arose, 
 towards sundown, and staggered off southward dog- 
 gedly bound home. 
 
 He walked till nearly midnight. By then he had 
 [130]
 
 The City of Dreams 
 
 topped the range of hills he had scaled at dawn go- 
 ing northward. The night was not intensely dark, 
 so vastly numerous and so brilliant were the stars. 
 The silence was deeper than profundity. God's ma- 
 jestic austerity claimed all that world, so freed of 
 the gauds and baubles of earthly beauty. There was 
 something marvelously splendid in the very desola- 
 tion. 
 
 Ghent gazed across the mighty land from the 
 rocky summit where he made his bed, and fancied he 
 could just discern the great V cleft in the range so 
 far to the southward the range of the green 
 oasis. While he looked a lustrous star burned in 
 glory down in the very angle of the V. For a mo- 
 ment he thought it must be Judith's camp-fire, 
 glowing in the night a beacon-light of comfort and 
 of home. Then he knew it was not. He sank into 
 dreamless sleep, and the mighty procession of the 
 spheres, working out the destinies of planets, suns, 
 and moons, swung westward in the desert realms of 
 space. 
 
 [131]
 
 CHAPTER XV 
 
 THE ACHE OF LONELINESS 
 
 JUDITH HAINES, left to herself in the mountain 
 strip of greenery, had undergone many sensations 
 when at the end of her first day of absolute solitude 
 the twilight found her wrapped in reflections before 
 her open cave. Just before sunset she had slain a 
 rabbit with her sling. Her traps were set. Her grim 
 scheme of living had abated not a jot of its fierce- 
 ness. 
 
 Nevertheless, the night brought on a poignant 
 realization of all that it meant to be living here 
 alone, abandoned by the other human being with 
 whom she had come to the desert. 
 
 How it would seem on the morrow, and after a 
 week, and after a month had passed she could not 
 even faintly conjecture. That such an enforced iso- 
 lation must soon become terrible she could have no 
 doubt. The thought of living on and on, slaying the 
 birds and beasts for food, speaking to no one, seeing 
 [132]
 
 The Ache of Loneliness 
 
 no being of her kind, degenerating rapidly into a 
 savage female hermit this was but faintly suggested 
 to her mind, for she shunned the prospect in dread. 
 
 John Ghent, her enemy, had at least been human. 
 His presence had meant no companionship, and yet 
 it had certainly been something. She had hated him 
 here ; she hated him now more intensely for his self- 
 ishness. That she could have no hope of escaping 
 from the desert, with no receptacle in which to carry 
 water, she readily conceded. Where Ghent had se- 
 cured his canteen, she could not guess. What the 
 end of her own career in this desert oasis would 
 finally be she would not have dared to foresee. 
 
 All that day she had roved the small green theater 
 of life, hungry, unkempt, and disturbed. All day 
 she had kept a furtive watch upon the camp John 
 Ghent had quitted, almost in hopes that he might re- 
 turn, and finally wondering what, if anything, he 
 might have left behind that she could use. 
 
 She had not, however, visited his camp. Some 
 pride, or some half-defined suspicion that he might 
 not be actually gone, but be lurking near enough 
 to detect her in her curious inspection of his fort, 
 compelled her to shun the place as thoroughly as she 
 must always have done while the man remained at 
 his shelter. 
 
 [133]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 When at length she retired within her cave that 
 night she had no thought of fear. She heard the 
 howl of some prowling coyote that came here to hunt, 
 and smelled out the tracks of a preying creature 
 greater than himself a human being, hungry and re- 
 lentless and she took up her hammer, the stone tool 
 that man has made in all the ages, and stood at her 
 cave-mouth ready for defense. 
 
 But the wolf-like animal howled no more. He 
 hunted in silence, and finding her trap, wherein a 
 belated quail had been captured at dusk, repeated 
 Ghent's performance of the dawn. He killed the 
 bird and robbed the trap, devouring his victim on 
 the spot. 
 
 In the morning a second of Judith's engines of 
 capture had performed its functions, slaying a 
 grouse. She had meat in abundance. She break- 
 fasted heartily for once, and set her traps anew, 
 discovering the feathers left on the ground where 
 the lone coyote had munched at his feast. 
 
 The second long day of Ghent's absence had com- 
 menced. Judith had scrutinized his camp from a 
 distance on emerging from her cave. When her 
 breakfast was finished she proceeded up the gorge 
 and looked again upon the shelter Ghent had made. 
 She felt he would never return. 
 [134]
 
 The Ache of Loneliness 
 
 Some boldness and exhilaration of spirit that the 
 cool, bright mornings always brought upon her, ex- 
 panded in her bosom as she thought of her absolute 
 dominion over all the oasis contained. Ghent's camp 
 was hers if she wished it; the appurtenances left 
 there at his departure were likewise hers should she 
 need them. 
 
 She climbed the slope and, proceeding to the shel- 
 ter, stood with folded arms disdainfully looking it 
 over. There lay the cordage he had fetched from 
 the valley, and there lay his bow, unstrung, with a 
 number of arrows beside it. The ashes of his former 
 fires lay in a small gray heap, at the edge of which 
 were bones half burned and greasy. For a moment 
 she thought of taking the bow, for which she 
 felt certain she could readily fashion additional 
 arrows. 
 
 Then a scorn for anything and everything that a 
 Ghent had made or handled brought a hard com- 
 pression to her lips and a light of contempt to her 
 eyes. The things could all lie here and rot! When 
 she needed a bow she would make one. 
 
 She returned to the spring. A certain sense of 
 
 freedom stole upon her, especially now that Ghent's 
 
 shelter had been visited. There could be no restraint 
 
 upon her actions. She was all alone. The strip of 
 
 [135]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 greenery was hers ; the spring, the sunlight every- 
 thing was hers. She stripped off her clothing and 
 bathed in the water that trickled down its channel 
 from the well. She shook down her hair and tried 
 to comb it with her fingers. It was hopelessly 
 tangled. Yet, despite its condition, it was a glorious 
 mantle to her shoulders. She was superb a natural 
 creature in a natural environment. 
 
 It seemed as if the very action of disrobing and 
 standing exposed to the sun and air begot a new 
 sort of wildness and freedom in her blood. No 
 Eve in her garden could have been more utterly un- 
 conscious of her beauty, no Diana could have trod 
 more like a goddess. 
 
 Not for long, however, could Judith remain here 
 in idleness. Dressed again soon, and bothered anew 
 by the uncontrolled strands of her hair, especially 
 those which trailed down her forehead and into her 
 eyes, she tore a twig from a willow, wound her front 
 locks upon it, and suddenly conceived a plan for 
 ridding herself of these tresses entirely. She could 
 burn them off. 
 
 The operation, with Judith, was a brief affair. 
 Returning to her cave, she blew upon certain of the 
 smoldering embers of her breakfast-fire, and thus se- 
 cured a number of twigs glowing hot for an inch or 
 [136]
 
 The Ache of Loneliness 
 
 so of th'eir length. With two of these kept alive in 
 her hand she hastened once more to the spring, in 
 one still pool of which she had previously seen her 
 face reflected. 
 
 It was the work of a moment only to catch up 
 the stray, flying strands that annoyed her so con- 
 stantly and wind them tightly on a stick. Thus held 
 in a firm, tidy manner close up to her scalp, the locks 
 were ready for the brand. She caught up one of 
 the twigs with red fire aglow upon its end, leaned 
 out above the mirroring pool of water, and drawing 
 the hot coal straight along the twig on which her 
 hair was rolled, burned it off in a clean straight line 
 as neatly as a barber could have cut it. 
 
 For a moment, beholding the ease with which the 
 trick had been accomplished, she was tempted to 
 serve the mass of her hair in a similar manner, re- 
 moving it close to the nape of her neck. But a 
 woman loves her hair. She could not make the 
 sacrifice, even here in this world of desert. She 
 made up her mind she would carve out a comb, and 
 cut the smallest crotches from the willows to serve 
 in her hair in lieu of pins. 
 
 Not that day, however, did she work out these 
 requisites of her toilet. The one need food -for 
 to-day, to-morrow, and the days to come impressed 
 [137] *
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 itself upon her thoughts relentlessly. Moreover, her 
 body craved more than merely meat. She wanted 
 for bread, or any vegetable, and she wanted con- 
 stantly for salt. Once more she examined the hard 
 green acorns growing in abundance on the oak- 
 shrubs, only to find, as she had before, that they 
 were quite impossible. 
 
 The small manzanita-berries were even less promis- 
 ing. She walked to a grove of stunted pine-nut 
 trees that grew on a slope down the canon. Beneath 
 them were numerous cones, all open and empty, while 
 the cones that were growing on the branches were 
 as hard and green as so many unripe pineapples, 
 and their surfaces were oozing with pitch. There 
 was nothing, not even a seed, to be ground up and 
 baked for variety of diet, and salt was out of the 
 question. 
 
 Against the hunger that returned once more with 
 the waning of the day there was no fresh captive 
 in the traps that Judith visited. She went to bed 
 hungry and once again the down-creep of the night 
 banished all her spirit of dominion, all her sense of 
 ownership and freedom in the strip, and in its place 
 came the thoughts of her utter loneliness in the 
 desolation sanctified to silence. 
 
 That this sense of her isolation would tend to in- 
 [138]
 
 The Ache of Loneliness 
 
 crease upon her daily she was made aware on the 
 following morning when again she gazed across the 
 gorge to Ghent's rude shelter in the rocks and beheld 
 it still untenanted. Some unvoiced hope that he might 
 have returned in the night had faintly stirred in her 
 bosom. The brilliance, purity, and exhilaration of 
 the morning's youth failed to stir her emotions of 
 gladness. 
 
 That day she was able to kill and eat, so that the 
 primal appetite of her being was once more quieted. 
 Despair, however, could not be allayed. Her hunger 
 for the world, her kind, her friends, seemed to cul- 
 minate that day and become a clamorous passion. 
 For this there could be not even a partial satisfac- 
 tion. Her traps were powerless to aid her here. A 
 dread of the days and weeks to come assailed her. 
 More than she ever had before, she feared for the 
 wild, half-starved thing she must become, crazed, 
 savage, clinging to life fanatically a veritable 
 sister to the wolves. 
 
 A hundred times she went to the spring that day, 
 and as often returned to her cave. Her work could 
 not fasten her attention. She made no confession to 
 herself that John Ghent was on her mind, troubling 
 her unaccountably; she would not admit that she 
 wished him back, much as she must hate him should 
 [139]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 he come; nevertheless, it was not for the water that 
 she climbed the gorge so many times, nor to make 
 an inspection of her traps. 
 
 There was nothing to tell her that out in the 
 glare of the valley, to the north, a half-crazed man 
 was staggering painfully home; nevertheless, unrest 
 was in her bosom, and she wandered back and forth 
 at random. 
 
 The sun went down at length upon the blistered 
 world of rock and mountain. Since breakfast, 
 Judith had neither eaten nor desired to eat. Once 
 again, at dusk, as she had so many times all after- 
 noon, she ascended the silent ravine to a point in 
 the alders from which she could look straight down- 
 ward at the spring. There was nothing there. She 
 remained at her post of vantage, however, while the 
 minutes went by and the night-shades crept tangibly 
 downward through the strip of green. 
 
 About to turn and leave the place, she started 
 abruptly and strained a little forward, her breath 
 coming short and rapidly, for no earthly reason 
 that she knew. A moment later one of the clumps 
 of willows above the spring of water swayed as if 
 some heavy weight had swept against it. Then Ghent 
 reeled weakly into sight a terrible figure, spent, all 
 but mad, ghastly, with swollen lips and bulging eyes, 
 [ 140]
 
 The Ache of Loneliness 
 
 his stubble-bearded face a mask of agony always 
 with that sinister scar upon his jaw. 
 
 The man fell forward on the earth and crawled 
 to the water. He drank but a sip, then rolled upon 
 his back, and lay there motionless, staring at the 
 sky. 
 
 Judith had felt her heart give one great bound 
 of she knew not what. She did not care to know. 
 She slipped in silence from her place of hiding, crept 
 down the canon noiselessly, and coming at length 
 to her cave on the hill, sat there to watch the shelter 
 up above, where perhaps Ghent would light him a 
 fire. She did not know that Ghent, like herself, 
 could ignite a fire only by the sun. 
 
 Until nearly midnight she watched through the 
 darkness of the mountain gorge before she sought 
 her bed of grass. But never a sign of the man come 
 home did the darkness surrender to her view. 
 
 Ghent had expended his last frantic spasm of 
 strength to reach the spring. He slept on the earth 
 beside the pool, where Judith had seen him flounder 
 down. 
 
 [141]
 
 CHAPTER XVI 
 
 A SAVAGE PARTNERSHIP 
 
 FOR Judith, the return of Ghent bore more than 
 one significance when once again she awoke to the 
 ever- relentless needs of life on the following day. 
 
 The first and most important fact adduced was 
 this there could be no escape from the desert. 
 Since he, a strong man, had attempted the labor and 
 failed, it meant that the trackless desolation must 
 extend all about them for leagues. They were 
 doomed, they two, together to remain here battling 
 for existence till the fates should release them, per- 
 chance by death itself. 
 
 The thought of this lay upon her heavily, destroy- 
 ing some vague, precious hope that she had fos- 
 tered in her breast. Meantime, as always, how- 
 ever, she must live and her hunger was rapacious. 
 She was early abroad in the greenery making in- 
 spection of her traps. The first sight she caught 
 of Ghent, at sunrise, aroused all the passions of her 
 [142]
 
 A Savage Partnership 
 
 lifelong hatred against him. In his weakened con- 
 dition, and with a memory of what he had found on 
 the morning of his departure from the gorge, he had 
 come once more to Judith's trap and there she be- 
 held him rob her of a grouse. 
 
 He snatched the bird savagely, with no thought 
 of compunction, obeying only the instincts of self- 
 preservation. Still exhausted, half-famished, and 
 aware of his physical incapacity for hunting and 
 slaying for his needs, he took this meat as a panther 
 might have taken it, and with equal readiness to 
 fight for its possession, if necessary, as far as his 
 weakness would permit. 
 
 With blazing eyes Judith watched him. His face 
 was still haggard and grim. She recognized the 
 savage mood of hunger that made him dangerous, 
 but not from fear did she restrain the impulse to 
 throw herself upon him tooth and claw. She loathed 
 him. She could not bear the thought of personal 
 contact with him. Neither agony nor rage could 
 have forced her to address him. 
 
 Could a stone from her sling have crashed its 
 way into his skull she might have been tempted to 
 hurl it, but she felt herself helpless, and was angered 
 more deeply by the fact. 
 
 She made no movement. Her presence was not de- 
 [143]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 tected. With the bird in hand, and tearing its skin 
 and feathers from it as he walked, Ghent went at 
 once to his shelter, built him a fire, and resumed his 
 dominion of half of the green oasis. 
 
 Fortunately, a large, fat ground-squirrel, the first 
 that she had captured, had been caught and hanged 
 by one of the nooses which Judith had set in the run- 
 ways. She found it while her rage was still upon 
 her, and was somewhat mollified. Nevertheless, re- 
 sentment burned in her bosom with every thought of 
 Ghent's descent upon her trap, and some fierce de- 
 termination to retaliate, or to beat him with her 
 hammer, should he ever repeat the robbery, surged 
 all morning in her blood. 
 
