Title:      Wanderer of the Wasteland
Author:     Zane Grey
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Title:      Wanderer of the Wasteland
Author:     Zane Grey




CHAPTER I

Adam Larey gazed with hard and wondering eyes down the silent current of
the red river upon which he meant to drift away into the desert.

The Rio Colorado was no river to trust. It chafed at its banks as if to
engulf them; muddy and thick it swirled and glided along in flood,
sweeping in curves back and forth from Arizona to California shore.
Majestic and gleaming under the hot sky, it swung southward between wide
green borders of willow and cottonwood toward a stark and naked upflung
wilderness of mountain peaks, the red ramparts of the unknown and
trackless desert.

Adam rushed down the bank and threw his pack into a boat. There his rapid
action seemed checked by the same violence that had inspired his haste.
He looked back, up at the dusty adobe town of Ehrenberg, asleep now under
the glaring noonday heat. It would not wake out of that siesta till the
return of the weary gold diggers, or the arrival of the stagecoach or the
steamer. A tall Indian, swarthy and unkempt, stood motionless in the
shade of a wall, watching stolidly.

Adam broke down then. Sobs made his utterance incoherent. "Guerd is no
brother--of mine--any more!" he burst out. His accent was one of
humiliation and cheated love. "And as for--for her--I'll never--never
think of her--again."

When once more he turned to the river, a spirit wrestled with the emotion
that had unnerved him. Adam Larey appeared to be a boy of eighteen, with
darkly tanned, clear-cut and comely face, and a lofty stature, straight
and spare and wide. Untying the boat from its mooring, he became
conscious of a singular thrill. Sight of the silent river fascinated him.
If it had been drink that had fortified his reckless resolve, it was
some strange call to the wildness in him that had stirred exaltation in
the prospect of adventure. But there was more. Never again to be
dominated by that selfish Guerd, his brother who had taken all and given
nothing. Guerd would be stung by this desertion. Perhaps he would be
sorry. That thought gave Adam a pang. Long habit of being influenced, and
strength of love fostered in playmate days, these made him waver. But the
tide of resentment surged up once more; and there flowed the red
Colorado, rolling away to the southwest, a gateway to the illimitable
wastes of desert land, with its mystery, its adventure, its gold and
alluring freedom.

"I'll go," he declared, passionately, and with a shove he sent the boat
adrift and leaped over the prow to the rowing seat. The boat floated
lazily, half circling, till it edged into the current; then, as if
grasped by unseen power, it glided downstream. Adam seemed to feel the
resistless current of this mysterious river take hold of his heart. There
would be no coming back--no breasting that mighty flood with puny oars.
The moment was sudden and poignant in its revelation. How swiftly receded
the cluster of brown adobe huts, the sombre, motionless Indian! He had
left Ehrenberg behind, and a brother who was his only near relative, and
a little sum of love that had failed him.

"I'm done with Guerd forever," he muttered, looking back with hard dry
eyes. "It's his fault. Mother always warned me....Ah! if she had lived I
would still be home. Home! and not here--in this awful desert of heat and
wastelands--among men like wolves and women like..."

He did not finish the thought, but from his pack he took a bottle that
glittered in the sunlight, and, waving it defiantly at the backward scene
of glare and dust and lonely habitation, he drank deeply. Then he flung
the bottle from him with a violent gesture of repulsion. He had no love
for strong drink. The bottle fell with hollow splash, rode the muddy
swirls, and sank. Whereupon Adam applied himself to the oars with long
and powerful sweep.

In that moment of bitter soliloquy there had flashed through Adam Larey's
mind memories and pictures of the past--the old homestead back East,
vivid and unforgettable--the sad face of his mother, who had loved him as
she had never loved his brother Guerd. There had been a mystery about the
father who had died in Adam's childhood. Adam thought of these facts now,
seeing a vague connection between them and his presence there alone upon
that desert river. When his mother died she had left all her money to
him. But Adam had shared his small fortune with Guerd. That money had
been the beginning of evil days. If it had not changed Guerd it had
awakened slumbering jealousy and passion. Guerd squandered his share and
disgraced himself in the home town. Then had begun his ceaseless
importunity for Adam to leave college, to see life, to seek adventures,
to sail round the Horn to the California gold fields. Adam had been true
to the brother spirit within him and the voice of the tempter had fallen
upon too thrilling ears. Yearning to be with his brother, and to see wild
life upon his own account, Adam yielded to the importunity. He chose,
however, to travel westward by land. At various points en route Guerd had
fallen in with evil companions, among whom he seemed to feel freer. At
Tucson he launched himself upon the easy and doubtful career of a
gambler, which practice did not spare even his brother. At Ehrenberg,
Guerd had found life to his liking--a mining and outfitting post remote
from civilization, where he made friends compatible with his lately
developed tastes, where he finally filched the favour of dark eyes that
had smiled first upon Adam.

