h religion.
Lolita afraid of his coming to grief in a country he had travelled
hundreds, thousands of miles in! Perhaps she had never started thinking
for herself yet. But she had. She was smarter than any girl of her age
he had ever seen. She did not want him back so soon. That was what it
was. Yet she had looked true; her voice had sounded that way. Again he
dwelt upon her words and caresses; and harboring these various thoughts,
he killed still more of the long road, until, passing after awhile Poso
Blanco, and later Marsh's ranch-well at the forks where the Sonora road
comes in, he reached Tucson a man divided against himself. Divided
beyond his will into two selves--one of faith besieged, and one of
besieging inimical reason--the inextricable error!

Business and pleasure were waiting in Tucson, and friends whose ways and
company had not been of late for him; but he frequented them this time,
tasting no pleasure, yet finding the ways and company better than his
own. After the desert's changeless, unfathomed silence, in which nothing
new came day or night to break the fettering spell his mind was falling
under, the clink and knocking of bottles was good to hear, and he
listened for more, craving any sound that might liven or distract his
haunted spirit. Instead of the sun and stars, here was a roof; instead
of the pitiless clear air, here was tobacco smoke; and beneath his
boot-heels a wooden floor wet with spilled liquids instead of the
unwatered crumbling sand. Without drinking, he moved his chair near the
noisiest drinkers, and thus among the tobacco smoke sought to hide from
his own looming doubt. Later the purring tinkle of guitars reminded him
of that promised present, and the next morning he was the owner of the
best instrument that he could buy. Leaving it with a friend to keep
until he should come through again from Maricopa, he departed that way
with his mules, finding in the new place the same sort of friends and
business, and by night looking upon the same untasted pleasures. He went
about town with some cattlemen--carousing bankrupts, who remembered
their ruin in the middle of whiskey, and broke off to curse it and the
times and climate, and their starved herds that none would buy at any
price. Genesmere touched nothing, yet still drew his chair among these
drinkers.

"Aren't you feeling good to-night, Russ?" asked one at length.

And Genesmere's eyes roused from seeing visions, and his ears became
a