But he kept silence, as a lonely child keeps silence over the visualization of his imaginary play-fellows. He was keenly interested, and only at times a little afraid. The apparition always came after a day of unusual fatigue, and in exactly the same way. He began to watch for it as for a friend. . . Turning some rock wall or corner of desert, he would find himself riding parallel with an Indian, who walked through the sand about twenty-five feet away as a tired man walks. Then Cuthbertson would say to his pony “There’s the Rainmaker,” and watch. The pony never paid any attention, and the moving figure never came any nearer. Through it there always ran a certain flicker of uncertainty, as through a mirage. And, like a mirage, it shook and thinned and went out.
Perhaps it was the lonely child, coming to the surface in the lonely man that made Cuthbertson, as the vision passed, lift his hand to the brim of his Stetson with a soft “Vaya con Dios,—go with God.”
The machinery at Lost Mesa found a purchaser at last, and Cuthbertson, through three blinding hot weeks, had to see it taken apart and numbered and packed on mule-back to the Los Santos line. Mules died and men sickened, heads grew light and tempers uncertain. For these three weeks, Cuthbertson lived at the mines; he had no thought to spare by day or night for the Rainmaker.
On the last day he rode back from Lost Mesa to the mines, alone and tired out, sitting his tired pony like a sack. The hills reeled in the afternoon heat, the desert was a grayish glare under a sky so hot it had no colour in it. Cuthbertson was waiting thirstily for the hour when the mesas would suddenly stand up in the evening like the foundations of some apocalyptic city forgotten of God, and the dark sweep in on the world like a wave foamed with stars. He looked about him as he rode, as though half-consciously waiting for something. He was waiting for the Rainmaker. Presently, as he turned down a shallow arroyo grown with mummied yuccas, he saw the little white dazzle of the eyes that preceded the vision.
“There’s the Rainmaker,” he said as usual, the man clear in his brain. “But I didn’t think he’d been so far west.” The Rainmaker was walking through the sand as a tired man walks. With a little jump of the pulses, Cuthbertson saw that the face of the apparition was turned fully towards him.