It was a June sun that burned down upon the Colorado desert and its red
river. Adam Larey had taken to rowing the boat with a powerful energy.
But the fiery liquor he had absorbed and the intense heat beating down
upon him soon prostrated him, half-drunk and wholly helpless, upon the
bottom of the leaky boat, now at the mercy of the current.

Strangest of all rivers was the Rio Colorado. Many names it had borne,
though none so fitting and lasting as that which designated its colour.
Neither crimson nor scarlet was it, nor any nameable shade of red, yet
somehow red was its hue. Like blood with life gone from it! With its
source at high altitude, fed by snow fields and a thousand lakes and
streams, the Colorado stormed its great canyoned confines with a mighty
torrent; and then, spent and levelled, but still tremendous and
insatiate, it bore down across the desert with its burden of silt and
sand. It was silent, it seemed to glide along, yet it was appalling.

The boat that carried Adam Larey might as well have been a rudderless
craft in an ocean current. Slowly round and round it turned, as if every
rod of the river was an eddy, sweeping near one shore and then the other.
The hot hours of the afternoon waned. Sunset was a glaring blaze without
clouds. Cranes and bitterns swept in lumbering flight over the wide green
crests of the bottom lands, and desert buzzards sailed down from the
ruddy sky. The boat drifted on. Before darkness fell the boat had drifted
out of the current into a back eddy, where slowly it rode round and
round, at last to catch hold of the arrow-weeds and lodge in a thicket.

At dawn Adam Larey awoke, sober enough, but sick and aching, parched with
thirst. The eastern horizon, rose-flushed and golden, told him of the
advent of another day. He thrilled even in his misery. Scooping up the
muddy and sand-laden water, which was cold and held a taste of snow, he
quenched his thirst and bathed his hot face. Then opening his pack, he
took out food he had been careful to bring.

Then he endeavoured to get his bearings. Adam could see by the stain on
the arrow-weeds that the flood had subsided a foot during the night. A
reasonable calculation was that he had drifted a good many miles. "I'll
row till it gets hot, then rest up in a shady place," he decided. Pushing
away from the reeds, he set the oars and rowed out to meet the current.
As soon as that caught him the motion became exhilarating. By and bye,
what with the exercise and the cool breeze of morning on his face and the
sweet, dank smell of river lowlands, he began to wear off the effects of
the liquor and with it the disgust and sense of unfitness with which it
had left him. Then at length gloom faded from his mind, though a pang
abided in his breast. It was not an unfamiliar sensation. Resolutely he
faced that wide travelling river, grateful for something nameless that
seemed borne on its bosom, conscious of a strange expansion of his soul,
ready to see, to hear, to smell, to feel, to taste the wildness and
wonder of freedom as he had dreamed it.

The sun rose, and Adam's face and hands felt as if some hot material
thing had touched them. He began to sweat, which was all that was needed
to restore his usual healthy feeling of body. From time to time he saw
herons, and other long-legged waterfowl, and snipe flitting over the sand
bars, and sombre, grey-hued birds that he could not name. The spell of
river or desert hovered over these birds. The fact brought to Adam the
strange nature of this silence. Like an invisible blanket it covered all,
water and brush and land.

"It's desert silence," he said, wonderingly.

When he raised the oars and rested them there seemed absolutely no sound.
And this fact struck him overpoweringly with its meaning and with a
sudden unfamiliar joy. On the gentle wind came a fragrant hot breath that
mingled with the rank odour of flooded bottom lands. The sun, hot as it
was, felt good upon his face and back. He loved the sun, as he hated the
cold.

"Maybe Guerd's coaxing me West will turn out well for me," soliloquised
Adam, with resurging boyish hope. "As the Mexicans say, Quien sabe?"

At length he espied a sloping bank where it appeared safe to risk
landing. This was a cove comparatively free of brush, and the bank sloped
gradually to the water. The summit of the bank was about forty or fifty
feet high, and before Adam had wholly ascended it he began to see the
bronze tips of mountains on all sides.

