Page:The Road to Monterey (1925).pdf/297

 lift a note too high. Such a one was Simon, crafty, sneaking, fit figure for the night.

So, by the wall Henderson leaned and listened the night full of its strident cacophony, beaten in the rhythm of nature's eternal metronome. It seemed secure there, yet night gives that sense to a hunted thing, too often beguiling and perilous. And in his waiting the horned owl came into the sycamore grove to prey on the feathered creatures that reposed in the false security of the dark, his rolling voice startling them in bewilderment to blunder in confusion into his talons. The snake glided along the adobe wall, the rustle of its passing in the leaves, stealthy upon the track of fieldmouse that danced in the deep shades and felt secure; the armored beetle the cold, repellent worm—all came from the place that covered them to seize and destroy, pursue and slay the things beneath them weaker in their order, impotent in their defense. Even the moth slipped into the beehive to suck the product of the drowsing swarm; the mean to prey upon the industrious, the loathsome to swallow the beautiful, the sluggish to spread its slime to ensnare the fleet.

There was no pause in the great tragedy of nature, Henderson reflected, leaning with arms against the crumbling wall. Man swallowed man by day; snake gulped mouse by night. It was a cloying, despicable situation that a man held among these rapacious things, cursed with passions that would not let him rise above the little and the