 For Ghent, the day became, perforce, a time of 
 rest and recuperation. He lay hour after hour 
 by the spring, breathing the cooler air that played 
 above the water and sleeping away the physical 
 fatigue and mental agonies to which for three days 
 he had been subjected. 
 
 Even more completely than Judith he had aban- 
 doned all hope of escape from the desert. In the 
 last strange malady that had claimed him, out upon 
 the sun-baked desolation, he had thrown away his 
 precious canteen, with almost half a quart of water 
 in its hold. Why he had committed this folly, or 
 [144]
 
 A Savage Partnership 
 
 when, or where, he could not have told to save his 
 life. And he could never have related how or by 
 what instinct he had finally staggered to this water- 
 hole here in the canon. 
 
 By evening the man was considerably restored. 
 He was once more hungry; he was willing, however, 
 to shoot or capture something for himself before 
 he should once more eat. With a thought of his 
 bow, which he knew was still lying on the gravel 
 at his camp, his reflection strayed to Judith in a 
 strangely eager manner. For a second some haunt- 
 ing fear, echoed from his terrible experiences out on 
 the desert, possessed his mind. She might have 
 gone in his absence and the woman, though forever 
 of the hated tribe of Haines, was nevertheless a 
 human being! 
 
 Heretofore too weak and dizzied to remember any- 
 thing, he now forgot hunger, his weapons, and every 
 bodily need in the almost childish demand of his 
 underlying nature to behold a fellow creature of his 
 kind. He climbed the slope towards his shelter. 
 
 Judith's cave was presently in sight, but his eyes 
 could discern no Judith at its mouth. Down the 
 slope, and down through the greenery, he hastened, 
 past the line that he mentally acknowledged divided 
 her region from his own, and at length came upon 
 [145]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 her, working to cut out some willows with one of her 
 corset-steel knives. 
 
 He halted too far away to surprise her at her 
 labors. She had neither heard nor seen him. He 
 remained for a moment only. The part of his nature 
 that craved this sight was satisfied; the part of his 
 nature that was savage aroused his old hatred of 
 a Haines. Then he heard the distant whistle of a 
 quail, and returned to his camp for his weapons. 
 
 During the week that followed Ghent's return, 
 the round of existence for the pair of antagonized 
 and isolated beings settled down to one endless tale 
 of hunger and desperate pursuit of lesser creatures. 
 To the daily need of eating was presently added the 
 need of new protection for their feet. 
 
 Judith's shoes had been frail examples of style 
 from the first; Ghent's had been but a trifle more 
 substantial, and had been subjected to much harder 
 wear. Judith wove herself two small mats of wil- 
 low and grass, which she fastened like sandals be- 
 neath the soles of her worn-out boots. Ghent found 
 a large dead juniper, and by burning and cutting 
 away the bulk of its substance hollowed out a crude 
 pair of sabots that served him fairly well. 
 
 Clothing both were soon to need. The raiment 
 of both had been torn repeatedly in their plunging 
 [146]
 
 A Savage Partnership 
 
 through the undergrowth in search of game ; neither 
 had the means of supplying new cloth or mending a 
 rent. But clothing, like shoes, had become of sec- 
 ondary importance. Morning after morning, and 
 night after night, the cry of the body was for meat. 
 Neither of the pair could ever be well fed. Both 
 went hungry often. 
 
 Relentlessly decimating the limited number of 
 quail, grouse, and rabbits, the two foresaw an in- 
 creasing paucity of food, and each, by instinct as 
 well as by savage design, endeavored to slay and 
 eat more than the other against the day of want. 
 There could be no compact between them to con- 
 serve the game from day to day. 
 
 In the silent warfare waged against every edible 
 creature alive in this slender strip of green, the 
 animals still surviving evolved new suspicions, new 
 cautions, new fears. They avoided old runways, 
 they sought the spring at unaccustomed hours, they 
 fled from the near approach of either the man or 
 woman, in terror of their lives. 
 
 Thus, with every succeeding day the task of pro- 
 curing food became more difficult, especially for 
 Judith. She seldom killed anything with her sling, 
 while Ghent, with his bow, became a deadly marks- 
 man. She redoubled her efforts to acquire a needed 
 [147]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 skill, for her traps were becoming less and less 
 reliable. 
 
 The days went on, with no time for monotony, 
 unless it might have been the monotony of hunger. 
 Savagery increased upon the man and woman. 
 Everything elementary in their natures was upper- 
 most. All day they either labored, in their sepa- 
 rate ways, to manufacture the crude, rough imple- 
 ments of daily need or roved the gorge to kill and eat. 
 
 The creatures of the strip had almost disap- 
 peared. They had been devoured. The grouse, 
 easy victims of Ghent's barbed shafts, had been the 
 first to suffer extermination; the quail were vanish- 
 ing rapidly. Numbers of the squirrels had suc- 
 cumbed to Judith's developing skill with her sling. 
 Not a few of the rabbits had abandoned their bur- 
 rows to creep much farther down the gorge and 
 dig anew. 
 
 Both Judith and Ghent discovered this ruse, and 
 followed relentlessly. Judith became aware of an- 
 other important fact. The rabbits that ran even out 
 of the green boundaries and into the rock-heaps below 
 the oasis, where the two perpendicular walls formed a 
 natural gate at its lower extermity, invariably back- 
 tracked and returned, as if unwilling to go far 
 around or to remain for long away from cover. 
 [148]
 
 A Savage Partnership 
 
 Not a few of the little creatures had thus learned 
 the trick of leading her down the ravine and then 
 doubling back to security. Therefore it was that 
 she spent all one morning in fetching and piling 
 slabs of stone to form a barrier across the gorge be- 
 tween the walls at its sides. 
 
 Her plan was to make the place a cul-de-sac into 
 which she could drive the helpless cottontails for 
 slaughter. The space between the last green growth 
 and her wall she cleared of every brush and stone 
 that could shelter the smallest of her victims. 
 
 The place, crudely finished but self-explanatory, 
 was found by Ghent on an early excursion down the 
 gorge at the heels of a rabbit. He gazed upon it 
 approvingly. It would help them both. Neverthe- 
 less, the particular cottontail he had hoped to shoot 
 had slipped through the wall where a tiny chink 
 that seemed far too small for its uses had offered 
 escape from the man. 
 
 He put down his weapons and worked till dark 
 supplementing all that Judith had accomplished, 
 filling the chinks with smaller stones and adding to 
 the height of all the barrier. That night the cot- 
 tontail he had shut outside was captured and eaten 
 by a gaunt coyote. At midnight two more coyotes, 
 less fortunate and no less hungry, hunted in pair
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 through the greenery, each of them jealous of the 
 other, yet both of them working in league against 
 their prey. 
 
 At sunrise the following morning Judith and 
 Ghent, each independently of the other, went down 
 the ravine towards the newly builded barrier, fright- 
 ening three rabbits before them. Before they came 
 to the open space betwen the greenery and wall they 
 beheld each other, and exchanged a glance which, 
 while it blazed with undiminished enmity, neverthe- 
 less conveyed a sort of understanding, such as two 
 wild coyotes might exchange. 
 
 Judith had come with her sling and a club. 
 Ghent was armed with bow and arrows. They as- 
 saulted the three darting rabbits simultaneously 
 and both of them missed. The pebbles hurled from 
 Judith's woven pouch and the feathered shaft that 
 sprang from Ghent's twanging cord served only to 
 throw the trio of cottontails into panic. 
 
 The man and the woman had closed in upon them 
 hungrily. In the blindness of their fear, baffled, as 
 they were, by the wall of stone, two of the cotton- 
 tails ran towards Judith, as if to escape between 
 her very feet. Ghent had notched another arrow, 
 but he could not shoot in the rapid maneuver of the 
 rabbits. 
 
 [150]
 
 A Savage Partnership 
 
 " Grab them ! Grab them ! Hit them ! " he cried 
 the first words with which he had addressed her. 
 
 Like a leopardess for quickness and fierceness, she 
 pounced upon the scurrying rabbits and clutched 
 them in her hands. In her savage fingers they were 
 almost immediately slain. She arose with them, 
 panting, flung one to Ghent, without a word, and 
 returned up the gorge to her cave. 
 
 [151]
 
 CHAPTER XVII 
 
 AN ADDED TORTURE 
 
 GHENT and Judith, by tacit consent, became a 
 pair, so far as the hunting was concerned. There 
 had been no more speech between them. They had 
 no need for words, and no inclination for companion- 
 ship. They merely hunted the game in league, as 
 the hungered coyotes had learned from necessity to 
 hunt. 
 
 Morning and evening they took up understood 
 positions and beat all the undergrowth towards the 
 wall below, since the ever-increasing scarcity of birds 
 or rabbits had compelled them to this grim and si- 
 lent partnership of interests. 
 
 These were moonlit nights. The cottontails that 
 still existed in the gorge fit survivals of the war- 
 fare waged against them now remained through- 
 out the day in their burrows, and came forth to feed 
 only by the clear cold light of the moon. Judith 
 and Ghent, having been famished for two whole days 
 [152]
 
 An Added Torture 
 
 together, detected the facts in their sinister way. 
 With no word between them they raided the green- 
 ery by night, driving the cottontails once more be- 
 fore them to the pen of death. 
 
 What a pair they were in the pale soft light, when 
 they finally emerged from the cover, out of which 
 they had driven their game! Half nude, dishev- 
 eled, gaunt, fierce of aspect, elemental in every 
 thought and action, they were nevertheless a splen- 
 did human couple, unmated, yet an Adam and an 
 Eve, obeying the primal instincts of existence, intent 
 upon nothing but to live ! 
 
 Tall, active, alert, muscular, they represented 
 examples of reversion to type as superb as God ever 
 created Ghent with his thick beard increasing on 
 his face, Judith with her hair all fallen on her shoul- 
 ders and her tragic face alight with elemental 
 passions. 
 
 What wonder that the solitary cottontail they 
 caught was torn apart and divided in their silent, 
 savage way. 
 
 Despite the arts of capture that they had both 
 acquired, however, and despite the understanding be- 
 tween them, the two could do nothing to replenish the 
 daily decreasing numbers of rabbits and other crea- 
 tures of the strip. With every night coyotes came 
 [153]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 more frequently and in larger numbers. It seemed 
 to Ghent they must have traveled hither from other 
 oases more depleted than this. He made every pos- 
 sible attempt at night to find and kill some of these 
 marauders, since the meat was insufficient for all, 
 but without result. 
 
 During all this time the heat had grown, if pos- 
 sible, more intense than before. Whether it was 
 Judith or Ghent that first discovered this vital and 
 alarming fact could make no difference to either, 
 for both were presently aware that a new and ter- 
 rible doom was daily threatened. The spring was 
 drying up. 
 
 At first it had seemed the merest fancy. The flow 
 had diminished so insidiously that neither had noted 
 promptly how much less every day seeped downward 
 to sink in the gravel. When the truth was revealed 
 in all its baldness, there was sickening fear with 
 dread of helplessness in the breast of each, and 
 nothing to hope for save that enough of the water 
 might remain through the hot autumn weeks till 
 winter should bring a new supply. 
 
 It was Judith who thought of the first expedient 
 
 to protect the hole from the heat. She cut and 
 
 brought armfuls of willows to thrust in the sand and 
 
 bend down and weave to form a shelter, since the 
 
 [154]
 
 An Added Torture 
 
 growth about the spring was insufficient to cast a 
 shade throughout the day. 
 
 When, wearied to exhaustion by the heat and la- 
 bor, she retired from the place, Ghent came, as he 
 had done before, and finished the shelter at the well. 
 He did it merely in a spirit of self-preservation. 
 The partnership between himself and Judith was no 
 more cordial than before. The feud still lived be- 
 tween them. The work they accomplished together 
 was part of their grim scheme of life, and nothing 
 more. 
 
 During the next ensuing week the artificial shade 
 thus supplied at the spring appeared to halt the 
 process of its drying. Ghent and Judith had been 
 more and more reduced in their means of securing 
 needed meat. And the respite from the sun's at- 
 tack upon the water was exceedingly brief. 
 
 With alarming abruptness the spring began again 
 to fail. In vain the man and woman heaped the 
 freshest obtainable leaves upon the shelter. The 
 heat from dawn to dusk was terrible. All the oasis 
 was parching. Alders and willows lost their foli- 
 age prematurely, especially those below and above 
 the fount of precious water. 
 
 The sun beat down upon the rocky sides of the 
 canon with merciless directness. The world of 
 [155]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 mountains sweltered. The air was dizzily vibrating, 
 hour after hour. No quail were whistling in the 
 brush; the squirrels had disappeared; a very few 
 rabbits remained, and they were supernaturally 
 timid. Man and God together had made the oasis 
 almost a lifeless desolation. 
 
 Ghent realized at last how the two men above at 
 the blackened cavern had come to their end. They 
 had perished for water. The spring had dried as 
 it was drying now, and the men had crawled to their 
 home in some final delirium, there to stretch upon 
 the sand and die. And the awful heat had made 
 steam of their brains, and the pressure had burst 
 their very skulls. 
 
 He wondered if God had cast himself and Judith 
 Haines together into this horrible place to bring 
 them both upon their knees, their feud forsworn, 
 their pride completely crushed, their prayers united 
 in a common plea for mercy. 
 
 The thought brought a grim, mirthless smile to his 
 lips, and as if in defiance of the creed of forgive- 
 ness, he parted his growing beard above the scar 
 that he would not permit to be concealed and so for- 
 gotten. Let him perish here, and Judith perish with 
 him, if this were fate's exaction, but the feud would 
 maintain till the end! 
 
 [156]
 
 An Added Torture 
 
 Nevertheless, he could not wholly exorcise that 
 spirit of chivalry that had risen unbidden in his na- 
 ture heretofore with Judith so constantly in sight ; 
 and despite his cleaving to the feudal passion, he 
 could not wholly withhold his admiration as day 
 after day went by and established Judith's courage. 
 From time to time some gentler impulse rose and 
 wavered and sank once more in his breast. 
 
 Judith underwent these emotions no less regularly 
 than Ghent, but never had his phase of relenting pas- 
 sion been timed to coincide with hers, and no truce had 
 been sped by the glances they exchanged, and no 
 bridge had been cast across their gulf. 
 
 Judith, meantime, despairing of meat, had discov- 
 ered that the acorns were ripening. The manza- 
 nita berries also were red and rapidly drying. They 
 contained a white mealy substance, decidedly sweet 
 and undoubtedly nourishing. She gathered a quan- 
 tity in the torn, wretched folds of her skirt and 
 munched at them hungrily. 
 
 The acorns continued to be bitter and apparently 
 useless. Nevertheless, she gathered several handfuls 
 and broke them open on a stone. They lay in the 
 sun before her cave, and presently dried as hard as 
 grains of corn. Like Ghent, however, she was more 
 concerned about the water than the food. Some 
 [157]
 
 few wily rabbits still remained unslain and she 
 knew where a rattlesnake or two could be found 
 should desperation drive her to the last extremity. 
 
