He watched the black streamer of the smelter stack fade beyond the engine”s bluer smoke; and as the railroad track elongated and thinned over the plain, the vast, complex burden of the town seemed to loosen and slip physically away from him. Leaning from his empty carriage, he saw the last vestiges of habitation disappear: ghostly ranches and breached fencing. There was no sign of any savages. There was no sign of life at all. All the town”s brutalizing turmoil, its hordes of semi-exiles with their laden pasts, their paranoia, were dropping away like an aching memory below the horizon. At last he sat back and watched the wilderness passing across his window. Nothing moved in it. Over whole regions an immunizing sweep of fires had charred the earth to a fine dust, and stripped and tilted the trees. To Rayner this forbidding land seemed to isolate his own past back in the town, and prevent it from following him. He took off his sweat-stained shirt and hung it in the window. As the hills lifted round the track, and the train labored up between them, he felt as if all his imperfect adulthood, its half-loves and compromises, was dying behind him in that blighted country.