"By Jove!" exclaimed Adam. "No sign of man! No sign of life!"

Some distance from the river bank stood a high knoll. Adam climbed to the
top of it, and what he saw here made him yearn for the mountain peaks. He
had never stood at any great elevation. Southward the Colorado appeared
to enter a mountain gateway and to turn and disappear.

When he had refreshed himself with food and drink he settled himself into
a comfortable position to rest and sleep a little while. He had plucked
at the roots of love, but not yet had he torn it from his heart. Guerd,
his brother! The old boyhood days flashed up. Adam found the pang deep in
his heart and ineradicable. The old beautiful bond, the something warm
and intimate between him and Guerd, was gone for ever. For its loss there
could be no recompense. He knew every hour would sever him the farther
from this brother who had proved false. Adam hid his face in the dry
grass, and there in the loneliness of that desert he began to see into
the gulf of his soul.

"I can fight--I can forget!" he muttered. Then he set his mind to the
problem of his immediate future. Where would he go? There were two points
below on the river Picacho, a mining camp, and Yuma, a frontier
town--about both of which he had heard strange, exciting tales. And at
that moment Adam felt a reckless eagerness for adventure, and a sadness
for the retreating of his old dream of successful and useful life. At
length he fell asleep.

When he awoke he felt hot and wet with sweat. A luminous gold light shone
through the willows and there was vivid colour in the west. He had slept
hours. When he moved to sit up he heard rustlings in the willows. These
unseen creatures roused interest and caution in Adam. In his travels
across Arizona he had passed through wild places and incidents. And
remembering tales of bad Indians, bad Mexicans, bad white men, and the
fierce beasts and reptiles of the desert, Adam fortified himself to
encounters that must come.

When he stepped out of the shady covert it was to see river and valley as
if encompassed by an immense loneliness, different, somehow, for the few
hours of his thought and slumber. The river seemed redder and the
mountains veiled in ruby haze. Earth and sky were bathed in the hue of
sunset light.

He descended to the river. Shoving the boat off, he applied himself to
the oars. His strong strokes, aided by the current, sent the boat along
swiftly, perhaps ten miles an hour. The rose faded out of the sky, the
clouds turned drab, the blue deepened, and a pale star shone. Twilight
failed. With the cooling of the air Adam lay back more powerfully upon
the oars. Night fell, and one by one, and then many by many, the stars
came out. This night ride began to be thrilling. There must have been
danger ahead. By night the river seemed vast, hurrying, shadowy, and
silent as the grave. Its silence wore upon Adam until it seemed
unnatural.

As the stars multiplied and brightened, the deep cut where the river
wound changed its character, becoming dark and clear where it had been
gloomily impenetrable. The dim, high outlines of the banks showed, and
above them loomed the black domes of mountains. From time to time he
turned the boat, and resting upon his oars, he drifted with the current,
straining his eyes and ears. These moments of inaction brought the cold,
tingling prickle of skin up and down his back. It was impossible not to
be afraid, yet he thrilled even in his fear. In the clear obscurity of
the night he could see several rods ahead of him over the gleaming river.
But the peril that haunted Adam seemed more in the distant shadows, round
the bends. What a soundless, nameless, unintelligible river! To be alone
on a river like that, so vast, so strange, with the grand and solemn arch
of heaven blazed and clouded white by stars, taught a lesson incalculable
in its effects.

The hour came when an invisible something, like a blight, passed across
the heavens, paling the blue, dimming the starlight. The intense purity
of the sky sustained a dull change, then darkened. Adam welcomed the
first faint gleam of light over the eastern horizon. It brightened. The
wan stars faded. The mountains heightened their clearness of silhouette,
and along the bold, dark outlines appeared a faint rose colour, herald of
the sun. It deepened, it spread as the grey light turned pink and yellow.
The shadows lifted from the river valley and it was day again.

"Always I have slept away the great hour," said Adam. An exhilaration
uplifted him.

He drifted round a bend in the river while once more eating sparingly of
his food; and suddenly he espied a high column of smoke rising to the
southwest. Whereupon he took the oars again and, having become rested and
encouraged, he rowed with a stroke that would make short work of the few
miles to the camp.

"Picacho!" soliloquised Adam, remembering tales he had heard. "Now what
shall I do?...I'll work at anything." He carried a considerable sum of
money in a belt round his waist--the last of the money left him by his
mother, and he wanted to keep it as long as possible.

