And sometimes in these strange intervals he longed for his old
friend, brother, shadow--Larry Red King. He held to Larry's memory,
though with it always would return that low, strange roar of
Benton's gold and lust and blood and death. Neale did not understand
the mystery of what he had been through. It had been a phase of
wildness never to be seen again by his race. His ambition and
effort, his fall, his dark siege with hell, his friendship and loss,
his agony and toil, his victory, were all symbolical of the progress
of a great movement. In his experience lay hid all that development.
The coming of night was always a relief now, for with the end of the
day's work he need no longer fight his battle. It was a losing
battle--that he knew. Shunning everybody, he paced to and fro out on
the dark, windy desert, under the lonely, pitiless stars.
His longing to see Allie Lee grew upon him. While he had believed
her dead he had felt her spirit hovering near him, in every shadow,
and her voice whispered on the wind. She was alive now, but gone
away, far distant, over mountains and plains, out of his sight and
reach, somewhere to take up a new life alien to his. What would she
do? Could she bear, it? Never would she forget him--be faithless to
his memory! Yet she was young and her life had been hard.
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