The farmhouse, straggling barn, and fringe of dusty willows, the white
dome of the motionless wagon, with the hanging frying pans and kettles
showing in the moonlight like black silhouettes against the staring
canvas, all presently sank behind Clarence like the details of a dream,
and he was alone with the moon, the hazy mystery of the level, grassy
plain, and the monotony of the unending road. As he rode slowly along he
thought of that other dreary plain, white with alkali patches and brown
with rings of deserted camp-fires, known to his boyhood of deprivation,
dependency, danger, and adventure, oddly enough, with a strange delight;
and his later years of study, monastic seclusion, and final ease
and independence, with an easy sense of wasted existence and useless
waiting. He remembered his homeless childhood in the South, where
servants and slaves took the place of the father he had never known,
and the mother that he rarely saw; he remembered his abandonment to a
mysterious female relation, where his natural guardians seemed to
have overlooked and forgotten him, until he was sent, an all too young
adventurer, to work his passage on an overland emigrant train across the
plains; he remembered, as yesterday, the fears, the hopes, the dreams
and dangers of that momentous journey. He recalled his little playmate,
Susy, and their strange adventures--the whole incident that the
imaginative Jim Hooker had translated and rehearsed as his own--rose
vividly before him. He thought of the cruel end of that pilgrimage,
which again left him homeless and forgotten by even the relative he was
seeking in a strange land. He remembered his solitary journey to the
gold mines, taken with a boy's trust and a boy's fearlessness, and
the strange protector he had found there, who had news of his missing
kinsman; he remembered how this protector--whom he had at once
instinctively loved--transferred him to the house of this new-found
relation, who treated him kindly and sent him to the Jesuit school, but
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