Page:Son of the wind.djvu/63

 His adventures, drifting in the north and south of the large west, his present profession—the excitements and the dangers of it—the look of the country there as if hell had blasted it, and the rough life in it, he told them all. The rougher the more it semed to strike Rader's imagination. He had a curious faculty of seeing resemblances in real things, men, horses and mountains, to frescoes, bas-reliefs and palaces; he had, too, a disconcerting way of breaking into a narrative with: "Tell me, what is it in a man that makes him do a thing like that?"

The horse-breaker had never interrogated himself in such fashion, though he had seen, far and wide, the curious, unaccountable things that men will do. He could not answer Rader, though the scholar made a dozen suppositions for himself upon each point, some glancing at what might have been the truth, some wide the possibility. He could only tell still more things to be wondered at, and he perceived the more he told, the more he gave of himself, the more response he had from his companion. He was beginning to understand that he was in Rader's hands like a new book. His interest for the scholar was not on what common ground they could meet, but into what fresh fields Carron could lead him. He had led him a long way to-night.