occasionally to riders who passed on in silence, no doubt taking them for strolling lovers. Half a mile or so beyond the edge of town the road bent southward, crossing the railroad, striking out into a land that appeared as empty of man's activities as the sky over it.
From the top of a swell in the treeless land they watched the train that Zora had come in to meet wind its way across the prairie, its two little red eyes winking out of sight at last. Its going seemed to leave the world more melancholy to Dunham, as if some last thread between him and his untroubled days had been broken, leaving him estranged and alone.
He regretted that hasty deed, that blow, given on what seemed to him now such trifling provocation, that had provoked vindictive retaliation; he was sorry for the man who had fallen in that sprawled, collapsed, flattened-out, repellent posture, his face in the dust, his wild bullet through the mayor's window pane.
He would have been glad to go back and live over again the hard years which he had surmounted to come to that tragic hour if such penance could clear his conscience of the burden that oppressed it so grievously. The farther he went from the scene, the heavier his regret weighed, like a load that had seemed light enough in the excitement of the start, but which promised to gall him and wear him down before the journey's end.
That was the outcome of all his vindictive years, his sweltering under the sting of early wrongs. A noble soul would have outlived them, he said, and hidden them in the expansive maturity of his heart, as a tree
