Wanderer Of the Wasteland (1982) Read Online Free PDF Page B

open to the wide space of river and valley beyond. The air seemed full of marvelous tints of gold and rose and purple. The majestic scene, beautiful and sad, needed life to make it perfect. Adam, more than usually drawn by Margarita's sympathy, was trying to tell her something of the burden on his mind, that he was alone in the world, with only a hard gray future before him, with no one to care whether he lived or died.
    Then had come his awakening. It did not speak well for Margarita's conceptions of behavior, but it proved her a creature of heart and blood. To be suddenly enveloped by a wind of flame, in the slender twining form of this girl of Spanish nature, was for Adam at once a revelation and a catastrophe. But if he was staggered, he was also responsive, as in a former moment of poignancy he had vowed he would be. A strong and shuddering power took hold of his heart and he felt the leap, the beat, the burn of his blood. When he lifted Margarita and gathered her in a close embrace it was more than a hot upflashing of boyish passion that flushed his face and started tears from under his tight-shut eyelids. It was a sore hunger for he knew not what, a gratefulness that he could express only by violence, a yielding to something deeper and more far-reaching than was true of the moment.
    Adam loosened Margarita's hold upon his neck and held her back from him so he could see her face. It was sweet, rosy. Her eyes were shining, black and fathomless as night, soft with a light that had never shone upon Adam from any other woman's.
    "Girl, do you--love me?" he demanded, and if his voice broke with the strange eagerness of a boy, his look had all the sternness of a man.
    "Ah...!" whispered Margarita.
    "You--you big-hearted girl!" he exclaimed, with a laugh that was glad, yet had a tremor in it. "Margarita, I--I must love you, too--since I feel so queer."
    Then he bent to her lips, and from these first real kisses that had ever been spent upon him by a woman he realized in one flash his danger. He released Margarita in a consideration she did not comprehend; and in her pouting reproach, her soft-eyed appeal, her little brown hands that would not let go of him, there was further menace to his principles.
    Adam, gay and teasing, yet kindly and tactfully, tried to find a way to resist her.
    "Senorita, some one will see us," he said.
    "Who cares?"
    "But, child, we--we must think."
    "Senor, no woman ever thinks when love is in her heart and on her lips."
    Her reply seemed to rebuke Adam, for he sensed in it what might be true of life, rather than just of this one little girl, swayed by unknown and uncontrollable forces. She appeared to him then subtly and strongly, as if there was infinitely more than willful love in her. But it did not seem to be the peril of her proffered love that restrained Adam so much as the strange consciousness of the willingness of his spirit to meet hers halfway.
    Suddenly Margarita's mood changed. She became like a cat that had been purring under a soft, agreeable hand and then had been stroked the wrong way.
    "Senor think he love me?" she flashed, growing white.
    "Yes--I said so--Margarita. Of course I do," he hastened to assure her.
    "Maybe you--a gringo liar!"
    Adam might have resented this insulting hint but for his uncertainty of himself, his consequent embarrassment, and his thrilling sense of the nearness of her blazing eyes. What a little devil she looked! This did not antagonize Adam, but it gave him proof of his impudence, of his dreaming carelessness. Margarita might not be a girl to whom he should have made love, but it was too late. Besides, he did not regret that. Only he was upset; he wanted to think.
    "If the grande senor trifle--Margarita will cut out his heart!"
    This swift speech, inflexible and wonderful with a passion that revealed to Adam the half-savage nature of a woman whose race was alien to his, astounded and horrified him, and yet made his blood tingle wildly.
    "Margarita, I do