Adam was not long in reaching the landing, which appeared to be only a
muddy bank. A small, dilapidated stern-wheel steamer, such as Adam had
seen on the Ohio River, lay resting upon the mud. On the bow sat a gaunt
weather-beaten man with a grizzled beard. He held a long crooked fishing
pole out over the water, and evidently was fishing. The bank sloped up to
fine white sand and a dense growth of green, in the middle of which there
appeared to be a narrow lane. Here in a flowing serape stood a Mexican
girl, slender and small, with a single touch of red in all her darkness
of dress.

Adam ran the boat ashore. Lifting his pack, he climbed a narrow bench of
the bank and walked down to a point opposite the fisherman. Adam greeted
him and inquired if this place was Picacho.

"Mornin' stranger," came the reply. "Yes, this here's the gold diggin's,
an' she's hummin' these days."

"Catching any fish?" Adam inquired, with interest.

"Yep; I ketched one day before yestiddy," replied the man, complacently.

"What kind?" went on Adam.

"I'll be doggoned if I know, but he was good to eat," answered the
angler, with a grin. "Where you hail from, stranger?"

"Back East."

"So I reckoned. No Westerner would tackle the Colorado when she was in
flood. I opine you hit the river at Ehrenberg. Wal, you're lucky. Goin'
to prospect for gold?"

"No, I'd rather work. Can I get a job here?"

"Son, if you're as straight as you look you can get a good job. But a
husky lad like you, if he stayed sober, could strike it rich in the
diggin's."

"How about a place to eat and sleep?"

"Thet ain't so easy to find up at the camp. It's a few miles up the
canyon. But say, I'm forgettin' about the feller who stayed here with the
Mexicans. They jest buried him. You could get his place. It's the 'dobe
house--first one. Ask Margarita, there. She'll show you."

Thus directed, Adam saw the Mexican girl standing above him. Climbing the
path to the top of the bank, he threw down his pack.

"Buenas dias, senor." The girl's soft, liquid accents fitted a dark,
piquant little face, framed by hair as black as the wing of a raven, and
lighted by big eyes, like night.

Adam's Spanish was not that of the Mexicans, but it enabled him to talk
fairly well. He replied to the girl's greeting, yet hesitated with the
query he had on his lips. He felt a slight shrinking as these dark eyes
reminded him of others of like allurement which he had willed to forget.
Yet he experienced a warmth and thrill of pleasure in a pretty face.
Women invariably smiled upon Adam. This one, a girl in her teens, smiled
with half-lowered eyes, the more provocative for that; and she turned
partly away with a lithe, quick grace. Adam's hesitation had been a sudden
chill at the proximity of something feminine and attractive--of something
that had hurt him. But it passed. He had done more than boldly step across
the threshold of a new and freer life.



CHAPTER II

For Adam's questions Margarita had a shy, "Si, senor," and the same subtle
smile that had attracted him. Whereupon he took up his pack and followed her.

Back from the river the sand was thick and heavy, clean and white. The
girl led down a path bordered by willows and mesquites which opened into a
clearing where stood several squat adobe houses.

Margarita stopped at the first house. The girl's mother appeared to be an
indolent person, rather careless of her attire. She greeted Adam in
English, but when he exercised some of his laborsome Spanish her dark face
beamed with smiles that made it pleasant to behold. The little room
indoors, to which she led Adam, was dark, poorly ventilated, and
altogether unsatisfactory. Adam said so. The senora waxed eloquent.
Margarita managed to convey her great disappointment by one swift look.
Then they led him outdoors and round under the low-branching mesquites,
where he had to stoop, to a small structure. The walls were made of two
rows of long slender poles, nailed upon heavier uprights at the corners,
and between these rows had been poured wet adobe mud. The hut contained
two rooms, the closed one full of wood and rubbish, and the other, which
had an open front, like a porch, faced the river. It was empty, with a
floor of white sand. This appeared very much to Adam's liking, and he
agreed upon a price for it, to the senora's satisfaction and Margarita's
shy rapture. Adam saw the latter with some misgiving, yet he was pleased,
and in spite of himself he warmed toward this pretty senorita who had
apparently taken a sudden fancy to him. He was a stranger in a strange
land, with a sore and yearning heart. While Adam untied his pack and
spread out its contents the women fetched a low bench, a bucket of water,
and a basin. These simple articles constituted the furniture of his new
lodgings. He was to get his meals at the house, where, it was assured,
he would be well cared for. In moving away, Margarita, who was looking
back, caught her hair in a thorny branch of the mesquite. Adam was quick
to spring to her assistance. Then she ran off after her mother.

