der, after watching her
for a moment, turned away and swung off, muttering. David dropped back
on the ground, his eyes closed, his body curved about the damp
depression.

The evening burned to night, the encampment growing black against the
scarlet sky. The brush fire sent a line of smoke straight up, a long
milky thread, that slowly disentangled itself and mounted to a final
outspreading. Each member of the group was still, the girl lying a
dark oblong under her blanket, her face upturned to the stars which
blossomed slowly in the huge, unclouded heaven. At the root of the
butte, hidden against its shadowy base, the mountain man lay
motionless, but his eyes were open and they rested on her, not closing
or straying.

When no one saw him he kept this stealthy watch. In the daytime, with
the others about, he still was careful to preserve his brusque
indifference, to avoid her, to hide his passion with a jealous
subtlety. But beneath the imposed bonds it grew with each day,
stronger and more savage as the way waxed fiercer. It was not an
obsession of occasional moments, it was always with him. As pilot her
image moved across the waste before him. When he fell back for words
with Daddy John, he was listening through the old man's speech, for the
fall of her horse's hoofs. Her voice made his heart stop, the rustle
of her garments dried his throat. When his lowered eyes saw her hand
on the plate's edge, he grew rigid, unable to eat. If she brushed by
him in the bustle of camp pitching, his hands lost their strength and
he was sick with the sense of her. Love, courtship, marriage, were
words that no longer had any meaning for him. All the tenderness and
humanity he had felt for her in the days of her father's sickness were
gone. They were burned away, as the water and the grass were. When he
saw her solicitude for David, his contempt for the weak man hardened
into hatred. He told himself that he hated them both, and he told
himself he would crush and kill them both before David should get her.
The desire to keep her from David was stronger than the desire to have
her for himself. He did not think or care what he felt. She was the
prey to be won by cunning or daring, whose taste or wishes had no place
in the struggle. He no longer looked ahead, thought, or reasoned. The
elemental in him was developing to fit a scene in which only the
elemental survived.

They broke camp at four the next morning. For th