 It was the spring that became the fetish of the 
 pair. By one of their unspoken agreements they 
 used the water with the utmost care, drinking but 
 little, washing not at all. Ghent slowly labored to 
 put a roof of tree-limbs and earth upon his shelter. 
 In no other manner could he hope for protection 
 from the heat. Much of the work was done at 
 night when the cooler mountain air rendered action 
 possible. Judith remained in the darkness of her 
 cave for hours at a time. The world about them 
 was dead, baked, and intolerable. 
 
 They were hungry almost constantly desper- 
 ately hungry. It was not in the least uncommon 
 for either to go without meat for two or three days 
 at a time. Ghent, too, had discovered the man- 
 zanita berries. The acorns he had not essayed to 
 sample. He cut a cone from one of the stunted 
 pines, however, and by heating it on a bed of 
 coals forced it open and shook out a handful 
 of rich brown nuts, thin of shell and delicious to 
 taste. 
 
 Daily the pool of water at the spring was dimin- 
 ishing. There came a noon when there was less 
 [158]
 
 An Added Torture 
 
 than a quart of water in the hole. Ghent had come 
 there for a drink which his body could no longer 
 be denied. He looked at the place in horror, re- 
 flecting on what he must expect for the following 
 day. The hungry sands were drinking with a thirst 
 insatiate ; the sun and the air licked up the moisture 
 with a greed nothing short of appalling. 
 
 That seepage robbed the pool by subterranean 
 processes Ghent was thoroughly convinced. No 
 trees could subsist below and above did not the pre- 
 cious water percolate through all that bed of gravel. 
 He knew he must come there at dusk to dig in the 
 earth and follow the sinking water to a deeper 
 source. 
 
 All afternoon in his darkened shelter he labored 
 with his knife, sharpening sticks for drills and a 
 shovel with which to perform the work of excavating 
 at the hole. He lashed a number of stout willow 
 stakes, thus sharpened, to cross-pieces, forming a 
 scoop. To the whole he lashed a substantial handle. 
 Other pieces he merely prepared for loosening the 
 earth and roots of plants, for the digging would be 
 no easy task. 
 
 At sundown he carried his implements to the dry- 
 ing well, and stood there gazing at the all but van- 
 ished pool. His digging, he knew, would so dis- 
 [159]
 
 turb and roil the water that a drink would be out 
 of the question for hours. Nevertheless, it was 
 work he could not negelect. Even since noon the 
 supply had visibly diminished. While he paused to 
 take one last long draft, Judith came walking up 
 her well-trod trail, bearing her hollowed-out stone, 
 in which she was wont to carry water. Ghent 
 turned about and beheld her. In silence they ex- 
 changed a long, questioning glance. 
 
 Beholding the tools that Ghent had made, Judith 
 was immediately apprised of his intention. The 
 man, for his part, divining the use to which her re- 
 ceptacle could be put, stood aside to permit her to 
 fill it, before operations should commence. She, 
 therefore, filled it carefully, exhausting the spring's 
 deepest cavity in the process. Not much more than 
 half a cupful of water remained in the hole, and 
 none flowed in to replenish the supply. 
 
 Judith was intensely thirsty even then. The sight 
 of the water increased her desire for a drink. She 
 would not slake her thirst in Ghent's presence, how- 
 ever, and therefore placed her rock receptacle upon 
 the earth, where both could partake of its contents. 
 She realized that such of the water as now remained 
 was the property of neither one alone. 
 
 She retired, returning to her cave. There she 
 [160]
 
 An Added Torture 
 
 could find no comfort, and her craving for food and 
 drink was poignant. On one of the smooth, flat 
 rocks at her feet lay a score of the dried and broken 
 acorns. She took up a kernel and ate it. To her 
 surprise and delight it had lost not a little of its bit- 
 terness; it was crisp, nut-like, and agreeable to her 
 palate. She ate half a dozen. Then she stopped to 
 consider a new idea. 
 
 It occurred to her that the hard, dry bits could 
 be ground or pounded into meal, which, mixed with 
 water and cooked upon a stone, might somewhat 
 resemble corn pone, capable of sustaining human 
 life. She ground up all that remained of the kernels 
 thus desiccated in the sun, and even in the darkness 
 descended to the oak-shrubs and gathered a new 
 supply to be broken and dried at her cave. 
 
 Ghent, in the meantime, was digging at the spring 
 under great disadvantages. His tools were wretch- 
 edly inadequate. The substitute for a spade was 
 promptly broken. The separate sticks of which it 
 was constructed could not be held together. Some 
 were quickly blunted, others twisted awry, and one 
 fell away from the crosspieces on which they were 
 bound. With his pointed stakes, however, he found 
 it possible to loosen up the sand, which he pawed 
 out with his hands. 
 
 [161]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 He found the gravel packed and hard. There 
 were rocks and roots in it everywhere. Neverthe- 
 less, despite his handicaps, he labored unceasingly, 
 succeeding at last in excavating a cavity perhaps a 
 foot in depth. Into this it seemed to him a somewhat 
 increased trickle of water was drained, and the 
 nights being once more moonless, he finally departed 
 to permit the spring to clear. 
 
 [162]
 
 CHAPTER XVIII 
 
 THE DUEL WITH THE HEAT 
 
 BY dawn of the day that followed, the spring had 
 filled the hole that Ghent had scratched in the 
 gravel. The water was slightly discolored, but 
 good. Judith was first at the place. She drank, 
 refilled her rock-basin, from which Ghent had par- 
 taken as he labored, and carried it off to her camp. 
 The work achieved by the man had apparently lent 
 a new vitality to the well. 
 
 At her cave she mixed a paste or dough of her 
 acorn meal, and forming a thick flat cake of the 
 dampened material, browned it to a crumbling state 
 on one of the flattest of the stones she had collected. 
 The product was astonishingly good and nourishing. 
 The bitterness had quite disappeared from the acorn 
 substance; the cake, with a spreading of butter, 
 would have been delicious. That morning she kept 
 no usual appointment to hunt the greenery with 
 Ghent. For the first time in many days the man 
 scoured the almost lifeless oasis alone. The one 
 [163]
 
 wily cottontail he finally frightened to a scamper 
 down the parched ravine was merely made more 
 alarmed by the branch-splitting arrow that lodged 
 just behind it in the alders. No Judith appeared at 
 the cul-de-sac to assist him in cornering his victim. 
 He therefore returned empty-handed, and partly 
 satisfied his gnawing appetite on the berries and nuts 
 of the growth. 
 
 As if to blast the hopes in his breast which his 
 digging at the spring had raised, the noon sun 
 again absorbed the water, and the heated air quiv- 
 ered above the very hole, parching the sand and 
 trees about it. In the afternoon a high and scorch- 
 ing wind came sweeping up the canon, blasting the 
 few remaining leaves that clung upon the shrinking 
 branches and scorching all the mountain world. 
 
 By sundown there was hardly a spoonful of water 
 at the hole. Once more that evening Ghent laid his 
 hands and sharpened sticks to the task of scratch- 
 ing deeper in the gravel for the precious drops of 
 liquid. Judith, who came there later, waited near- 
 by, till Ghent had gone, then drank of the roily 
 trickle, and herself worked for more than an hour, 
 removing the sand he had cast from the hole, to 
 render further excavations less irksome. 
 
 The battle with the sun and heat had barely com- 
 [164]
 
 The Duel with the Heat 
 
 menced. The morning that came upon the withered 
 oasis was no less fierce than its predecessors. Again 
 at noon the blistering sirocco swept upon the moun- 
 tain world, singeing the life from everything. For 
 the third time Ghent returned to the digging. Ju- 
 dith had fetched her rock receptacle, to leave it 
 henceforth at the spring. 
 
 Life hung by a matter of water-drops, and none 
 must be sacrificed to waste. Ghent could dig no 
 deeper, however, till he cleared away the sand that 
 surrounded the well. He realized that nothing short 
 of his utmost labor could suffice to pursue the water 
 to a source where it would not succumb to the 
 searching caloric of the sun and atmosphere. 
 
 His hands were scratched and sore, and yet on his 
 ten aching fingers he knew he must depend to re- 
 move all the gravel he could loosen. He went at 
 the business a yard below the hole, by way of pre- 
 paring a trench that would give him a chance to 
 tunnel in beneath the roots and rocks that filled all 
 the earth above the spring. 
 
 The work was not finished that night. He wore 
 himself out and left the place at last, to climb to his 
 camp and throw himself down upon his bed of grass. 
 Judith resumed the labors he had left. She clawed 
 out the earth till her fingernails were torn to the 
 [165]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 quick and the skin was broken on her knuckles. She 
 accomplished less than Ghent, however, and another 
 day was soon upon them. 
 
 That fourth day, at dawn, before the awful heat 
 should drive him to his shelter, Ghent returned to 
 the battle and assaulted the gravel anew. The work 
 that Judith had performed in his absence he beheld 
 with satisfaction. She was shirking no part in the 
 struggle. 
 
 He had scratched out the sand for a matter of 
 less than three more inches, and was working in 
 a frenzy at the bottom of the two-foot trench 
 they had formed when he came upon something me- 
 tallic. A moment later he had completely unearthed 
 a point of steel that gave him a mingled sensation of 
 alarm, astonishment, and gratitude. It was the end 
 of a pick. 
 
 In feverish haste he clawed at the implement, and 
 presently, prying and tugging with all his might, 
 unbedded the tool, remarkably preserved a miner's 
 implement, rusted and oozy with moisture, its handle 
 rotted only on the end. 
 
 It was almost too much to believe. Then a sick- 
 ening thought of how it came to be here made him 
 weak with despair. The two famished miners, who 
 had died above at the cave in the branch ravine 
 [166]
 
 The Duel with the Heat 
 
 they had fetched this pick to the spring and they, 
 like himself, had delved in the earth, when the spring 
 was drying up and still had perished for the lack 
 of drink ! Their work had been done in vain! 
 
 A cold sweat broke out on his forehead. The 
 annals of the helpless seekers after gold were all too 
 hideously revealed. The story of himself and Ju- 
 dith Haines what reason could he conjure for be- 
 lieving it could be anything less tragic and awful? 
 The spring would dry and dry, if need be to the 
 center of the earth, in this terrible scheme of tortu- 
 ring two human wretches to the madness preceding 
 the end. 
 
 The farther they pursued the life-giving moisture, 
 the farther it would shrink from their lips. The 
 conviction was almost overpowering, yet so stubborn 
 is life and the clinging thereto that Ghent set more 
 madly to work than before, trenching the sand with 
 the implement that the earth had yielded to his hand. 
 
 Till the furnace of heat was once more searing 
 the very flesh on his bones, the man continued at his 
 labors. When he felt himself obliged to abandon the 
 task at last, he had barely prepared the way for the 
 tunneling he must later perform to follow the fast- 
 retreating water. Half starved, he climbed to the 
 cooler shadow of his stone-and-earthen camp and 
 [167]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 lay there motionless upon the earth, far too pros- 
 trated to gather nuts and berries. 
 
 All day the place was lifeless and deserted. Be- 
 fore sundown, however, Judith was working at the 
 spring, assuming her share of the labor. She found 
 the pick, and having undergone no less amazement 
 at its presence here than had Ghent, was no less 
 quick than he to divine the fact that at least one 
 human being had been here before them digging 
 for his life. 
 
 In her strong, willing hands the tool took on a 
 certain lust of labor. She loosened and scratched 
 out a heap of sand that left quite a cool, yawning 
 hole beneath the roots. From broken fibers, and 
 even from a rock, a few crystal water-drops fell 
 tremblingly. She caught up her empty receptacle 
 and, wedging it into the hole, beheld priceless gems 
 of moisture collecting, one after another, encouraged 
 to flow by the digging she had done. 
 
 That the willow protection they had made above 
 the spring served merely to cast a speckled shade 
 upon the earth, and in nowise kept out the super- 
 heated air, she understood the better from the fact 
 that her cave was comparatively cool, and that 
 Ghent had been obliged to construct himself a roof 
 with a layer of earth. 
 
 [168]
 
 The Duel with the Heat 
 
 Instead of toiling longer with the pick, she per- 
 mitted the dropping water to accumulate in her 
 basin, and went at the task of fetching rocks, with 
 which to build a wall or house about the hole. Such 
 a structure could be roofed substantially to keep it 
 fairly cool. 
 
 The rocks that she fetched were almost blistering 
 hot, but she hugged them to her bosom and carried 
 them none the less eagerly, making trip after trip 
 to the slope that was strewn with broken fragments. 
 Ghent beheld her from his shelter. He understood 
 her intention and knew it was wise. 
 
 Without pausing to ascertain from her actions 
 whether or not she would desert the labor upon his 
 near approach, he rolled a number of rocks down the 
 sandy declivity, and was presently imitating Ju- 
 dith's example fetching the blocks and boulders to 
 the spring. 
 
 Not before had the pair thus labored in company, 
 and even now neither spoke. Judith had no appar- 
 ent intention of leaving because of his assistance in 
 the work. She continued to fetch the crude material 
 for walls, and presently began to pile the fragments 
 one upon another in a rude sort of circle, embracing 
 all but the trench they had dug at the former outlet 
 of the spring. 
 
 [169]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 Until they could no longer see to direct their rock- 
 building efforts, the two continued the task of creat- 
 ing a circular enclosure to protect the well from the 
 terrible days of heat. By the time the darkness 
 had enveloped all the world their spring-house was 
 nearly three feet high and four or five feet in 
 diameter. 
 
 Even then, by the light of the stars that shone 
 with such unparalleled brilliance, they continued to 
 work, cutting long, stout poles from the growth near 
 at hand, with which to form the supports of the roof 
 of gravel which would finish the structure they were 
 making. 
 
 Meantime, drop by drop the water was trickling 
 into Judith's rock-basin, which was filled by ten 
 o'clock. Judith was the first to drink and return 
 to her cave. Ghent remained when she had gone, 
 piling branches and twigs upon the roofs, then grass 
 to fill the chinks, then sand to the depth of a foot. 
 It was all a very fight for life. He remained there 
 till nearly two o'clock in the morning, then crept to 
 his bed, a sore and weary creature, filled with haunt- 
 ing doubts that bordered on despair. 
 
 For two or three days it seemed as if the newly 
 built shelter, supplanting the bower of willows, had 
 sufficed to stay the awful failing of the spring. 
 [170]
 
 The Duel with the Heat 
 
 More sand had been heaped upon the roof, and 
 gravel had been heaped about the walls. Even a 
 mass of new tree-stuff had been cut by the two and 
 laid over and upon the rock protection. 
 
 The hole had been rendered almost cool, despite 
 the torrid heat and the blistering sirocco that re- 
 turned with every day. But no considerable flow 
 of water had been encouraged. The drops merely 
 oozed from the hungry sand, sped down the white 
 fiber of broken roots and fell into Judith's recep- 
 tacle, but this was enough. 
 
 Judith and Ghent, convinced that they must now 
 depend upon the acorns, nuts, and berries, had gath- 
 ered great stores of these supplies, working in the 
 coolness of the night. Hope had almost sprung 
 anew for them both, when an hour arrived in which 
 not even the oozing drops trembled forth to fall into 
 the basin. 
 