"What eyes! Well, well!" exclaimed Adam, sensible of a warmth along his
veins. Suddenly at that moment he thought of his brother Guerd.
"I'm glad he's not here." Margarita had prompted that thought. Guerd was
a handsome devil, irresistible to women. Adam went back to his unpacking,
conscious of a sobered enthusiasm.

He hung his few clothes and belongings upon the walls, made his bed of
blankets on the sand, and then surveyed the homely habitation with
pleasure.

He found the old fisherman in precisely the same posture. Adam climbed
on board the boat.

"Get any bites?" he queried.

"I believe I jest had one," replied the fisherman.

Adam saw that he was about fifty years old, lean and dried, with a
wrinkled tanned face and scant beard.

"Have a smoke," said Adam, proffering one of the last of his cigars.
"Lordy!" ejaculated the fisherman, his eyes lighting. "When have I seen
one of them?...Young man, you're an obligin' feller. What's your name?"

Adam told him, and that he hailed from the East and had been a tenderfoot
for several memorable weeks.

"My handle's Merryvale," replied the other. "I came West twenty-eight
years ago when I was about your age. Reckon you're about twenty."

"No. Only eighteen. Say, you must have almost seen the old days of
'forty-nine."

"It was in 'fifty. Yes, I was in the gold rush."

"Did you strike any gold?" asked Adam, eagerly.

"Son, I was a prospector for twenty years. I've made an' lost more than
one fortune. Drink an' faro an' bad women!...And now I'm a broken-down
night watchman at Picacho."

"I'm sorry," said Adam, sincerely. "I'll bet you've seen some great old
times. Won't you tell me about them? You see, I'm footloose now and sort
of wild."

Merryvale nodded sympathetically. He studied Adam with eyes that were
shrewd and penetrating, for all their kindliness. Wherefore Adam talked
frankly about himself and his travels West. Merryvale listened with a nod
now and then.

"Son, I hate to see the likes of you hittin' this gold diggin's," he
said.

"Why? Oh, I can learn to take care of myself. It must be a man's game.
I'll love the desert."

"Wal, son, I oughtn't to discourage you," replied Merryvale. "An' it
ain't fair for me to think because I went wrong, an' because I seen so
many boys go wrong, thet you'll do the same...But this gold diggin's is a
hell of a place for a tough old timer, let alone a boy runnin' wild."

And then he began to talk like a man whose memory was a vast treasure
store of history and adventure and life. Gold had been discovered at
Picacho in 1864. In 1872 the mill was erected near the river, and the ore
was mined five miles up the canyon and hauled down on a narrow-gauge
railroad. The machinery and construction for this great enterprise,
together with all supplies, were brought by San Francisco steamers round
into the Gulf of California, loaded on smaller steamers, and carried up
the Colorado River to Picacho. These steamers also hauled supplies to
Yuma and Ehrenberg, where they were freighted by wagon trains into the
interior. At the present time, 1878, the mine was paying well and there
were between five and six hundred men employed. The camp was always full
of adventurers and gamblers, together with a few bad women whose capacity
for making trouble magnified their number.

"Down here at the boat landin' an' the mill it's always sorta quiet,"
said Merryvale. "You see, there ain't many men here. An' the gamblin'
hells are all up at the camp, where, in fact, everybody goes of an
evenin'. Lord knows I've bucked the tiger in every gold camp in
California. There's a fever grips a man. I never seen the good of gold to
the man thet dug it....So, son, if you're askin' me for a hunch, let me
tell you, drink little an' gamble light an' fight shy of the females!"

"Merryvale, I'm more of a tenderfoot than I look, I guess," replied Adam.
"You'd hardly believe I never drank till I started West a few months ago.
I can't stand liquor."

Adam's face lost its brightness and his eyes shadowed, though they held
frankly to Merryvale's curious gaze.

"Son, you're a strappin' youngster an' you've got looks no woman will
pass by," said Merryvale. "An' in this country the preference of women
brings trouble. Wal, for thet matter, all the trouble anywheres is made
by them. But in the desert, where it's wild an' hot an' there's few
females of any species, the fightin' gets bloody."

"Women have been the least of my fights or troubles," rejoined Adam. "But
lately I had a--a little more serious affair--that ended suddenly before
I fell in deep."

