women call love," he compared it with the other letter, "There would have
been far more excuse for me if I had been simply incapable of the
feeling." The two statements did not exactly tally; but what else could
he say? And it was too late to mend it now.

He laid down the sheets and opened Stanistreet's letter. It was short; it
gave the news of Molly's death with a few details, and these words: "In
any case it must have come soon. Your going away made no difference. It
began before you left--the fever was hanging about her; and they say her
brain could never have been very strong."

He sat staring at the canvas of the tent till it glowed a purplish
crimson against the dawn. The air choked him; it reeked with pestilence
and death. O God! the futility of everything he had ever done! The lie he
had written was futile; it had come too late. His coming out here was
futile; he had come too soon. If he had waited another three weeks he
could have gone without breaking Molly's heart. "Her brain could never
have been very strong." At that he laughed--horribly, aloud.

The sound of his own laughter drove him from the tent. He went out. As he
strained his eyes over the desert, the waste Infinity that had claimed
him, he seemed to be brought nearer to the naked sincerity of things.
There was no pity for him and no excuse; but neither was there
condemnation. He knew himself, and he knew the hour of his redemption.
_Ex oriente lux!_ It was as if illumination had come with that fierce
penetrating dawn that was beating the sand of the desert into fire.

Ah--that was a shot! The outpost stood a hundred yards to the left of him
reloading. A black head started up behind a curve of rising ground, a
bullet whizzed by, and the man with the musket fell in a little cloud of
sand.

And now the bullets were crossing each other in mid-air. The camp was
surrounded.

Tyson called up his twenty men and ran to his tent for arms. The papers
were still there in the box of cartridges.

He hesitated for a second. He realized with a sudden lucidity that if he
died, and those damning documents were found, there would be a slur on
his memory out of keeping with the end. He could not have it said that
the last words he had written had been an apology and a lie.

He tore the papers across, once, twice--no time for more--and rushed into
the desert, his heart beating with the brutal, jubilant lust of battle.

CHAPTER XXIII

_IN MEMORIAM_