Had not his own perversity taken his fate out of her hands?  If he preferred to die, why should it be her concern?  Should she volunteer herself as a rescuer of fools?  The gleaming sand of the arroyo rose in a dazzling mist before her eyes, obscuring him, clothing him with the unreality of a dream; and then, in physical reality, he emerged.  He was so near as she rose spasmodically that she could have laid her hand on his shoulder.  His hat under his arm, he stood smiling in the bland, questioning interest of a spectator happening along the path, even as he had in her first glimpse of him on the pass.

“I don’t care!  Go on!  Go on!” she was going to say.  “You have made sport of me!  You make sport of everything!  Life itself is a joke to you!”

The tempest of the words was in her eyes, if it did not reach her tongue’s end.  It was halted by the look of hurt surprise, of real pain, which appeared on his face.  Was it possible, after all, that he could feel?  The thought brought forth the passionate cry of her mission after that sleepless night.

“I beg of you—­I implore you—­don’t!”

Had anyone told her yesterday that she would have been begging any man in melodramatic supplication for anything, she would have thought of herself as mad.  Wasn’t she mad?  Wasn’t he mad?  Yet she broke into passionate appeal.

“It is horrible—­unspeakable!  I cannot bear it!”

A flood of color swept his cheeks and with it came a peculiar, feminine, almost awkward, gentleness.  His air was that of wordless humility.  He seemed more than ever an uncomprehending, sure prey for Leddy.

“Don’t you realize what death is?” she asked.

The question, so earnest and searching, had the contrary effect on him.  It changed him back to his careless self.  He laughed in the way of one who deprecates another’s illusion or passing fancy.  This added to her conviction that he did not realize, that he was incapable of realizing, his position.

“Do you think I am about to die?” he asked softly.

“With Pete Leddy firing at you twenty yards away—­yes!  And you pose—­you pose!  If you were human you would be serious!”

“Pose?” He repeated the word.  It startled him, mystified him.  “The clothes I bought to please Firio, you mean?” he inquired, his face lighting.

“No, about death.  It is horrible—­horrible!  Death for which I am responsible!”

“Why, have you forgotten that we settled all that?” he asked.  “It was not you.  It was the habit I had formed of whistling in the loneliness of the desert.  I am sorry, now, that I did not stick to singing, even at the expense of a sore throat.”

Now he called to Leddy, and his voice, high-pitched and powerful, seemed to travel in the luminous air as on resilient, invisible wires.

“Leddy, wasn’t it the way I whistled to you the first time we met that made you want satisfaction?  You remember”—­and he broke into a whistle.  His tone was different from that to Leddy on the pass; the whistle was different.  It was shrill and mocking.