"Lordy! son, you'll be a lamb among wolves!" broke in Merryvale. "See
here, I'm goin' to start you right. This country is no place for a nice
clean boy, more's the shame and pity. Every man who gets on in the West,
let alone in the desert where the West is magnified, has got to live up
to the standard. He must work, he must endure, he must fight men, he must
measure up to women. I ain't sayin' it's a fine standard, but it's the
one by which men have survived in a hard country at a hard time."

"Survival of the fittest," muttered Adam, soberly.

"You've said it, son. Thet law makes the livin' things of this desert,
whether man or otherwise. Quien sabe? You can never tell what's in a man
till he's tried. Son, I've known desert men whose lives were beyond all
understandin'. But not one man in a thousand can live on the desert. Thet
has to do with his mind first; then his endurance. But to come back to
this here Picacho. I'd not be afraid to back you against it if you meet
it right."

"How is that?"

"Lordy! son, I wish I could say the right word," returned Merryvale, in
pathetic earnestness. "You ain't to be turned back?"

"No. I'm here for better or worse. Back home I had my hopes, my dreams.
They're gone--vanished...I've no near relatives except a brother who--who
is not my kind. I didn't want to come West. But I seem to have been freed
from a cage. This grand wild desert! It will do something wonderful--or
terrible with me."

"Wal, wal, you talk like you look," replied Merryvale, with a sigh. "Time
was, son, when a hunch of mine might be doubtful. But now I'm old, an' as
I go down the years I remember more my youth an' I love it more. You can
trust me." Then he paused, taking a deep breath, as if his concluding
speech involved somehow his faith in himself and his good will to a
stranger. "Be a man with your body! Don't shirk work or play or fight.
Eat an' drink an' be merry, but don't live jest for thet. Lend a helpin'
hand--be generous with your gold. Put aside a third of your earnin's for
gamblin' an' look to lose it. Don't ever get drunk. You can't steer clear
of women, good or bad. An' the only way is to be game an' kind an'
square."

"Game--kind--square," mused Adam, thoughtfully.

"Wal, I need a new fishin' line," said Merryvale, as he pulled in his
rod. "We'll go up to the store an' then I'll take you to the mill."

While passing the adobe house where Adam had engaged board and lodging he
asked his companion the name of the people.

"Arallanes--Juan Arallanes lives there," replied Merryvale. "An' he's the
whitest greaser I ever seen. He's a foreman of the Mexicans employed at
the mill. His wife is nice, too. But thet black-eyed hussy Margarita----"

Merryvale shook his grizzled head, but did not complete his dubious
beginning. The suggestion piqued Adam's curiosity. Presently Merryvale
pointed out a cluster of huts and cabins and one rather pretentious stone
house, low and square, with windows. Both white- and dark-skinned
children were playing on the sand in the shady places. Idle men lounged
in front of the stone house, which Merryvale said was the store. Upon
entering, Adam saw a complete general store of groceries, merchandise,
hardware, and supplies; and he felt amazed until he remembered how the
river steamers made transportation easy as far as the border of the
desert. Then Merryvale led on to the huge structure of stone and iron and
wood that Adam had espied from far up the river. As Adam drew near he
heard the escape of steam, the roar of heavy machinery, and a sound that
must have been a movement and crushing of ore, with a rush of flowing
water.

Merryvale evidently found the manager, who was a man of medium height,
powerfully built, with an unshaven broad face, strong and ruddy. He wore
a red-flannel shirt, wet with sweat, a gun at his belt, overalls thrust
into cowhide boots; and altogether he looked a rough and practical miner.

"Mac, shake hands with my young friend here," said Merryvale. "He wants a
job."

"Howdy!" replied the other, proffering a big hand that Adam certainly
felt belonged to a man. Also he was aware of one quick all-embracing
glance. "Are you good at figures?"

"Why, yes," answered Adam, "but I want to work."

"All right. You can help me in the office where I'm stuck. An' I'll give
you outside work, besides. To-morrow." And with this brusque promise the
manager strode away in a hurry.

"Mac don't get time to eat," explained Merryvale. Adam had to laugh at
the incident. Here he had been recommended by a stranger, engaged to work
for a man whose name he had not heard and who had not asked his, and no
mention made of wages. Adam liked this simplicity.

A man must pass in this country for what he was.


