The Moving Finger

The Padre stood at the top of the steps and looked out over the wide stretching valley below him. His long day was drawing to a close, but he felt no weariness of body. There was a weariness of mind, a weariness of outlook. There was something gray and cold and hopeless upon his horizon, something which left him regretful of all that which lay within his view now.

There was a half smile in his eyes, as, for a moment, they rested on the narrow indistinct trail which looked so far below him. He was thinking of that apparition he had met only a few days back, the apparition which had suddenly leapt out of his past. It was all very strange, very wonderful, the working of those mysterious things which make it certain that no page in a human creature's life can be turned once and for all.

Yes, it was all very wonderful. The hand of Fate had begun to move against him when he had greeted that starving fragment of humanity at the trail-side, more than twenty years ago. It had moved steadily since then in every detail of his life. It had been progressing in the work he had done in the building of his farm. Its moving finger had pointed every day of Buck's young life. In the necessities of those poor gold-seekers it had shown its unerring direction, even in the spirit which had prompted him to help them, which involved the selling of his farm.