 Once more Ghent dug inward with the pick. 
 Once more Judith scratched out the sand with her 
 fingers. Once more a respite was promised to the 
 pair, then again the jealous heat sank deeper in the 
 earth and fetched up the moisture with quivering 
 fumes of the baking earth, and the famishing man 
 and woman were tortured to the last degree. 
 
 It became a duel waged against the sun and 
 [171]
 
 scorching wind. Deeper and deeper became the ex- 
 cavation ; less and less became the flow. At length 
 the tunnel could be driven no farther. The pick 
 smote upon a ledge of rock, through some narrow 
 seam of which the water was wont to gush upward. 
 It could be hunted no deeper, and only sufficient was 
 trickling through to fill the basin in a night and day. 
 
 [172]
 
 CHAPTER XIX 
 
 A BATTLE IN THE NIGHT 
 
 FOR a week there had been no alteration in the 
 struggle of the two for bare existence. Each day 
 had brought its awful tale of heat and wind, but the 
 water had not yet ceased to flow, at least the basin's 
 capacity in each twenty-four hours. 
 
 The oasis was no longer an oasis. It was the 
 merest mockery of a haven, grown to trees and 
 grasses. Stark effigies of willows and alders bent 
 dryly in the withering sirocco of the afternoons. 
 Dry, crisp leaves clung in some of the shrubbery and 
 rattled in the wind. The place was stripped naked 
 of foliage, almost as if a devastating fire had swept 
 the gorge. 
 
 Ghent and Judith no longer attempted to search 
 out and slay the few remaining rabbits for their 
 sustenance. They were living on berries, nuts, and 
 acorns and they were gaunt, wild-eyed creatures, 
 roving that nude theater of death like specters, 
 doomed to haunt the scene of desolation till the end. 
 [173]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 The tortures they had both endured were not yet 
 to be concluded. At the end of one of their periods 
 of waiting for the filling of the rock receptacle, in 
 the shade-protected spring, they found it half filled 
 only and new despair was at their vitals. The 
 precious supply was being withdrawn with a certain, 
 inexorable slowness that nearly drove them mad. 
 That neither had filched the water from the basin 
 in the other's absence both were well aware, for the 
 visible drops that oozed down and hung upon the 
 lip of rock that the man with his pick had laid bare, 
 came so rarely that either of the two human crea- 
 tures, watching the process in terror of its mean- 
 ing, could have counted to the hundreds between the 
 crystal jewels fraught with life. 
 
 All night was barely time sufficient for a cupful 
 of the drink to gather for their use. In their si- 
 lent way, with no word spoken between them, the 
 two had come to a thorough understanding regard- 
 ing the equal division of the fluid. The compact 
 was never violated, no matter how intense became 
 their suffering, or how terribly temptation came to 
 goad them. 
 
 On such a night as these had all become nights 
 of the sleepless agony of those who wait for a ter- 
 rible end the man in his shelter and the woman in 
 [174]
 
 A Battle in the Night 
 
 her cave heard the weird, disturbing howl, the yelp 
 and chatter of a band of coyotes, come from some- 
 where out beyond in the trackless realm of desert. 
 It was a dreadful sound in the silence of the night. 
 Had the human pair been abruptly vouchsafed a 
 glossary of animal expressions, revealing the sig- 
 nificance of every uttered sound the beasts may pro- 
 duce, neither could have understood more clearly 
 the cry of these creatures for water. 
 
 The rock receptacle Avas in its place, with nearly 
 half a cupful of water in its hold water more pre- 
 cious than the blood that flowed in their pulses, to 
 Ghent and Judith, tossing on their beds. The 
 spring-house entrance was open, the better to per- 
 mit the cool night air to circulate within and en- 
 courage the flow. That the famishing coyotes had 
 smelled the priceless liquid and would hasten there 
 and pillage the basin of its contents was the instant 
 conviction of the pair. 
 
 Judith was out, with her hammer in hand, and 
 speeding towards the spring no less promptly than 
 was Ghent, who, with the old rusted barrel of a 
 rifle in his fist, was swiftly descending his slope. 
 Already, however, the desperate plains-wolves, far 
 more gaunt and tortured than either the man or the 
 woman, had indeed snatched the scent of the water 
 [175]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 from the air and were racing towards it jealously, 
 each of them snapping at his fellows as they ran. 
 
 Ghent was the first upon the scene. The crack- 
 ling of twigs and the rustling of leaves beneath the 
 feet of four thirst-maddened prowlers apprised him 
 that the creatures were at hand. A moment later 
 he beheld their shadowy, slinking forms, as thin as 
 wraiths, and two more brought up the rear, the six 
 of them halting scarcely twenty feet away when the 
 man who confronted them stirred in his tracks and 
 moved a step forward to greet them. 
 
 They had ceased to howl. Indeed, the only sound 
 they made was a low, dry whine of surprise and 
 uneasiness. They darted a little to right and left, 
 leaping each other in the process, and their eyes 
 all blazed coal-like in the darkness as they found 
 themselves halted by the natural enemy before them. 
 
 They paused to summon courage for a fight. 
 While they still stood there bristling, dim specters 
 of want and desperation, two things happened. A 
 wandering night breeze flung them a new, sweet 
 scent of the water in the hole, and Judith came run- 
 ning to the place. 
 
 She was panting, her eyes were ablaze with sav- 
 age emotions. She was half stripped. The figure 
 she presented, with her ugly rock-hammer in her 
 [176]
 
 A Battle in the Night 
 
 hand, harked back to the dawning of man, the su- 
 perior brute. She had come without a thought of 
 Ghent, just as he had descended from his shelter 
 with no thought of her, and for no other purpose 
 than to guard the water, precious to himself. 
 
 She took up a place at his side, not because he 
 was a man and her companion, but merely because 
 this was the only position left to her to assume be- 
 tween the coyotes and the spring. She did not 
 speak to Ghent in this extremity, nor did Ghent 
 make the slightest sound at beholding her. He 
 knew why she was here. 
 
 The maddened coyotes, conjuring a certain sort 
 of courage because of their numbers, not only smelt 
 water, but they also scented meat. The two hu- 
 man beings were food, if but once they could be 
 dragged to the earth and ripped open to the seat of 
 life. 
 
 Tactics of circling and pressing in closer were al- 
 most immediately inaugurated. The creatures were 
 exceptionally goaded to attack. It was one of the 
 thinnest of the animals, a tall, almost hairless old 
 chieftain of the pack that was first to leap forward 
 and lead a confusing assault. With a hundred wild 
 bickerings, snarlings, and yelps, the six savage ban- 
 dits of the desert made simultaneous descent upon 
 [177]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 the guardians of the well. It was an utterly be- 
 wildering onslaught, where the creatures leaped 
 swiftly all around their intended victims, snapping 
 teeth that sounded out a dry sort of clash, and per- 
 forming every conceivable maneuver to harass 
 Ghent or Judith to some move of indiscretion. 
 Their gaunt, active forms could never be distinctly 
 seen; the occasional blazing of their eyes was a 
 baffling, uncanny element in all the confusion. 
 
 Both Judith and Ghent were eager to advance 
 to closer quarters for the fray. Already they were 
 striking, wildly, viciously, their eyes only hungry 
 for blood. The moment, however, that the man left 
 the spring by a step, one of the desperate animals 
 sped there behind him, ready to leap inside the cave 
 for the water so fragrant and near, or to sink his 
 teeth in the legs of his foes, and so draw their 
 wrath, while his comrades took advantage of the 
 moment. 
 
 It was Judith that turned and met the creature. 
 She crashed her stone-hammer down upon its back 
 and then upon its head, and then upon its leg, rain- 
 ing her blows like a fury on the form that lay so 
 soon upon the gravel, its lungs heaving fearfully 
 in death. 
 
 No sooner had she presented her back to the 
 [178]
 
 A Battle in the Night 
 
 wolves at the fore, however, than a pair leaped 
 straightway to attack her. With his gun-barrel 
 Ghent broke the two forelegs of the first that came 
 in reach, when he himself was instantly the object 
 for all of the others to assault. 
 
 A wild and tremendous melee ensued. More 
 grim, more desperate than the very beasts that be- 
 set them, the man and woman swiftly turned the 
 tables of the battle, attacking in a frenzy of activity. 
 They fought like very demons, this cave-pair 
 schooled in savagery; and with lust and love of the 
 bloody work they rushed upon the thirst-crazed 
 coyotes, beating them down, and then beating 
 them again, till the brutes were outdone in brute 
 fierceness. 
 
 There were presently two that lay lifeless on the 
 sand. A third hobbled grotesquely about on broken 
 legs, making sounds of its pain. A fourth one, 
 struck upon the nose, turned round and round in a 
 circle, till Judith dealt it a crashing blow with her 
 hammer and crumpled it down upon the earth. Of 
 the two that remained one was entirely unhurt, the 
 other had a bruise upon his bony rump, and his 
 tail had been broken. With his one sound com- 
 panion he turned and fled the scene, howling of woe 
 and tales of suffering to come. 
 [179]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 Ghent descended on the creature so helplessly 
 hobbling about in the gravel, and with one blow 
 knocked the very roof from its skull. He could 
 have slain a grizzly in the passion for fight that was 
 upon him. Both he and Judith were panting; both 
 were wild and sinister of aspect. The half cup of 
 water was secure. 
 
 " We'll have to watch here every night ! " said 
 Ghent, returning towards the spring. It was the 
 second time he had spoken. 
 
 Judith, who had never addressed him a word in 
 all these fateful weeks, broke her silence at last. 
 She said : " I'll watch from twelve o'clock till 
 morning." 
 
 There was nothing further said. Ghent moved 
 from one to another of the four still forms, lying 
 in four different attitudes of death upon the sand, 
 and having assured himself that none could commit 
 a belated treachery, entered the spring-house, drank 
 a sip of the water, then emerged and started in si- 
 lence up the slope. 
 
 He paused a rod or more away, and turned to 
 look back on his companion. She stood there, a 
 grim, magnificent figure of strength and courage, 
 veiled in the dimming mystery of night. She was 
 panting; she was weary, from the fight just con- 
 [180]
 
 A Battle in the Night 
 
 eluded as well as from all the days of effort, worry, 
 and privation. 
 
 Once more the exultation of his manhood swept 
 upon Ghent in a wave of feeling. He had never so 
 thoroughly felt the bond of his partnership with 
 Judith as he felt it now. She was only a woman. 
 Some pang engendered by his brutish behavior shot 
 through the hardness that the feud had long nur- 
 tured in his breast. 
 
 He did not know that Judith at last felt one al- 
 most insupportable yearning for his companionship 
 for one word of cheer and friendliness. He fan- 
 cied the starlight gleamed with coldness in her eyes, 
 and so he went on to his camp. 
 
 Judith watched him go. A warm, soft glow that 
 had come in her bosom died away. He had been 
 her fight-mate for a moment nothing more but 
 her nature had been stirred to its depths. 
 
 At length she sat down upon a rock, her hammer 
 laid close to her hand. The darkness slightly 
 cloaked the four still forms by which she was sur- 
 rounded, but from time to time the night wind 
 slightly raised the long gray hair upon a stiffened 
 creature, as if some spark of life might be stirring 
 anew, or some unseen fingers toyed with the harm- 
 less carcasses. 
 
 [181]
 
 CHAPTER XX 
 
 THE REVOLT OF HEAVEN 
 
 AT dawn both Ghent and Judith dragged one 
 coyote apiece from the scene of the battle and 
 skinned it for its hide. None of the creatures bore 
 a handsome coat. Two had lost much of their 
 hair. 
 
 If any thought that perhaps a piece of meat 
 might be cut from the better portions of the animals 
 had entered the mind of either the man or the 
 woman, it was speedily abandoned when the odor 
 of coyote flesh was vouchsafed their senses in the 
 process of removing the hides. 
 
 There was nothing to do but to drag the dead 
 animals far down the ravine past the cul-de-sac, 
 and throw them on the hill. There they would pres- 
 ently desiccate, almost without decomposition, to 
 bleach some day and leave a pile of bones to whiten 
 in the sun. 
 
 The skins secured began to dry at once. It was 
 only by vigorous rubbing as the heat drew the 
 [182]
 
 The Revolt of Heaven 
 
 natural moisture that either Judith or Ghent was 
 enabled to retain any softness or pliability in the 
 pelts. This diversion served to while away another 
 torrid morning. All afternoon the sirocco gushed 
 upward from the open hells below, and the strip was 
 deserted. 
 
 There was no abatement of the heat. At the 
 spring the same slow, steady diminution of the 
 water-supply was maintained. For perhaps three 
 days there was no observable change, then once 
 again, as always before, the oozing drops oozed less. 
 In twenty-four hours not one full cup of water 
 could be gathered in the basin. 
 
 The two haggard ghosts that Ghent and Judith 
 had become moved twice a day to the spring-house, 
 drank a sip of water, and returned to lie in the 
 shade. 
 
 Each night, till the great blazing dipper had 
 swung half its circle in the heavens, Ghent took up 
 his watch at the well, to ward off any famishing 
 creatures that might smell out the all but burned- 
 up moisture. 
 
 Each midnight Judith came to take his place and 
 
 keep the grim vigil till morning. Once, while she sat 
 
 before the drying spring a lone coyote, voicing its 
 
 animal despair, howled far down the canon, but 
 
 [183]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 failed to appear at the place. He had perished on 
 his way to the water, even as he wailed. 
 
 A week dragged by, and scarcely more than a 
 spoonful of water was delivered up by the ledge of 
 rock throughout all a day and night. The pair 
 of wild-eyed beings that still clung tenaciously to 
 life at the parched oasis could scarcely nibble at 
 the nuts or acorns or berries, since one sip of water 
 a day was all they could hope for at the spring. 
 It was almost a mockery to guard the well when 
 darkness descended, or the moon arose, yet the 
 vigilance was rigidly maintained. 
 
 Death, nothing but death, lay all about them in 
 the once-green strip. Some terrible, ominous change 
 had come upon the blast of air that took the place 
 of wind. It seemed as if new stillness, far more 
 deep and terrible, lay upon the realm. Portent was 
 rife in the stifling atmosphere. 
 
 The hour arrived when the watch at night was no 
 longer kept. There was nothing to watch. Three 
 days had gone by and the two silent specters of the 
 shriveled oasis had taken a bare sip apiece of the 
 water. Doom and the end could apparently be 
 dodged no longer. The two antagonized beings 
 made no pretense of respecting equal rights. Twice, 
 three times, and four times a day or night, either 
 [184]
 
 one of them crept stealthily upon the spring, caught 
 up the rock receptacle and held it to drain it of its 
 contents. 
 
 There were no contents. 
 
 They laid their tongues to the crevice of the rock 
 which had always been wet with the trickle. It was 
 dry and beginning to be hot with all the other heated 
 things that constituted this hideous region. An en- 
 mity deadlier than all the feuds, a jealousy and sav- 
 age selfishness out-intensifying every possible scheme 
 of vengeance, now claimed the two, as each madly 
 struggled to be the last to die. 
 
 Fully twenty times, that third awful night, both 
 Judith and Ghent returned to haunt the spring. 
 Either one, beholding the other come reeling out 
 from the spring-house they had made, could only 
 groan, turn away, and wander to cave or to camp 
 in a species of homing instinct undying in the mind. 
 
