“And the center of this devil’s business,” concluded Jager, “is the farm that belonged to Persil Mandifer.” He drew a deep, tired-sounding breath. “As the desert is the habitation of dragons, so is it with that farm. No trees live, and no grass. From a distance, one can see a woman. It is Enid Mandifer.”
“Where is the place?” asked Lanark directly.
Jager looked at him for long moments without answering. When he did speak, it was an effort to change the subject. “You will eat here with me at noon,” he said. “I have a Negro servant, and he is a good cook.”
“I ate a very late breakfast at a farmhouse east of here,” Lanark put him off. Then he repeated, “Where is the Mandifer place?”
“Let me speak this once,” Jager temporized. “As you have said, we are no longer at war—no longer officer and man. We are equals, and I am able to refuse to guide you.”
Lanark got up from his chair. “That is true, but you will not be acting the part of a friend.”
“I will tell you the way, on one condition.” Jager’s eyes and voice pleaded. “Say that you will return to this house for supper and a bed, and that you will be within my door by sundown.”
“All right,” said Lanark. “I agree. Now, which way does that farm lie?”
Jager led him to the door. He pointed. “This trail joins a road beyond, an old road that is seldom used. Turn north upon it, and you will come to a part which is grown up in weeds. Nobody passes that way. Follow on until you find an old house, built low, with the earth dry and bare around it. That is the dwelling-place of Enid Mandifer.”
Lanark found himself biting his lip. He started to step across the threshold, but Jager put a detaining hand on his arm. “Carry this as you go.”
He was holding out a little book with a gray paper cover. It had seen usage and trouble since last Lanark had noticed it in Jager’s hands; its back was mended with a pasted strip of dark cloth, and its edges were frayed and gnawed-looking, as though rats had been at it. But the front cover still said plainly:
John George Hohman’s
Pow-Wows
Or
Long Lost Friend
“Carry this,” said Jager again, and then quoted glibly: “ ‘Whoever carries this book with him is safe from all his enemies, visible or invisible; and whoever has this book with him cannot die without the holy corpse of Jesus Christ, nor drown in any water, nor burn up in any fire, nor can any unjust sentence be passed upon him.’ ”
Lanark grinned in spite of himself and his new concern. “Is this the kind of a protection that a minister of God should offer me?” he inquired, half jokingly.
“I have told you long ago that the Long Lost Friend is a good book, and a blessed one.” Jager thrust it into Lanark’s right-hand coat pocket. His guest let it remain, and held out his own hand in friendly termination of the visit.
“Goodbye,” said Lanark. “I’ll come back before sundown, if that will please you.”
He limped out to his horse, untied it and mounted. Then, following Jager’s instructions, he rode forward until he reached the old road, turned north and proceeded past the point where weeds had covered the unused surface. Before the sun had fallen far in the sky, he was come to his destination.
It was a squat, spacious house, the bricks of its trimming weathered and the dark brown paint of its timbers beginning to crack. Behind it stood unrepaired stables, seemingly empty. In the yard stood what had been wide-branched trees, now leafless and lean as skeleton paws held up to a relentless heaven. And there was no grass. The earth was utterly sterile and hard, as though rain had not fallen since the beginning of time.
Enid Mandifer had been watching him from the open door. When she saw that his eyes had found her, she called him by name.
VII
The Rock Again
Then there was silence. Lanark sat his tired roan and gazed at Enid, rather hungrily, but only a segment of his attention was for her. The silence crowded in upon him. His unconscious awareness grew conscious—conscious of that blunt, pure absence of sound. There was no twitter of birds, no hum of insects. Not a breath of wind stirred in the leafless branches of the trees. Not even echoes came from afar. The air was dead, as water is dead in a still, stale pond.
He dismounted then, and the creak of his saddle and the scrape of his boot-sole upon the bald earth came sharp and shocking to his quiet-filled ears. A hitching-rail stood there, old-seeming to be in so new a country as this. Lanark tethered his horse, pausing to touch its nose reassuringly—it, too, felt uneasy in the thick silence. Then he limped up a gravel-faced path and stepped upon a porch that rang to his feet like a great drum.
Enid Mandifer came through the door and closed it behind her. Plainly she did not want him to come inside. She was dressed in brown alpaca, high-necked, long-sleeved, tight above the waist and voluminous below. Otherwise she looked exactly as she had looked when she bade him goodbye beside the ravine, even to the strained, sleepless look that made sorrowful her fine oval face.
“Here I am,” said Lanark. “I promised that I’d come, you remember.”
She was gazing into his eyes, as though she hoped to discover something there. “You came,” she replied, “because you could not rest in another part of the country.”
“That’s right,” he nodded, and smiled, but she did not smile back.
“We are doomed, all of us,” she went on, in a low voice. “Mr. Jager—the big man who was one of your soldiers—”
“I know. He lives not
