He repeated to himself his new name, his real name:
“Anthony Bard.” It seemed to make
him a stranger in his own eyes. “Woodbury”
had been a name of culture; it suggested the air of
a long descent. “Bard” was terse,
short, brutally abrupt, alive with possibilities of
action. Those possibilities he would never learn
from the dead lips of his father. He sought them
from his mother, but only the painted mouth and the
painted smile answered him.
He turned again to the picture of the house with the
snow-topped mountains in the distance. There
surely, was the solution; somewhere in the infinite
reaches of the West.
Finally he cut the picture from its frame and rolled
it up. He felt that in so doing he would carry
with him an identification tag—a clue to
himself. With that clue in his travelling bag,
he started for the city, bought his ticket, and boarded
a train for the West.
MARTY WILKES
The motion of the train, during those first two days
gave Anthony Bard a strange feeling that he was travelling
from the present into the past. He felt as if
it was not miles that he placed behind him, but days,
weeks, months, years, that unrolled and carried him
nearer and nearer to the beginning of himself.
He heard nothing about him; he saw nothing of the
territory which whirled past the window. They
were already far West before a man boarded the train
and carried to Bard the whole atmosphere of the mountain
desert.
He got on the train at a Nebraska station and Anthony
sat up to watch, for a man of importance does not
need size in order to have a mien. Napoleon struck
awe through the most gallant of his hero marshals,
and even the porter treated this little brown man
with a respect that was ludicrous at first glimpse.
He was so ugly that one smiled on glancing at him.
His face, built on the plan of a wedge, was extremely
narrow in front, with a long, high-bridged nose, slanting
forehead, thin-lipped mouth, and a chin that jutted
out to a point, but going back all the lines flared
out like a reversed vista. A ridge of muscle
crested each side of the broad jaws and the ears flaunted
out behind so that he seemed to have been built for
travelling through the wind.
The same wind, perhaps, had blown the hair away from
the upper part of his forehead, leaving him quite
bald half way back on his head, where a veritable
forest of hair began, and continued, growing thicker
and longer, until it brushed the collar of his coat
behind.
When he entered the car he stood eying his seat for
a long moment like a dog choosing the softest place
on the floor before it lies down. Then he took
his place and sat with his hands folded in his lap,
moveless, speechless, with the little keen eyes straight
before him—three hours that state continued.
Then he got up and Anthony followed him to the diner.
They sat at the same table.