Merryvale went on his way then, leaving Adam alone. It seemed to Adam, as
he pondered there, that his impressions of that gold mill did not auger
well for a satisfaction with his job. He had no distaste for hard labour,
though to bend over a desk did not appeal to him. Then he turned his gaze
to the river and valley. What a splendid scene! The green borderland
offered soft and relieving contrast to the bare and grisly ridges upon
which stood. At that distance the river shone red gold, sweeping through
its rugged iron gateway and winding majestically down the valley to lose
itself round a bold bluff.

Adam drew a long breath. A scene like this world of mountain wilderness,
of untrodden ways, was going to take hold of him. And then, singularly,
there flashed into memory an image of the girl, Margarita. Just then Adam
resented thought of her. It was not because she had made eyes at him--for
he had to confess this was pleasing but because he did not like the idea
of a deep and vague emotion running parallel in his mind with thought of
a roguish and coquettish little girl, of doubtful yet engaging
possibilities.

"I think too much," declared Adam. It was action he needed. Work, play,
hunting, exploring, even gold digging--anything with change of scene and
movement of muscle--these things that he had instinctively felt to be the
need of his body, now seemed equally the need of his soul.



CHAPTER III

Arallanes, the foreman, did not strike Adam as being typical of the
Mexicans among whom he lived. He was not a little runt of a
swarthy-skinned man, but well built, of a clean olive complexion and
regular features.

After supper Arallanes invited Adam to ride up to the camp. Whereupon
Margarita asked to be taken. Arallanes laughed, and then talked so fast
that Adam could not understand. He gathered, however, that the empty ore
train travelled up the canyon to the camp, there to remain until morning.
Also Adam perceived that Margarita did not get along well with this man,
who was her stepfather. They appeared on the verge of a quarrel. But the
senora spoke a few soft words that worked magic upon Arallanes, though
they did not change the passion of the girl. How swiftly she had paled!
Her black eyes burned with a dusky fire. When she turned them upon Adam
it was certain that he had a new sensation.

"Will not the gracious senor take Margarita to the dance?"

That was how Adam translated her swift, eloquent words. Embarrassed and
hesitating, he felt that he cut a rather sorry figure before her. Then he
realised the singular beauty of her big eyes, sloe black and brilliant,
neither half veiled nor shy now, but bold and wide and burning, as if the
issue at stake was not trivial.

Arallanes put a hand on Adam. "No, Senor," he said. "Some other time you
may take Margarita."

"I--I shall be pleased," stammered Adam.

The girl's red lips curled in pouting scorn, and with a wonderful dusky
flash of eyes she whirled away.

Outside, Arallanes led Adam across the sands, still with that familiar
hand upon him.

"Boy," he said, in English, "that girl--she no blood of mine. She damn
leetle wild cat--mucha Indian--on fire all time."

If ever Adam had felt the certainty of his youthful years, it had been
during those last few moments. His collar was hot and tight. A sense of
shock remained with him. He had not fortified himself at all, nor had he
surrendered himself to recklessness. But to think of going to a dance
this very night, in a mining camp, with a dusky-eyed little Spanish girl
who appeared exactly what Arallanes had called her--the very idea took
Adam's breath with the surprise of it, the wildness of it, the strange
appeal to him.

"Senor veree beeg, but young--like colt," said Arallanes, with good
nature. "Tenderfeet, the gamblers say...He mos dam' sure have tough feet
soon on Picacho!"

"Well, Arallanes, that can't come too soon for me," declared Adam, and
the statement seemed to give relief.

They climbed to the track where the ore train stood, already with
labourers in almost every car. After a little wait that seemed long to
the impatient Adam the train started. The track was built a few feet
above the sand, but showed signs of having been submerged, and in fact
washed out in places. The canyon was tortuous, and grew more so as it
narrowed. Adam descried tunnels dug in the red walls and holes dug in
gravel benches, which places Arallanes explained had been made by
prospectors hunting for gold. It developed, however, that there was a
considerable upgrade. That seemed a long five miles to Adam. The train
halted and the labourers yelled merrily.

Arallanes led Adam up a long winding path, quite steep, and the other men
followed in single file. When Adam reached a level once more, Arallanes
called out, "Picacho!"

But he certainly could not have meant the wide gravelly plateau with its
squalid huts, its adobe shacks, its rambling square of low flat
buildings, like a stockade fort roofed with poles and dirt. Arallanes
meant the mountain that dominated the place--Picacho, the Peak.