 It seemed that the day that followed must cer- 
 tainly be the last. Another could never be survived. 
 As it was, the two lay in a stupor, Judith in the 
 darkness and partial coolness of her cave, Ghent 
 in a double-shaded pit he had dug in his shelter. 
 Outside, in the glare, the sky had assumed a brazen, 
 heat-scorched appearance, and portentous heavi- 
 ness hung upon the air. A sultriness to which the 
 [185]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 desert atmosphere is seldom subjected pressed 
 tangibly upon the sweated earth. 
 
 By some mercy of agonies increased beyond en- 
 durance, the man and the woman lay half fainting 
 at last. They were unaware of the lowering some- 
 thing that oppressed the very hills, and when at 
 length a leaden mass of tortured fumes and ether 
 rolled like a frown of God across the summits, flash- 
 ing with vicious spears of light, there was no human 
 sense to render fit tribute of awe. 
 
 The cataclysmic outburst of a sky pent to burst- 
 ing and angered to furious revolt at last by the 
 merciless warfare of the sun, came suddenly at mid- 
 dle afternoon. With a mighty detonation of ac- 
 cumulated thunders, discharged in one prodigious 
 explosion, the firmament appeared to split wide 
 open and be rent in a thousand yellow fissures. 
 Then down on the baked and shrinking earth the 
 earth that had rendered up every last drop of its 
 moisture descended a million huge, splashing blobs 
 of water, as if in the sudden, convulsive grief of all 
 the heavens. 
 
 God, how it rained! 
 
 It fell as the sea might fall through the meshes 
 of a net. It tumbled down upon the hungry hills 
 as if it belonged to them only. It sprayed as it 
 [186]
 
 The Revolt of Heaven 
 
 struck, and beat up the gravel to looseness. It 
 steamed on the rocks and made them glisten. The 
 sun was blotted from the world with all its brazen 
 sky. Coolness and vigorous wind-gushes seemed to 
 hurl themselves upon the reeking atmosphere, and 
 drive the sultry heat like an enemy before them. 
 
 Again the fearful thunder voiced the long-sup- 
 pressed wrath of the elements. The mountains 
 roared it back exultantly. Tumult and downpour 
 claimed the world together. 
 
 Then out of a cave and a shelter crept two half- 
 naked human beings, half a mile apart. Judith on 
 her hands and knees emerged from her rocky abode 
 and gave up her body to the storm that smote upon 
 her; and eagerly she bent her face to the flooded 
 earth and drank from a small, muddy puddle not 
 half an inch in depth. 
 
 Ghent, having risen to his feet, came forth in a 
 crouching position, unable to believe the wild tale 
 of his senses. He stood in the rain, a huddled crea- 
 ture, fearing to look on the heavens lest the deluge 
 cease, but holding forth one of his hands as if for 
 alms. Into his upturned palm the drops were strik- 
 ing tremendously, only to splash and disappear be- 
 fore he could close his grasp upon them. He finally 
 held both open hands before his face to form a 
 [187]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 living bowl. Into the flesh receptacle the waters 
 poured, and he drank and laughed like a child. 
 
 Throughout the hour that the fury of the rain 
 continued, the two human prisoners, here in the 
 open dungeon of the desert, either stood or lay down 
 in the flaying drops, their bodies greedily absorb- 
 ing the monster globules, their ragged clothing 
 soaked and running with a hundred streams far 
 larger than the spring had produced for many weeks. 
 
 The downpour ceased at sunset. A zephyr like 
 the mountain's sigh crept with the dusk down the 
 rugged ravine. Judith and Ghent could do nothing 
 but sleep, in relief and utter exhaustion. In the 
 morning God's smile had returned to His desert 
 oasis. The spring was once more flowing from the 
 rock. 
 
 [188]
 
 CHAPTER XXI 
 
 THE SEASON OF MOODS 
 
 WINTER in the desert had commenced. In the 
 stress of life to which they had both been subjected 
 neither Ghent nor Judith had been aware of the 
 passing of the weeks. Neither had kept a calendar 
 of days or dates ; neither could have told what month 
 it was with any degree of assurance. 
 
 In the higher mountains, off to the north and the 
 eastward, the snows had fallen fully three weeks 
 prior to the first mad onrush of the desert rain. 
 Blizzard and north wind had wrapt the frozen peaks 
 that reach aloft into atmospheres austere and bleak, 
 while still the sirocco had scorched the desolation. 
 
 Even now, when the reign of the gods of heat had 
 been broken for the year, it was far from being a 
 chill, damp world in which the oasis had its being. 
 The rains were few. They came invariably in a 
 violent manner, to rage for an hour or more with 
 extraordinary fury and then abruptly cease, when 
 [189]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 the clouds retired as if to wait new hoardings of 
 celestial ammunition. 
 
 At all these times the gulches ran with turgid 
 streams, and a thousand rills chased down the slopes 
 till the earth was but superficially irrigated, and the 
 rivers off somewhere in the favored lands were 
 swelled to overflowing. 
 
 Judith and Ghent had returned to the former 
 problem that of food. Not many creatures 
 emerged from the earth when the rains made living 
 possible, for scores had been slain by the preying 
 pair, and to multiply here was weighty business. 
 The man, therefore, gathered at his camp a great 
 horde of pine-nuts, supplemented by the tiny man- 
 zanita berries that much resembled miniature 
 tomatoes. 
 
 Judith, more familiar with the acorns and the 
 uses to which she could put them, contented herself 
 with fetching many bushels of these to her cave. 
 She likewise brought many of the berries. The 
 powder that they rendered up on being ground made 
 a sweet, nutritious addition to her acorn-meal, which 
 she cooked as before, upon a stone. 
 
 Once again she and Ghent had resumed independ- 
 ent ways of existence. Not infrequently they hunted 
 in pair, as before, but it was seldom that meat was 
 [190]
 
 The Season of Moods 
 
 forthcoming. They had robed themselves in fur. 
 Judith's coyote skin was worn almost straight down 
 her body, and belted at the waist. Ghent's was 
 flung across his shoulder and fastened in place with 
 
 a cord. 
 
 When they met there was no exchange of speech, 
 yet a strong sense of fellowship had sprung into 
 being between them. They had lived through a 
 feud with the elements, if not a feud with God, and 
 the puny human quarrel and hatred bequeathed them 
 by their tribes had appeared less significant and 
 vital. 
 
 During that first month of the winter there were 
 only two rains, both tremendous, however, in the 
 masses of water discharged. Early in the second 
 month came a cloudburst that eclipsed both the pre- 
 ceding storms, not only for violence and suddenness, 
 but also for destructiveness. This mighty demon- 
 stration of nature's ill-regulated forces could have 
 been no more terrific had it embodied all the malice 
 of a sky intent upon the earth's annihilation. 
 
 Whole seas of water were not only liberated 
 abruptly on the mountains, they were dropped sheer 
 upon the helpless world. Great masses of sand and 
 gravel literally crumbled beneath the weight and 
 flow of the torrents. Boulders were sluiced from the
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 mothering earth and cast far below to the plains. 
 The canons roared with angry cataracts, tawny and 
 foaming. Sand rivers hastened to escape the mighty 
 onslaught. 
 
 Down through the narrow oasis a torrent plunged, 
 as if some great reservoir above had given way. 
 Trees were swept from their root-holds, rock-masses 
 came toppling down there, like castles disrupted in 
 a tidal wave. 
 
 The roar of the heavy, yellow rapids seemed to 
 fill all empty space. And the rain that descended 
 in great, irregular splotches fairly beat down the 
 water-wolves that leaped on the bosom of the flood. 
 
 The rock-and-earth shelter constructed by Judith 
 and Ghent above the spring was swept away like a 
 structure of nursery blocks. The wall of the cul-de- 
 sac went like a windrow of hay. Ten thousand tons 
 of gravel flowed like mush down the gorge, spreading 
 deep over spring, trees, and all. As if wave and 
 boulders, flood and swirling debris, had been units in 
 an army, fanatically charging down the hill to over- 
 whelm an enemy, the whole thing had come and gone 
 in half an hour, leaving ruin and ugliness behind. 
 
 Judith and Ghent had been safe above the highest 
 eager lapping of the torrent, but for two days that 
 followed they could not discover where the spring 
 [192]
 
 The Season of Moods 
 
 had been, till at length its belated waters, forcing 
 a passage through the masses on masses of sand 
 that lay upon them, issued forth as before and 
 trickled down upon their way. 
 
 The pick had been once more buried in the earth, 
 and Ghent was aware that in some past outburst of 
 nature's might the dug-out spring and the miner's 
 implement had been entombed before. He scooped 
 out a hole where the clear, cold liquid bubbled to the 
 surface, and the gravel all about it began once again 
 to assume its dry appearance. 
 
 The oasis itself was a desolate sight to behold. 
 What the heat and sirocco had not achieved to ren- 
 der it utterly ugly and forlorn had been accom- 
 plished by the flood. Its willows and alders pro- 
 truded above the sand and ooze in straggling 
 bunches, like bare poles thrust into mud. Its under- 
 growth was gone. Rocks and sand lay knee-deep 
 upon the trunks of every growing thing. 
 
 Down through the center was a cleared path fully 
 a rod in width. Many of the oak-shrubs had disap- 
 peared entirely. There was no more grass, dry or 
 otherwise, with which to replenish a bed. Not a spear 
 or leaf of greenery remained, save for the clumps of 
 evergreen trees and manzanita. 
 
 Fortunately for Ghent the roof of earth he had 
 [193]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 made for his shelter had only been partly washed 
 away in the deluge. His house did not leak; his 
 grass bed was dry and almost comfortable. He 
 threw a new layer of sand on the top of his shelter 
 and was ready to receive another drenching. 
 
 Judith in her cave was secure against the on- 
 slaughts of the elements. The rills of water which 
 had hastened down the slope had undermined her 
 fire-stones and carried a number away, but a new 
 supply could be selected from any one of dozens of 
 shale deposits where slabs as flat as a plank lay like 
 the broken platters of a bygone race of Titans. She 
 had lost not a few drying acorns, spread before the 
 storm's arrival, but this was a trivial matter. She 
 realized, however, that more of these violent down- 
 pours might visit the gorge before the season of 
 rains should be concluded, and therefore she gleaned 
 the oasis of every brown acorn and berry that re- 
 mained untouched by the torrents. 
 
 There were days of wondrous beauty that came 
 in the dead of the winter on this land of the great 
 extremes. There was balm in the air, delight in the 
 milder glances of the sun, peace and serenity when 
 each succeeding storm had gone its way, and infinite 
 beauty in the matchless sky, by night as well as day. 
 If the nights were long and edged with nipping cold, 
 [194]
 
 The Season of Moods 
 
 the days were merely crisp with frost-hint and sun- 
 shine blended together. 
 
 A few strange flowers, timid, frail little things, 
 emerged from the earth, where seeds had lain dormant 
 throughout the months of heat, and bloomed, and 
 nodded and faded away with a fragrant sigh that 
 left the world sweeter for their passing. 
 
 The weeks went by, with nothing eventful in their 
 train. It was a period of enforced inactivity for 
 both Judith and Ghent, with an almost unrelieved 
 monotony of diet on the things which trees or shrub- 
 bery had produced. Ghent did less cooking than 
 Judith. His fare was therefore less inviting. From 
 time to time either one or the other of them secured 
 one more rabbit or a squirrel, but meat was a luxury 
 denied them day after day. 
 
 To Judith the time was almost happy, despite the 
 bodily privations she endured. Some vague, intan- 
 gible j oy had come upon her, undefined and not in the 
 least understood. She found herself humming at odd 
 little tunes as she labored to grind up the acorns. 
 A few straggling words of songs she once had sung 
 came tentatively knocking at her memory, and were 
 bidden to enter and make themselves at home. 
 
 It was such a song that broke from her lips in 
 clear, melodious utterance, one day, as she walked 
 [195]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 to the spring to fill her treasured basin the rock- 
 basin, taken home as soon as the spring had recom- 
 menced to flow. She sang unconsciously, and Ghent, 
 at his shelter, heard the words. 
 
 "Oh, that we two were maying 
 
 Down the stream of the soft spring breeze, 
 Like children with violets playing 
 In the shade of the whispering trees. 
 
 "Oh, that we two were dreaming 
 
 On the sward of sheep-triimned down, 
 Watching the white mists stealing 
 O'er river, mead, and town." 
 
 She returned, still singing softly to herself, and 
 Ghent watched her going all the way. It was not till 
 the following day, however, that he climbed the hill, 
 up the branch ravine, till he came to the place where 
 two white skeletons had lain for years. They were 
 gone. The cloudburst had swept them away at last 
 and given them interment in sand. Ghent gazed in 
 unbelief where the pair had been, then felt a 
 warmth creep subtly to his heart, as if at some 
 propitious omen. 
 
 For a moment he almost forgot what it was he 
 
 had come here to seek. He looked about and into 
 
 the cave, at the table two men had once constructed 
 
 out of stone. There upon it lay the object he had 
 
 [196]
 
 The Season of Moods 
 
 climbed the slope to find the nugget of gold, with a 
 hole through the bulk of its metal. He took it at 
 once and, returning to his shelter, sought out a large 
 flat rock to serve him in lieu of an anvil, and then, 
 with his rusted gun-barrel for a hammer, began to 
 pound and shape the gold with careful, fastidious 
 strokes. 
 
 Why he was working at this heavy piece of stuff 
 he could not have told to save his life. He only 
 knew the work was joyous, out there in the sun before 
 his shelter. A shy, half-audible sound of whistling 
 floated from his lips, stealing forth on the air a 
 faint, blithe echo of the song that Judith had been 
 singing. 
 
 [197]
 
 CHAPTER XXII 
 
 WHEN NATURE STIRS THE BLOOD 
 
 FOR a number of days Ghent wrought at the nug- 
 get, beating it slowly into the shape of a large, 
 rough ring three inches or more in diameter. He 
 worked with care, directing his blows in a manner 
 that increased the natural hole by which the nugget 
 had been pierced and reducing the many irregulari- 
 ties of its pattern. He had nothing else to do but to 
 eat and sleep, for of tools or weapons there could 
 be no need, and hunting was the merest waste of 
 time. 
 
 Judith, whose feet were almost bare again, was 
 patiently toiling, day by day, to produce such a pair 
 of sabots as she had observed on her neighbor's feet. 
 With a hint of the method that Ghent had employed 
 to hollow out his wooden shoes, she set to work on 
 just such a piece of dead tree-trunk as he had em- 
 ployed, burning away such of its substance as she 
 could not cut with her corset-steel knives, and then 
 [198]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 scraping out the charred portions, to repeat the per- 
 formance anew. 
 
 She burned the wood slowly, employing hot coals, 
 which she laid upon the surface of the wood she de- 
 sired to remove, permitting them to ignite or char 
 the substance for a time, then throwing them off 
 and gouging away the blackened material. 
 
 Aside from the gray coyote-skin with which she 
 robed her body, she had rudely sewed various patches 
 of her ragged dress together with a needle cut from 
 a hard bit of manzanita and some of the raveled cord- 
 age for a thread. The skirt thus fashioned reached 
 only to her knees, and day after day it was succumb- 
 ing to the wear and tear of her rugged mode of life. 
 
