SON OF THE WIND
the fading hours? Carron could not remember how he had looked at his departing. But who remembers the retreat of a king? It was the advance, and again the advance, that returned to him—the roulade of hoofs afar off in the forest, the sharp music on the rocky slope, the body breaking through the trees. Yet, he did not see it quite as it had come in fact; for to the imagination, the back, that shining hollow that had shivered at a white moth's weight, was not empty. It was bestrode. Once the eye had seen, the brain seized its object. The man was in saddle; and though fancy pictured Son of the Wind in the citadel of the cañon, or speeding among mountains beyond possible human ways, the persistent phantom would not be unseated. Where is the use of sides of silk without heel to guide, or of feet that can chant the song of swiftness if no purpose profit by their speed?
Across the cañon, where night was complete, and upward, under branches, into the high open ascents, mysterious, peaceful, colorless in the beginnings of dawn, he came, his mind filled with images of contentions and conquests. Near the horizon Venus burned white, but the star above his head was Sirius, red and troubled. The woman beside him made a faint rustling as she moved through the leaves. She, who had been quick, filled with double energy
304
