He seemed in a
deep sleep. Wild ducks settled on the lake not far from him with a swish
and flutter; a coyote ran past, veering as it saw the recumbent figure; a
prairie hen rustled by with a shrill cluck, but he seemed oblivious to
all. If asleep, he was evidently dreaming, for now and then he started,
or his body twitched, and a muttering came from beneath the hat.
The battered house, the absence of barn or stable or garden, or any token
of thrift or energy, marked the man as an excrescence in this theatre of
hope and fruitful toil. It all belonged to some degenerate land, some
exhausted civilisation, not to this field of vigour where life rang like
silver.
So the man lay for hour upon hour. He slept as though he had been upon a
long journey in which the body was worn to helplessness. Or was it that
sleep of the worn-out spirit which, tortured by remembrance and remorse,
at last sinks into the depths where the conscious vexes the
unconscious--a little of fire, a little of ice, and now and then the turn
of the screw?
The day marched nobly on towards evening, growing out of its blue and
silver into a pervasive golden gleam; the bare, greyish houses on the
prairie were transformed into miniature palaces of light.
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