Hare wandered over the farm and down
the red lane, brooding over the issue. Naab's few words had been full of
meaning; the cold gloom so foreign to his nature, had been even more
impressive. His had been the revolt of the meek. The gentle, the
loving, the administering, the spiritual uses of his life had failed.
Hare recalled what the desert had done to his own nature, how it had bred
in him its impulse to fight, to resist, to survive. If he, a stranger of
a few years, could be moulded in the flaming furnace of its fiery life,
what then must be the cast of August Naab, born on the desert, and
sleeping five nights out of seven on the sands for sixty years?
The desert! Hare trembled as he grasped all its meaning. Then he slowly
resolved that meaning. There were the measureless distances to narrow
the eye and teach restraint; the untrodden trails, the shifting sands,
the thorny brakes, the broken lava to pierce the flesh; the heights and
depths, unscalable and unplumbed. And over all the sun, red and burning.
The parched plants of the desert fought for life, growing far apart,
sending enormous roots deep to pierce the sand and split the rock for
moisture, arming every leaf with a barbed thorn or poisoned sap, never
thriving and ever thirsting.
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