SON OF THE WIND
self to his knees, and saw what the body had hidden —the sunk neck and the head. A film was upon the eye, and flowing from somewhere a fine stream of blood.
An ugly thing! A bad thing for her to see! The thought of Blanche sprang live and clear out of the blank of his mind. There was nothing to account for the sudden vision, unless it were that sound he seemed to be hearing, very faint, like something heard in a dream—the sound of some one weeping. A flurry of fear went over him. She must not see it. She had seen it at the wrong time before, and if she saw it again as it was now—No, no, better wait until he had it as he meant to have it! His thought flowed. All his fiery determinations drooped, and stopped. He knelt staring. The thing in front of him had not stirred. It looked more inert than the earth it rested on. Yet there was a strange evanescence about it, like a shadow which wanes constantly, imperceptibly. Could all that pulse, and power of motion escape by such a narrow path as the thin, dark stream which flowed, and flowed, and settled in a pool in a depression of the rock, and there slowly, imperceptibly, began to sink out of sight? No way of making the strewn limbs gather themselves and stand upright! No way of wrenching victory from them! The back that had carried him, the neck that had been hot, the feet that
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