a secluded corner of the Square, where in
the shade and quiet of the trees he suffered a storm of heart and mind.
During that short or long time--he had no idea how long--the Indian
remained with him. He never lost the feeling of Nas Ta Bega close beside
him. When the period of acute pain left him and some order began
to replace the tumult in his mind he felt in Nas Ta Bega the same
quality--silence or strength or help--that he had learned to feel in the
deep canyon and the lofty crags. He realized then that the Indian was
indeed a brother. And Shefford needed him. What he had to fight was more
fatal than suffering and love--it was hate rising out of the unsuspected
dark gulf of his heart--the instinct to kill--the murder in his soul.
Only now did he come to understand Jane Withersteen's tragic story and
the passion of Venters and what had made Lassiter a gun-man. The desert
had transformed Shefford. The elements had entered into his muscle and
bone, into the very fiber of his heart. Sun, wind, sand, cold, storm,
space, stone, the poison cactus, the racking toil, the terrible
loneliness--the iron of the desert man, the cruelty of the desert
savage, the wildness of the mustang, the ferocity of hawk and wolf, the
bitter struggle of every surviving thing--these were as if they had been
melted and merged together and now made a dark and passionate stream
that was his throbbing blood. He realized what he had become and gloried
in it, yet there, looking on with grave and earnest eyes, was his old
self, the man of reason, of intellect, of culture, who had been a good
man despite the failure and shame of his life. And he gave heed to the
voice of warning, of conscience. Not by revengefully seeking the Mormon
who had ruined Fay Larkin and blindly dealing a wild justice could he
help this unfortunate girl. This fierce, newborn strength and passion
must be tempered by reason, lest he become merely elemental, a man
answering wholly to primitive impulses. In the darkness of that hour he
mined deep into his heart, understood himself, trembled at the thing he
faced, and won his victory. He would go forth from that hour a man. He
might fight, and perhaps there was death in the balance, but hate would
never overthrow him.

Then when he looked at future action he felt a strange, unalterable
purpose to save Fay Larkin. She was very young--seventeen or eighteen,
she had said--and there could be, there must be some happiness
before her. It