 This was the fashion of existence the two were 
 leading when the winter had spent its fury and a 
 hint of spring was coming in the air. The new year's 
 child that would blossom into summer comes early 
 in the desert. And it is beautiful. Just as no man 
 is wholly bad in every fiber of his being, so no land 
 is wholly repulsive throughout the year. The sea- 
 son that came upon the land of desolation brought 
 with it charm and stirrings of life surcharged with 
 exquisite longings and ecstasies of life-emotion. 
 
 Even the cacti, gaunt effigies of growing plants, 
 put forth their marvelous blossoms singularly beau- 
 [199]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 tiful offerings to be born of such hopeless ugliness. 
 The barren earth tendered its younglings, dainty 
 flowers like symbols of hope in the mountain's soul 
 the mountain that all the summer through must lie 
 so forbidding and austere. 
 
 The oasis responded bravely to the miracle of re- 
 creation. Tender shoots of grass appeared, un- 
 daunted by the overflow of sand upon the bottom of 
 the gorge ; the buds on the willows and alders swelled, 
 and baby leaves burst forth precociously, uncon- 
 scious of the fate of those gone before, which in their 
 time had responded to the season's courtship like 
 all inexperienced things. 
 
 From somewhere, out in the places of its mystery, 
 came a pair of the desert's quail, to repopulate the 
 gorge. Later a pair of grouse arrived, and another 
 mated brace of quail. A number of newly grown cot- 
 tontails the family of some old, wily pair that had 
 lived through the drought and escaped from Ghent 
 and Judith drew the meat-hungry hunters upon 
 themselves and excited their appetite anew. 
 
 It was not altogether because of the taste of fresh 
 meat thus afforded him that Ghent began to ex- 
 perience a stirring of spring in his blood. The first 
 frail ecstasy had faintly tinged his pulses on the 
 day that Judith's song had floated to his ears. Not 
 [200]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 even yet, however, did he comprehend the meaning 
 of the wine within his veins. Something animal, 
 something buoyant, exciting, and fiery made his 
 movements elastic and his brain alert and his senses 
 all sharp in their tingling. 
 
 He was no longer working at his massive ring of 
 gold. In a manner it was finished like an ancient 
 tore, rugged, and splendid. It lay on a rock-shelf, 
 back in his shelter, while his hands began to itch for 
 new employment. For nearly a week he had seen 
 very little of Judith. Her labor to make a pair of 
 shoes had absorbed her attention protractedly. 
 
 It was not until Ghent beheld her in her tidy, 
 mended raiment that the cry of his nature was at 
 length made somewhat intelligent to his being. He 
 beheld her at the spring, bathing her splendid bare 
 arms in the secondary pool to which the waters 
 trickled. His blood leaped hotly in its channels and 
 his gaze was bent upon her intently. He watched 
 her uncoil the masses of her hair and shake the glori- 
 ous mantle out upon her shoulders. 
 
 He noted the curve of her body, from her neck to 
 her feet. The supple, sinuous movements that she 
 made were infinitely graceful and suggestive of 
 power. For the very first time in all these months 
 the man had forgotten that Judith was a Haines; 
 [201]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 he beheld her only as a woman a female creature 
 of his race. 
 
 He watched her conclude the last detail of re- 
 coiling her hair upon her crown. Her beauty awoke 
 him as the spring had done, but far more potently ; 
 it fevered his pulses ; it deadened all the past and 
 bound him, all in all, to the present. He forgot to 
 revere the Haines-Ghent feud ; he forgot he had hated 
 this being. The physical revulsion against her, 
 which had utterly possessed him since his boyhood 
 days, had melted in the surge of life that leaped in 
 every fiber of his being. 
 
 It was not until Judith turned and beheld him 
 that confusion of memory and present desire, in 
 chaotic struggle for his mastery, swept some hot tide 
 of fever to his face. He did not relinquish his gaze, 
 however, and Judith met it calmly. There was noth- 
 ing of hatred in the glance she bestowed upon him. 
 
 The attitude of tense contemplation in which he 
 was poised brought some wild, spring pleasure to her 
 senses. Half nude himself and superbly developed, 
 he ignited a flame of admiration in her bosom, for 
 nature had claimed her elemental self and the season 
 had wrought its magic no less upon her than on 
 Ghent. 
 
 When she turned to go, the man's gaze followed, 
 [202]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 despite the feeble struggle of his memory, making 
 its final resistance in his mind. He watched till she 
 had departed from his sight, and even then his veins 
 gave up none of their joyance. He looked about 
 him slowly, like one who emerges from a long, ugly 
 dream, t find the world far more beautiful than 
 reason could accept. The tender leaves upon the 
 trees addressed him with a new and subtle message. 
 A tiny flower that blossomed at his feet almost rav- 
 aged his senses. He snatched it up, root and all, 
 from the earth, and crushing it against his face, 
 despoiled it utterly. 
 
 Every day that succeeded for a week, the man's 
 one wish was to look on Judith's form. He spent 
 hours at a time in a rock-clump across the canon 
 from her cave, watching every movement she made. 
 He arose with the dawn to haunt the spring, since 
 that was the hour when she came to replenish her 
 basin and to bathe. He made long detours to meet 
 her when she walked or hunted in the shrubbery. His 
 gaze grew bolder. Freemasonry had come in his 
 glances ; companionship was building some airy 
 bridge between them. He did not speak when he 
 met her, and she never spoke to him. The habit of 
 silence upon them was deeper, more tangible than the 
 older habit of their hate. 
 
 [203]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 As for Judith no woman so favored by the gods, 
 so entirely re-created on the natural lines of an open- 
 air being, self-dependent, returned to savage ways 
 and bounding with natural vigor, could have long re- 
 mained insensible to nature's mighty edicts. She, 
 too, had forgotten the accursed feud; she too, 
 had responded to the Spring. Admiration for 
 Ghent's resourcefulness, his courage, yea, even his 
 grim and sinister indifference to herself throughout 
 their sojourn here together, had been kindled in her 
 bosom months before. He was strong; she admired 
 his might of arms and limbs. He could fight; she 
 responded to the savagery that made him what he 
 was. If his glances were startling to her keen per- 
 ception now, then so were the impulses deep in her 
 own surging blood. 
 
 Despite it all, however, she was a free, wild 
 creature. Had he offered but to lay a finger upon 
 her, she would have fought him like a tigress not 
 for the hate she once had borne, but because of her 
 strong, fierce nature, bred in her being and fostered 
 by the life she had lived in this rugged ravine. 
 
 Like the quail and the grouse that had come here 
 
 to nest, John Ghent was possessed of one thought 
 
 only to make his den complete. The spring-stirred 
 
 passion of his nature was not such a love as conven- 
 
 [204]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 tions beget or approve. It was hardly to be termed 
 a love at all. Towards Judith he felt no tender emo- 
 tions, no solicitudes, no softening sense of adoration. 
 As a jungle-bred tiger demands a mate, so he de- 
 manded the Eve of this garden in the desert. He 
 meditated no wooing ; his impulse was to bound upon 
 and hold her, to drag her by force from her cave 
 on the hill and fetch her away to his shelter. 
 
 This was the thought that abided in his brain in 
 his hours of waking and sleeping. The marriage 
 would be God's since God had thrown them here to- 
 gether. The symbol was ready that great golden 
 tore which, with blow upon blow, he had wrought of 
 the nugget at his camp. This he would place upon 
 her firm brown arm at once his insignia and the 
 link to bind them each to each forever. It was all a 
 savage, elemental mating that shaped itself in his 
 mind and he felt it soon must come. 
 
 Three more days went by, and the madness on 
 Ghent disturbed him night and day. If some 
 lingering reminiscence of the codes evolved by men 
 who abide in the towns remained still undissolved 
 from his long years of training, they had all become 
 powerless at last. 
 
 There came a warm, sweet night when the fra- 
 grance of some goddess, trailing her new spring gar- 
 [205]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 ments across the air, intoxicated Ghent with an over- 
 whelming ecstasy of life. Nature was naked out of 
 doors and laying her soft, tingling hands upon all 
 her living things. Ghent became her votary, drunk 
 to do her bidding. 
 
 Pie crept from his shelter silently and stood for a 
 moment in the marvelous moonlight, flooding all the 
 world. It cut him out in clear, sharp contrast to 
 the mass of rocks in which he made abode. With his 
 wolfskin upon him and his arms and legs practically 
 naked, he was all a gray-and-ivory being, save for 
 his beard and his hair, which had now grown thick 
 and long. In his hands he bore nothing at all not 
 even the braclet of gold. He remained there to scru- 
 tinize the gorge below and to listen, in the silence, 
 for a moment. Then he noiselessly descended to the 
 greenery, proceeded down its grassy bed, and 
 was presently climbing the slope to Judith's 
 cave. 
 
 The man was trembling violently. His mouth was 
 dry. All his senses were tremendously acute. A 
 clammy perspiration had broken out upon him. He 
 could feel and hear his heart beat in its rapid, heavy 
 strokes. 
 
 He approached the mouth of the cave from off 
 at the right, and was thus unable to discern it as he 
 [206]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 made his way along the slope. The moon cast his 
 shadow up the hill a patch of shade as black as 
 ink. Absolute silence wrapped the world. 
 
 He slipped on a rock as he neared the cave, and 
 made a slight disturbance which the stillness magni- 
 fied alarmingly. Then, emerging close to Judith's 
 abiding-place, from behind the final turn of the rise, 
 he suddenly halted at a sight that chilled the mar- 
 row in his bones. 
 
 Creeping towards the cave-mouth far more 
 stealthily than any man could ever hope to creep 
 upon a victim, her eyes ablaze, her jaw dropped 
 down, her tail straight out behind her, a huge moun- 
 tain lioness, heavy with whelps, was almost at the 
 entrance of the cavern. That all her faculties were 
 intent upon a single object there could be no doubt. 
 That the cave had been hers for former whelpings 
 was as certain as that now she smelled a human 
 intruder in her den and meant to slay, in her 
 frenzy of approaching motherhood, and occupy the 
 place. 
 
 Her movements held the man transfixed in ad- 
 miration. There was something majestic in the ter- 
 rible purpose which the creature revealed by her 
 steady approach. All the passion and fire had 
 abruptly sunk in Ghent's throbbing arteries and left 
 [207]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 him nothing but awe. It was Judith's peril, im- 
 minent and perhaps inescapable, that awoke a new 
 emotion within him. A memory of the day when he 
 had seen her a child helplessly riding on the flood, 
 surged upon him. He had suddenly lost all selfish- 
 ness, all desire to make her his own. 
 
 The impulse of brotherhood surged uppermost 
 within him the impulse that binds his species man 
 to man when the moment of trial shall come. He 
 was suddenly a creature wrung with manly love 
 the love that is protective, self-sacrificing, heroic 
 aye, divine. He wanted nothing but Judith's safe- 
 keeping from this brute from every brute, his own 
 fierce self included. 
 
 A hoarse cry escaped him as he suddenly launched 
 himself forward to kill the lioness with his naked 
 hands. His descent upon the creature was so swift 
 and unexpected that he landed on her shoulder, with 
 his hands at her throat before she could rise from 
 her crouching. Instantly, however, she let out a 
 sound of rage and surprise and rolled on her back 
 to assault him with her claws. 
 
 She gashed his shoulder with the first mad rake 
 
 of her talons. Together they had lurched entirely 
 
 over on the ground, Ghent with his fingers dug 
 
 fiercely in her neck, the lioness thrashing and claw- 
 
 [208]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 ing in a fury that it seemed no man could hope to 
 withstand. 
 
 Over they went again, rolling on the level earth 
 that lay before the cave. With one of his knees in 
 the creature's stomach, Ghent bore down upon her 
 heavily. The she-beast had ripped him, arm and 
 leg, however, and was swiftly inflicting deep, ugly 
 gashes upon him. 
 
 It was a furious vortex of action that the two of 
 them made in the moonlight. Which was more sav- 
 age no man could have told, Ghent or the animal he 
 was fighting. He made no sound as he clung to her 
 throat, for man is a stoic in his hurts. The lioness 
 screamed and bellowed tremendously, for such is the 
 way of her kind. Judith, abruptly awakened by the 
 sounds, came running to the opening, her heavy 
 stone-hammer in her hand. 
 
 What she saw was a half-naked man upon the 
 earth, so closely hugged to the lioness and so wildly 
 embroiled with the beast in fighting and violence that 
 to tell which was uppermost, or which was more ter- 
 rible, would have been an impossible task. She ran 
 towards the two savage beings, her hammer raised 
 high for a blow upon the animal's head. But she 
 could not strike she dared not strike, for the fear 
 of killing Ghent. 
 
 [209]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 In the utterly confusing paroxysms and commo- 
 tion of her rage the panther tossed and scrambled 
 caveward till one of her claws caught for a moment 
 in Judith's skirt, and tore a full half from her per- 
 son. Ghent all this time had never for a second 
 loosed his terrible grip on the creature's throat. 
 Both of his knees were pressing now upon her lungs 
 and abdomen. He was strangling and crushing the 
 life from her body. 
 
 The sounds that the she-brute made to catch a 
 breath and the heave of her mighty thorax in her 
 labor to fill her lungs were terrible to hear and be- 
 hold. Nevertheless, she was gashing her man-foe 
 atrociously, even when somewhat of the viciousness 
 of her clawings had departed from her furious as- 
 saults. 
 
 When he presently had her borne helpless on the 
 sand, the man beheld a jagged piece of rock in the 
 reach of his hand. He relinquished the grip of five 
 of his fingers, snatched up the weapon which the 
 mountain had provided, and crashed it down upon 
 the creature's skull with all his might. 
 
 The huge brute shivered. He struck again, and 
 yet again, and all the fierce activity seemed to wilt 
 and shrink from the quivering frame of the panther. 
 The battle was done. 
 
 [210]
 
 When Nature Stirs the Blood 
 
 Judith stood poised, her hammer still partially 
 raised for a blow, when Ghent staggered weakly to 
 his feet. She saw the blood upon him, his own red 
 blood. She saw the smile that illumined his white, 
 set face for a second in the moonlight, and then he 
 collapsed at her feet. 
 
 [211]
 
 CHAPTER XXIII 
 
 THE MIGHT OF GOD 
 
 ALL that night Judith labored to save John Ghent 
 from death. All night she tore strips from her 
 garments, and bound up his wounds, and ran back 
 and forth between her cave and the spring for needed 
 water. 
 
 He bled tremendously. The panther had torn 
 not only channels in his flesh, but the flesh itself 
 from his bones. His legs were aquiver with the 
 lacerations of nerves and veins and thews. He had 
 lain for fifteen minutes unconscious before the first 
 draining of his life fluid had been checked ; and when 
 morning dawned at length upon the scene he was 
 weakened to utter helplessness. 
 
 Judith had fetched him the grass of her bed and 
 made him a pallet upon the barren earth before her 
 cave and the man had fallen asleep. How changed 
 he seemed, with his beard so grown and his hair 
 now long about his pallid face ! He awoke about an 
 [212]
 
 The Might of God 
 
 hour after sunrise, and turning his head gazed in si- 
 lence on the face of the woman beside him. She 
 was pale from exhaustion and the mothering worry 
 come to possess all her nature.. Her face was smile- 
 less, but in it the lines of solicitude w6re graven for 
 Ghent to decipher. 
 
