XXVISILENCE
Meanwhilehe was learning undreamed-of-matters about himself. No amount of riding such as he had done down in the valleys could have shown him what he was getting now, in the stillness and sunlight and starlight of high country. A hundred times a day, the flick of a lizard over leaf or pebble or twig called his eye; that was the only continual distraction. The days were mainly silent, though the nights were full of sound; the coyotes sometimes a maddening chorus that stirred up unheard-of deeps in the listener, and once as he lay awake at night a muffle-winged owl swept past so close as to fan his face. That shook him like the sounds during his first night out in White Stone Flats. In the stillness, thoughts rose up in him with a power he hadn’t known before; one could get so accustomed to this sort of life, he reflected, that he would be entirely unfit in a little while for the towns again.
Here’s where a man reverted to type. What he was at bottom came out. One might sink into being just an animal—eating and drinking and sleeping—or get more fiery alive with the days, more quick and sensitive with strange inner activity.There were times when Elbert’s thoughts carried him along with a clear cool strength that was almost frightening. He knew now that he had never been alone before; that a man isn’t quite alone, even if locked in his own room—that he is only really alone with the sky above and the earth beneath.
He had told Bart that he was getting to like it, but that didn’t become wholly true until quite a number of days had passed. Again and again he felt his jaw hardening, his lips pressed together; gradually his fears fell away and the silence bit into the very center of his being. He became a part of the outer silence of the days, a part of the fierce still sunlight that slowly blackened his hands and face. He looked back upon his dreams in the room at home, remembering the things he had treasured there—Indian blankets, pictures, leather work—all had meant something.
Out of these kid treasures and symbols, Cal and Slim had come to life, Heaslep’s, Nacimiento, San Pasquali; Bob Leadley, Bismo on the Rio Brava, Red Ante, the Dry Cache mine; Sonora, the cells, the corner of the wall, flight from the rurales, El Relicario. He could shut his eyes and think way back to the very beginning—hear the swish of motor cars from his bedroom window, the sound of the piano below, the sounds of his phonograph, and that last swung him swiftlyacross the continent to the Plaza at Los Angeles—‘Cuando sali—’ and the leather-store.
All these a part of him now, but in the beginning there had only been a little room of books and pictures and yearnings—yearnings that finally drove him out to find his Crimson Foam. Something else he had found—that still room in Tucson. Not a symbol of that in his father’s house—oh, yes, of course, the alabaster bowl in the dining-room!
His thin lips stretched into the beginnings of a smile. He had heard it said that each day brings to a man nine parts review and one part advance work. Everything seemed like review to him now—the whole circle rounded (at least, it would be when Bart and he were safely over the Border into the States) everything review, except that still room in Tucson. Very much advance work, that. His heart pumped so that he could actually hear its beat.
Sometimes he felt, if he could get a little deeper into the silence, he would know all about—even that. Anyway, it began to dawn on him that everything would have been spoiled if he had rushed north alone, leaving Bart—that the greatest adventure of all lay right in the core of these days of solitude and silence. One night he felt like a different man altogether, as he started down toward El Relicario in the dusk.