appeared: lifeblood and rum soaked the flannel together, indistinguishable.
Harden, with gun grounded, looked down at this, his thin face stern as bronze in the hot sun,—the face of a soldier and a priest.
Slowly the ringing in his ears turned into the hum of flies that made the silence. Then of a sudden the place was struck into dusk. The sun had gone behind the trees above the road, leaving the gully in shadow, as if cloude over before a storm. The hollow seemed also to become cooler. And just then Harden, with his eyes still fixed on the dead man's face, lying half sidewise, in the stubble of beard, saw it as if it had been his father's. At the thought, his heart shrank small and cold: it was as though he had killed them both. His whole body unstrung, like a fiddlestring when the peg slips. Without another look at the dead man, he turned and ran in panic and horror, shivering with cold, stumbling to his knees with weakness, back into the sunlight and along the deserted road.