 He winked, in a slow, deliberate way, for the sun 
 was in his eyes, and even his eyelid muscles were tor- 
 pid. She fetched him a drink, in a small, concaved 
 stone that could hold scarcely half a dozen spoon- 
 fuls. He drank it, but made no effort to speak, 
 either to express his thanks or to offer explanation 
 of his presence here in the night. 
 
 Whether Judith respected his mood of silence or 
 could not herself break the barrier between them 
 mattered little. She did not speak. She fetched 
 three slender poles of willow, tied them together at 
 the end, formed a tripod between Ghent and the sun, 
 and secured a rag upon it, to shield his eyes from 
 the light. Then she cooked a pone of her acorn- 
 meal on a flat piece of rock and gave it to Ghent 
 for his breakfast. He ate it and once more fell 
 asleep. 
 
 For Judith, with Ghent thus laid at her threshold, 
 helpless and all but killed, there was much important 
 employment. There was blood to be covered on the 
 [213]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 sand and rocks, and the body of the panther to be 
 skinned and dragged away. 
 
 With a thought of needs to arise some day, she 
 stripped off the hide with no compunction, after 
 which her next concern was to move the carcass far 
 enough away to secure the ravine against any pos- 
 sible offensiveness. 
 
 Therefore, she finally hauled it down through the 
 greenery, past the walls where her cul-de-sac had 
 been swept clean away by the cloudburst, and so to 
 one of the barren slopes from which the skeletons 
 of the two coyotes had been washed by some of the 
 freshets. 
 
 When she came once more to her dwelling, Ghent 
 was again awake. He watched her restore a more 
 cleanly appearance to the place where the fight had 
 taken place, and watched her sit down at her crude 
 rock implements and grind up the acorns on which 
 they must both of them live. Indeed, he watched 
 her all day long, her goings, her comings, and her 
 ministrations. Some way, despite the ceaseless tor- 
 tures in his mangled flesh, he was wondrously happy, 
 thus to lie helpless at her feet. 
 
 And he was utterly helpless; she could do with 
 him quite as she liked. There was no more furious 
 passion in his veins not because of the letting of 
 [214]
 
 The Might of God 
 
 his blood, but rather because of some chastening that 
 had come to his spirit in that second when he had 
 wished to protect her from a ravening beast. He 
 loved her, and the love in his heart had been touched 
 by divinity the fire that burns away the dross and 
 refines and brightens the gold. 
 
 All that day he could not, or did not, speak. He 
 suffered agonies, but his face betrayed no sign as 
 he lay upon the grass of Judith's bed. Some ecstasy 
 within him gave him far more exquisite torture, for 
 such is the way of an overwhelming joy just strug- 
 gling to its birth. At noon and at sundown Judith 
 cooked more of her acorn cakes and put them in his 
 hand to eat. In her eyes burned some light of exulta- 
 tion, for love had possessed her in its sweetness. 
 
 That night she made him almost comfortable, in 
 her silent, effective way. He slept in fitful naps, and 
 was often awake. So often as he stirred, however, 
 there was Judith at his side with her shallow stone 
 saucer of water for his needs, or standing above him, 
 or sitting near at hand, her half-clad figure won- 
 drously beautiful in the soft white light of the moon. 
 
 Her womanly ministrations had only commenced 
 
 on that first spring day. With the pangs of healing 
 
 in his muscles, bone, and flesh, John Ghent became 
 
 a weak and fevered patient, over whom Judith 
 
 [215]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 yearned with all the tenderness of her potential 
 motherhood. 
 
 And still they did not speak. 
 
 He never had occasion to request so much as a 
 drink. Her thoughtfulness was always a trifle in ad- 
 vance of his wants ; he could not thank her, for such 
 was not his way. The words that his heart would 
 have prompted him to utter were confused, hence 
 his love was dumb. There was nothing to talk about, 
 nothing to say, so much had always been between 
 them. 
 
 It was far more wonderful and joyous to lie there 
 and look upon her face far more ecstatic now and 
 then to feel the wonderful gaze of her eyes on his, as 
 the earth sank away from their two lone selves, tak- 
 ing with it all its heavy burden of sins, mistakes, 
 and woes, and leaving them nothing but nature, the 
 desert, and God. 
 
 He mended slowly, for his wounds were deep, and 
 new blood was making in his veins. Day after day of 
 their silent companionship went by with joy to the 
 served and the server. Only souls that have passed 
 through travail such as theirs could lie so naked, side 
 by side, in the sanctifying silence that reveals the 
 uttermost of all there could be to reveal. 
 
 A week thus passed, and Ghent was barely strong 
 [216]
 
 The Might of God 
 
 enough to sit with his back against the wall of Ju- 
 dith's cave while nature worked at his cuts and in- 
 juries. He never complained; not even in his sleep 
 did a groan betray him. His progress now was 
 rapid his progress in everything save speech. He 
 and Judith seemed farther from speech than 
 before. 
 
 At the end of ten days he could be kept no longer 
 on his back or sitting down throughout the day. He 
 got to his feet, from time to time, to limber the 
 sinews and flesh newly knitted in his legs. It was one 
 of these days that some strange oppression came to 
 haunt the very air. 
 
 Both Ghent and Judith were affected, they knew 
 not how or why. A sense of impending disaster, or 
 a restlessness of the inner self that was responsive 
 to hidden warnings, took possession of them both, 
 yet nothing seemed to happen. 
 
 A second day of the singular feeling followed, then 
 a third. It was a terrible, inescapable sensation that 
 seemed to have nothing wherewith to find expression, 
 for it seemed not of air or earth or sun, yet was 
 singularly present everywhere. 
 
 It was nearly at sundown that the awesome si- 
 lence and the pause of the earth were broken. The 
 thing came not suddenly then. A distant roar, that 
 [217]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 swept ever onward with incredible velocity, ushered 
 the mighty cataclysm to the mountains. 
 
 Sounds of wrack and devastation made articulate, 
 but concentrated in a tumult such as sea nor gale nor 
 cataract may ever create, involved entire creation. 
 On its heels came the dreadful thing itself the 
 earthquake rending the very hills and flapping the 
 earth-crust like a rag of rock and sand, and heaving 
 through adamant ledges and gravel like a tidal 
 wave on some molten sea which the earth may no 
 longer contain. 
 
 It opened the mountains and closed them again, 
 as if the things had been creatures, gasping for the 
 breath of life. It shook and rocked the solid peaks. 
 It split vast walls and tossed the dust of ruins in the 
 air, which, in turn, assumed the awful motion. 
 
 Ghent had staggered galvanically to his feet. He 
 reeled about like some grotesquery in human form. 
 Judith was flung upon her knees. She got up and 
 was shaken once more to the earth, from which she 
 dared not rise. The rocks all about the two seemed 
 tortured, and the earth to contort itself fantasti- 
 cally. Ghent was cast down at Judith's side, away 
 from the wall of the cave against which he had gone 
 spinning, and with muffled crunching, grinding, and 
 sounds of earth-agony, the cavern was blotted from 
 [218]
 
 The Might of God 
 
 being, and only a short, shallow wrinkle in the slope 
 marked the place where the rock and gravel had top- 
 pled in to level up the cavity. A hatful only of 
 rock-dust arose to float above the hill. 
 
 The temblor was gone, with a few slight tremors 
 like shivers of the earth in fright, and the man and 
 woman gazed at each other, appalled. Ghent was the 
 first to rise to his knees. Judith remained on the 
 earth before him, propped at an angle by one of her 
 strong bare arms. Ghent looked at her peculiarly 
 as his lips slowly parted for speech. 
 
 " It must have been God, coming home." 
 
 She gave a little shudder, but she did not speak 
 for a time, and then she said : 
 
 " The cave is gone." 
 
 Ghent looked at it silently for fully a minute. 
 Judith had risen. He, too, stood up, despite his 
 weakness. 
 
 " Gone," he presently echoed solemnly. " He has 
 shut us out together. It has taken the might and 
 impatience of God to bring us face to face." 
 
 He paused in his speaking. His breath was com- 
 ing fast ; his form was shaken. A light of sublimity 
 burned in his eyes. Then, as she looked at him in a 
 tense, silent way, he added: 
 
 " I love you, Judith. Though all the tribe of 
 [219]
 
 Ghent should writhe in their graves, I love nothing 
 but you ! " 
 
 She looked at him silently. For very emotion she 
 could not speak. The earthquake had terrified her 
 fearfully ; the interpretation Ghent had dared to put 
 upon it frightened her anew. She did not shrink 
 from him, she simply put her hand to her face, as one 
 in doubt, and slowly backed a little away. He made 
 no effort to approach her, or to touch her hand. 
 Thus they stood there, each gazing on the other's 
 soul for a time that seemed eternal. 
 
 " I don't know I don't know what I must say," 
 she said to him finally. " I will have to be alone 
 to think." 
 
 Ghent could make no effort to give haste to her 
 needed meditations. He was ready to abide by her 
 present desire ; he would be equally prepared to abide 
 by her final decision. 
 
 " I'll go back to my shelter and wait," he said. 
 
 She said nothing more, even at the wringing of 
 her heart, when he went, in his weak, unsteady way, 
 down the slope and up the strip and so to the spring 
 and his camp. 
 
 [220]
 
 CHAPTER XXIV 
 
 " THAT YE LOVE ONE ANOTHEE " 
 
 FOR three days and nights the man was kept wait- 
 ing, and saw no sign of Judith. She had moved her 
 few belongings down the hill to the shelter of the 
 greenery, and there had debated with her nature. 
 
 Ghent in the meantime, respecting the mood in 
 which she required to be alone, had made no effort 
 to pierce the slender tapestries of green in which she 
 was bowered and there behold her, much as he hun- 
 gered for so much as one look at her face. 
 
 He lived upon the remnants of his hoard of pine- 
 nuts and manzanita berries, for he could not hunt, 
 and the gorge afforded no more acorns to be ground 
 and cooked on Judith's plan. 
 
 What the end of it all would be he dared not con- 
 jecture. The past, with its deeds of rage and mur- 
 der, rose between them now, and he and Judith 
 seemed held apart by a chasm, deep, black, and im- 
 passable. For himself he hated all the past; he 
 [221]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 hated the horrible sins which his tribe had committed 
 in the name of vindictiveness and folly. If it came to 
 a choice between Judith and his own dead kin, he 
 chose the living, and the new, sweet way, which he 
 felt was God's own dictation, unmistakable and 
 mighty. 
 
 In belated contrition he combed his beard with his 
 fingers to draw it across that scar upon his jaw, 
 which the world should see no more. From his shelter 
 he fetched the golden tore, and gazed at it long in 
 the sunlight. How little he had known of the subtle 
 working of his nature as he hammered and wrought 
 to form this massive jewel for a mate. 
 
 He closed his eyes and again he heard the clear, 
 melodious notes of Judith's voice, and the words that 
 she had sung: 
 
 " Oh, that we two were maying 
 
 Down the stream of the soft spring breeze, 
 Like children with violets playing 
 
 In the shade of the whispering trees." 
 
 He could not despair, even in the added loneliness 
 which the past three days had brought upon him. 
 His subconscious self was irrepressibly happy. 
 
 Meantime Judith had undergone a succession of 
 attacks, cold and hot, which had wrought her by their 
 very alternations to a joyousness of spirit she could 
 [222]
 
 scarcely understand. But a woman plans for a life- 
 time while a man plans more often for a day. 
 
 She was looking ahead, as far ahead as this desert 
 isolation permitted. Should they ever escape? It 
 seemed impossible. If not, then a marriage here 
 would be a marriage for all their lives, however long 
 or brief. If chance should restore them to the world 
 without then what of a marriage made only in the 
 sight of God? 
 
 She loved John Ghent with all her soul and body. 
 In one great passionate outburst of her nature she 
 had utterly repudiated all the past, with its horrors 
 of hatred and rapine. Having given her love to this 
 man once for all, it seemed as if all the hatred that 
 had gone before served merely to intensify her pas- 
 sion. A woman could banish all allegiance to such a 
 thing as a family-feud, when a man might cling to it 
 in some sort of mistaken sense of honor. 
 
 But she could not so quickly abandon her life-long 
 scheme of chastity, which the man could forget in a 
 moment. It was not the feud that once had been 
 that was halting Judith's decision; it was soul-deep 
 questioning of the rights of love and a mating with 
 only nature for a witness. 
 
 She reviewed in her mind a hundred times the fate- 
 ful manner of her coming here with Ghent. She 
 [223]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 thought of the means by which mutual help had first 
 thrown them into a manner of partnership, hunting 
 for the meat they must devour to live. 
 
 She recalled every detail of their work to save the 
 spring work which neither could have accomplished 
 alone. She knew that once again, with the waning 
 of the summer, the well would doubtless dry, and she 
 and Ghent be obliged as before to toil together for 
 their lives. 
 
 Even a few short weeks from now their acorns and 
 berries would be gone, and then they must hunt to- 
 gether, scheme together live together, savage, half- 
 naked and alone. She was far from being terrified 
 by the thought that once more they would slay all 
 the newly hatched quail, and pillage the gorge of its 
 every living creature, then undergo that far more 
 terrible ordeal when the spring should again go dry. 
 
 These merely material things gave her no fright, 
 for the thought of battling thus at the side of John 
 Ghent was something splendid, and her mothering 
 mind, with latent arts and devices for hoarding food 
 and water already stirring in its depths, took a sort 
 of joy in contemplating ways and means by which 
 she would protect her man from want and death. 
 
 It was not in response to the process of her mind 
 that Judith at length was decided; it was solely in 
 [224]
 
 "That Ye Love One Another" 
 
 obedience to the urging of her body and her soul 
 those close associates that work in such harmony 
 with God, despite man's crude conventions. The 
 mind is a part of the body, not the body a part of 
 the mind. Reason and logic, even backed by 
 timidity, were powerless in such a physique as 
 Judith's. Her being clamored its one long reitera- 
 tion of love and her decision had really been made 
 from the first. She told herself it was cruel to per- 
 mit John Ghent, in his half-mended way, to live in 
 his shelter alone. She rebuked herself for lack of 
 sympathy ; but she knew these arguments were merely 
 weak temporizings and wide of the actual mark. 
 
 In a fever of excitement and happiness she com- 
 pleted a task of dressing herself in the panther's 
 tawny hide, and, shaking down her glorious hair, 
 which covered a portion of her naked shoulders and 
 neck, she took her rock-basin in her hands, by way 
 of a feminine excuse, wended her way up through 
 the greenery, and slowly came to the spring. 
 
 There she filled her receptacle. It was middle af- 
 ternoon, and not once before by daylight had she 
 thus appeared where Ghent could behold her since 
 the day when the temblor brought its crisis. She be- 
 held him now, from the corner of her eye. He was 
 standing in front of his shelter, looking down where 
 [225]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 she stood. To her womanly eyes he had never ap- 
 peared more manly more like a god. Bareheaded, 
 bare of arms, bare-legged, and clad in his wolfskin, 
 he was such a lord as any Eve must welcome for her 
 master. 
 
