Page:Edison Marshall--Shepherds of the wild.djvu/156



didn't take Fargo long to perfect his plans. As the dawn emerged he talked them over with the Mexican, José, and the latter was ready with any little suggestions that did not occur to his chief. And the gray, soft, mysterious light of early morning came into that conference—through the stained and cobwebbed windowpane—and found a darkness it could not alleviate.

As they talked, the very atmosphere of the room seemed to change. It was tense, poignant as if with the remembered lusts and passions of an earlier, more savage world. The little sounds of a room in which two men talk together—the stir of moving bodies, the creak of furniture, the soft whisper of easy breathing seemed lacking here. Both were motionless as two serpents that lay in their sunbaths on their ledges, and thus an insidious stillness dropped down in the little intervals between their sentences.

The almost total absence of motion on the part of those two conspirators could not have been ignored. It implied only one thing: that their thoughts were so commanding and engrossing that even the almost unconscious movements of the body were suspended. What motion there