 That he did not come down, but remained where 
 he was, keeping his word to wait till she should go 
 to him, endeared him further to her heart. It was 
 like his ways of strength. She lingered, for the mo- 
 ment of waiting thus prolonged was incredibly 
 sweet. 
 
 At length she placed her receptacle upon the 
 earth and started up the hill. Her eyes were raised 
 to his, at last, even with the distance still between 
 them. As she slowly climbed the hill, however, the 
 lighter joy departed from her breast, and in its place 
 came a deep and sober happiness which left no smile 
 upon her lips, no light of idle coquetry within her 
 eyes. Her heart-beat increased tremendously but 
 her footsteps did not falter. 
 
 When she drew quite close she could see that his 
 face was very white. The luster of his eyes was a 
 fire of divinity, not a flame of passion. He made 
 no movement forward to receive her. She halted at 
 last within a yard of where he stood, and they looked 
 long and steadily upon each other, like two strong 
 [226]
 
 beings, equal, stripped of all pretense, serious in the 
 contemplation of their mating. 
 
 It was Judith who finally spoke. She came to- 
 wards him slowly. 
 
 " I love you," she said, and she placed both her 
 arms about his neck and felt him fold her to his 
 body. 
 
 Then her pent-up emotions, prisoned for years in 
 her bosom, abruptly broke their bonds. She sobbed 
 convulsively, and Ghent, as he held her, understood. 
 He presently put one of his hands against her cheek 
 and, raising her face to his, kissed her on the lips. 
 
 For a long time they looked in each other's eyes, 
 silently. Even now they could scarcely begin the 
 speech so long denied between them. When she drew 
 a little off, he held her two brown hands upon his 
 breast, watching her face till a faint sweet smile, as 
 tender as some youngling of the spring, came about 
 her mouth. Its answer leaped in joy to his eyes, 
 which suddenly shone with pure delight. 
 
 " You must have been hungry," she said at last. 
 " I brought you a few of my pones. They are down 
 by the spring." 
 
 She took him by the hand to lead him there, in the 
 way that a woman loves to lead her captive man to 
 some feast in the shade of a grove; and then she 
 [227]
 
 beheld him suddenly stare straight past her, with 
 fixed, troubled eyes that blazed as if in fear. 
 
 In the alertness taught her by the desert life she 
 turned about before he could speak. His hand, when 
 she dropped it, fell at his side like a thing of lead. 
 Then she too stared like a being transfixed and 
 Ghent put his hand out upon her. 
 
 "You see it too you see it?" he said to her 
 weirdly. " It's not a mirage not a wild fancy like 
 the cacti down below? " 
 
 She made no response, but continued to gaze in 
 unbelief across the wide ravine. There, on the op- 
 posite slope, plainly and sharply cut against the hill 
 of rock and sand, were two astounding figures a 
 tall, dusty, gray-bearded man and a small, gray, 
 overloaded burro, slowly, deliberately coming down 
 and down, on their way to the green oasis and the 
 spring. 
 
 " A man ! " said Judith finally. " It can't be any 
 mistake. It's surely a man." 
 
 " I don't believe it I can't believe it ! " said 
 Ghent, in deep agitation. " It's just another trick ! " 
 
 Nevertheless he went down the slope with Judith's 
 hand pressed firmly in his own, his eyes still fixed 
 upon the approaching beings from the world outside 
 the desert. 
 
 [228]
 
 At the spring they waited. The man with the gray 
 little donkey had discovered them at last. He halted 
 for a moment, as thoroughly surprised as either 
 Ghent or Judith could have been, then came on down 
 the slope a trifle faster, in a wondering way of be- 
 wilderment. 
 
 Ghent went forward to greet him. He halted on 
 a ledge of rock and regarded the visitor with blaz- 
 ing, eager eyes. 
 
 "Man," he said, "where have you come from? 
 Have you fetched any coffee and salt? " 
 
 Judith had come to his side. 
 
 The traveler halted, took off his hat, and passed 
 his hand across his forehead. Then rubbing his eyes, 
 he looked at the pair anew. 
 
 " I couldn't believe I seen ye," he said. " A man, 
 b'God, and a woman." 
 
 " John Ghent," said Ghent, " and my wife."
 
 CHAPTER XXV 
 
 THE TORC OF GOLD 
 
 THE man who had come to the desert spring was 
 Hi Winters, prospector and sole survivor of an ex- 
 pedition which had tempted the desert long before 
 in quest of gold, remaining at this oasis spring for 
 two days only, while its waters were rapidly failing. 
 He was a Westerner of a thirty-years' experience in 
 the mineral-bearing mountains. He was fifty-five 
 years old, gray as a desert coyote, thin as a sword, 
 tanned like leather, and as guileless as a child. 
 
 He had tramped the desolations with a solitary 
 burro for companionship year after year, always 
 in quest of the heavy yellow gold that served as his 
 will-o'-the-wisp, always disappointed, always pa- 
 tiently searching anew. 
 
 In utter amazement the man had listened to the 
 
 tale of John Ghent and Judith Haines. He had said 
 
 almost nothing, so great was the marvel of their 
 
 story. He had made his camp beside the spring in 
 
 [230]
 
 The Tore of Gold 
 
 a calm, matter-of-fact manner, turning his burro 
 loose to feed upon the grass. In his pack he had 
 brought a somewhat meager supply of coffee and 
 other provisions, a keg of water, a blanket, a 
 box of dynamite, picks, shovels, drills, a hammer, 
 utensils for cooking, and half a dozen books to 
 read, in addition to candles, fuse, explosive caps, a 
 gold-pan, and mortar-and-pestle. 
 
 That first afternoon he had hardly spoken half a 
 dozen sentences. He had come from a town ninety 
 miles to the westward, a blistered little railroad-tank 
 town at the edge of the desert. He expected to re- 
 main here a couple of months and look for the gold 
 that tradition had long reported to abound in the 
 range, and whether he found it or not he would 
 certainly leave before the well should begin at its 
 drying. 
 
 This meager bit of knowledge he had slowly im- 
 parted as he laid off the burden from his donkey. 
 Without further ado he had made up a fire, ex- 
 tracted a long slab of bacon, a small sack of onions 
 and another of potatoes from his pack, opened the 
 one solitary can of tomatoes he had fetched against 
 the wants of some distant day to come, and pre- 
 pared a meal such as Judith and Ghent had not 
 gazed upon for many weary months. 
 [231]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 The two sat together, silently observing the round 
 of preparations. Judith had gone just once to the 
 spring to fill the man's coffee-pot with water. He 
 had quietly informed her he was host, cook, chief 
 bottle-washer, and kitchen-colonel, after which she 
 had quietly submitted with Ghent, to their visitor's 
 plans. 
 
 The three of them dined there together, sitting on 
 the ground and eating with their fingers from the one 
 tin plate with which the old prospector's kit was 
 provided. It was a wonderful dinner for the pair 
 who had lived so long like cave-dwelling savages, and 
 they ate it in silence, so filled were they both with 
 the marvel of this man's appearance on the scene. 
 
 When at length it was finished and Winters drew 
 forth an old black pipe, to fill and smoke with great 
 expenditure of matches, it was Ghent who spoke of 
 gold. 
 
 " My friend," he said " do you know what it 
 means to the pair of us who have lived here all these 
 months to hear you talking of remaining for two 
 or more months before you take us out of this ter- 
 rible desert? Have you thought of that in your 
 hunt for a mine ? " 
 
 " Well, no, not exactly," said Winters drawlingly. 
 " I didn't reckon on findin' no one here." 
 [232]
 
 The Tore of Gold 
 
 " All right," said Ghent. " Now that you have 
 found us, I want you to pack up to-morrow and 
 show us the way to that railroad." 
 
 The gray old prospector relighted his pipe and 
 reflected for a moment in silence before he answered. 
 Then he said: 
 
 " Wai, I guess that's reason fer you folks any- 
 way. I don't suppose I'm ever goin' to hit it. 
 Never have. May not be any gold in all this 
 country anyway. Might as well start in the 
 mornin'." 
 
 " Winters, I'd like to shake hands with you," 
 said Ghent, to whom the man's answer had come with 
 no little surprise. " There is a lot of gold in these 
 hills. I've seen it. I know where it's bedded. I'll 
 show you the place and give you half of any rights 
 you may reckon I possess. But, man, we want to 
 start to-morrow." 
 
 Thus it came that early on the day that followed, 
 Ghent and the tall, lean old miner walked together 
 up the great ravine, so echoing with awful memories 
 for the man who had one day staggered down its 
 long, rocky way, returning from his three-day effort 
 to escape the desolation, and so come at length to 
 the mighty amphitheatre, then to the break in its 
 eastern wall, and halted in the tunnel that two gold- 
 [233]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 hungry men had dug, where the vein of yellow metal 
 gleamed so brightly in the wall. 
 
 Unexcited by the wondrous sight, and patiently 
 prepared to wait, if need be, another long year be- 
 fore he should finally wrest from the earth the 
 reward of his many years of searching, Winters 
 merely nodded at the rich golden streak, noted the 
 lay of the land by which it was surrounded, gathered 
 up the bright loose fragments, spilled from an ore- 
 sack long before rotted to nothing, and was ready 
 to depart. 
 
 Judith was waiting at his shelter when Ghent 
 once more returned. It had been her home for one 
 night only, while Ghent and Winters slept on the 
 ground at the spring. She loved it for what it had 
 been to Ghent, and she had waited for him here in 
 womanly shyness. 
 
 When he came he smiled at her quietly, saying 
 nothing as her eyes met his with some question in 
 their depths. Going past her he entered his shelter, 
 took something from a hiding place and immedi- 
 ately came forth again, out to the sunlight that 
 bathed her tall figure in glory. Below them the old 
 mountain wanderer was leading his burro to the 
 spring to put the pack upon him for the homeward 
 pilgrimage. 
 
 [234]
 
 The Tore of Gold 
 
 " Judith," said Ghent, looking as before into her 
 eyes, " we are going home going out of this place, 
 to people and the world. If you wish to be free if 
 you wish to plan some other way if you wish you 
 hadn't said it, yesterday why, this is the very best 
 time in all the world to tell me what you prefer." 
 
 She looked at him steadily, the softness increas- 
 ing in her eyes. 
 
 " If you mean that you take it all back " she 
 
 started, but he could not permit her to finish. 
 
 " Don't say it don't say it ! " he interrupted al- 
 most fiercely. " I love you I want you to be my 
 wife. I have loved you a great deal longer than I 
 knew. In the winter I found a piece of gold and 
 hammered out a bracelet for your arm. I didn't 
 even know what it was for but that is what it was. 
 A wedding-ring could never be large enough, or fit 
 for my desert-mate to wear. Judith there it is," 
 and he held it forth in his open hand, abruptly, the 
 crude, massive tore so roughly splendid in the sun. 
 " Will you take it and wear it or shall I leave it 
 behind us when we go ? " 
 
 She knew what he meant the leaving of the tore 
 
 would be but a symbolism for leaving all that thej^ 
 
 both had finally become to one another, if this was 
 
 her wish, now that freedom was proffered by the 
 
 [235 ]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 fates. She made no reply. She merely took the 
 crude gold bracelet from his hand and slipped it far 
 up on her naked arm, where it shone with a splendor 
 barbaric. Then she placed her arms once more 
 about his neck and went home to the shelter of his 
 breast. 
 
 [236]
 
 CHAPTER XXVI 
 
 THE TRIUMPH OF NATUKE 
 
 A YEAE had gone by in the desert a long, tragic 
 year with a new repetition of the days of heat; the 
 cool, still nights of beauty and austerity; the com- 
 ing of the autumn siroccos ; the parching of all the 
 oasis, the failing of the spring, and the awful de- 
 spair of every living thing that strove for existence 
 in the strip. 
 
 Once more the quail and rabbits had bred their kind 
 and seen them ruthlessly preyed upon by hungry 
 coyotes from the plains. Once more the tortured 
 earth had shrunk and sweltered, surrendering its 
 final drop of moisture to the sun. As before, but 
 even later in the year, the violent storms had burst 
 upon the desert world in cloudburst, torrent, and 
 freshet. 
 
 Deserted and barren, with no human victims to 
 torture, the stark oasis had passed through its an- 
 nual travail, its trees and shrubs performing the 
 [237]
 
 The New Commandment 
 
 functions allotted them early in creation, and their 
 seeds had been scattered by the waters, to perish 
 on the barren wastes below. 
 
 The Spring had returned again in its beauty and 
 tenderness, replenishing the hope that burgeons 
 anew with every year. Nights and days of miracu- 
 lous charm had succeeded one another in a round of 
 divinely ordered loveliness. 
 
 Then, on one of the long, balmy afternoons, when 
 all nature smiled in beneficence, there came down 
 the slope of the western hill, that rose above the 
 gorge, a little train of beings two men, three 
 burros, and two women who rode upon horses. 
 There was first a gray old prospector, then Ghent, 
 who walked at Judith's side, and behind them the 
 prospector's wife. 
 
 If the lean old gold-seeker typified patience, and 
 Ghent and Judith typified God's first created pair, 
 then the wife of the miner assuredly typified that 
 solid, admirable symbol of wisdom, resourcefulness, 
 and tenderness that has made of the Western fron- 
 tierswoman a figure unsurpassed for large-hewn 
 virtues. Mrs. Winters could have been the mother 
 of a nation for the things she knew and the large- 
 ness of her heart. She had come here to mother 
 Judith Ghent. 
 
 [238]
 
 The Triumph of Nature 
 
 Down by the spring old Winters made his camp, 
 and there for a while Judith rested. Ghent climbed 
 the slope, to where the ruins of his shelter still 
 remained among the rocks. The storms of the 
 winter had torn away the roof and the walls were 
 gaping open to the elements. 
 
 With tools from the pack he set joyously to work, 
 while Judith, in a new, more radiant way of beauty, 
 and with no look of tragedy remaining on her face, 
 smiled in companionship upon him. By evening he 
 had made it once more a substantial cave-house, pro- 
 vided at last, however, with something far better 
 than a couch of mountain grass. 
 
 The night that came down was one of marvelous 
 beauty, with the silence of centuries, desert-deep, 
 laid far and wide upon the universe. It almost 
 seemed as if the vast machinery that moves the 
 stellar globules in their round must deliver up the 
 mighty sound, that would come in some huge anthem 
 to the place. 
 
 Ghent was profoundly stirred by all the fearful 
 majesty of night and Nature's mysteries, here so 
 nakedly revealed and yet inscrutable. It was cer- 
 tain to his soul that God was here in this place He 
 had made to bide at times alone. 
 
 At length he slept, but when the gorgeous starry 
 [239]
 
 dipper had swung to its midnight declination, the 
 long, weird wail, the mirthless laughter, and the ques- 
 tioning bark of a man-detecting coyote, roused him 
 from his bed. 
 
 He came forth from his shelter, a look of slum- 
 berous strength, primordial might, and conscious 
 mastery upon his muscled frame. In his eyes burned 
 a light of mingled tenderness and passion. In his 
 hand he clutched the handle of the rude stone ham- 
 mer that Judith had made the year before. Like a 
 guardian cave-man watching at his door to protect 
 his mate with his life, he sat on a stone in the star- 
 light and waited there till dawn. 
 
 THE END 
 
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