Adam faced the west as the sun was setting. The mountain, standing
magnificently above the bold knobs and ridges around it, was a dark
purple mass framed in sunset gold; and from its frowning summit, notched
and edged, streamed a long ruddy golden ray of sunlight that shone down
through a wind-worn hole. With the sun blocked and hidden except for that
small aperture there was yet a wonderful effect of sunset. A ruddy haze,
shading the blue, filled the canyons and the spaces. Picacho seemed grand
there, towering to the sky, crowned in gold, aloof, unscalable, a massive
rock sculptured by the ages.

Arallanes laughed at Adam, then sauntered on. Mexicans jabbered as they
passed, and some of the white men made jocular comment at the boy
standing there so wide-eyed and still. A little Irishman gaped at Adam
and said to a comrade:

"Begorra, he's after seein' a peanut atop ole Picacho....What-th'-hell
now, me young fri'nd? Come hev a drink."

The crowd passed on, and Arallanes lingered, making himself a cigarette
the while.

Adam had not been prepared for such a spectacle of grandeur and
desolation. He seemed to feel himself a mite flung there, encompassed by
colossal and immeasurable fragments of upheaved rock, jagged and jutted,
with never a softening curve, and all steeped in vivid and intense light.
The plateau was a ridged and scarred waste, lying under the half circle
of range behind, and sloping down toward where the river lay hidden. The
range to the left bore a crimson crest, and it lost itself in a region of
a thousand peaks. The range to the right was cold pure purple and it
ended in a dim infinity. Between these ranges, far flung across the
Colorado, loomed now with exquisite clearness in Adam's sight the
mountain world he had gotten a glimpse of from below. But now he
perceived its marvellous all-embracing immensity, magnified by the
transparent light, its limitless horizon line an illusion, its thin
purple distances unbelievable. The lilac-veiled canyons lay clear in his
sight; the naked bones of the mountains showed hungrily the nature of the
desert earth; and over all the vast area revealed by the setting sun lay
the awful barrenness of a dead world, beautiful and terrible, with its
changing rose and topaz hues only mockeries to the lover of life.

A hand fell upon Adam's shoulder.

"Come, let us look at games of gold and women," said Arallanes.

Then he led Adam into a big, poorly lighted, low-ceiled place, as crudely
constructed as a shed, and full of noise and smoke. The attraction seemed
to be a rude bar, various gambling games, and some hawk-faced, ghastly
spectacles of women drinking with men at the tables. From an adjoining
apartment came discordant music. This scene was intensely interesting to
Adam, yet disappointing. His first sight of a wild frontier gambling hell
did not thrill him.

It developed that Arallanes liked to drink and talk loud and laugh, and
to take a bold chance at a gambling game. But Adam refused, and meant to
avoid drinking as long as he could. He wandered around by himself, to
find that everybody was merry and friendly. Adam tried not to look at any
of the women while they looked at him. The apartment from which came the
music was merely a bare canvas-covered room with a board floor. Dancing
was going on.

Adam's aimless steps finally led him back to the sand-floored hall, where
he became absorbed in watching a game of poker that a bystander said had
no limit. Then Adam sauntered on, and presently was attracted by a
quarrel among some Mexicans. To his surprise, it apparently concerned
Arallanes. All of them showed the effects of liquor, and, after the
manner of their kind, they were gesticulating and talking excitedly.
Suddenly one of them drew a knife and lunged toward Arallanes. Adam saw
the movement, and then the long shining blade, before he saw what the man
looked like. That action silenced the little group.

The outstretched hand, quivering with the skewer-like dagger, paused in
its sweep as it reached a point opposite Adam. Instinctively he leaped,
and quick as a flash he caught the wrist in a grip so hard that the
fellow yelled. Adam, now that he possessed the menacing hand, did not
know what to do with it. With a powerful jerk he pulled the Mexican off
his feet, and then, exerting his strength to his utmost, he swung him
round, knocking over men and tables, until his hold loosened. The knife
flew one way and the Mexican the other. He lay where he fell. Arallanes
and his comrades made much of Adam.

"We are friends. You will drink with me," said Arallanes, grandly.

Though no one would have suspected it, Adam was really in need of
something bracing.

"Senor is only a boy, but he has an arm," said Arallanes, as he clutched
Adam's shoulder and biceps with a nervous hand. "When senor becomes a
man he will be a giant."

Adam's next change of emotion was from fright to a sense of foolishness
at his standing there. Then he had another drink, and after his feelings
changed again, and for that matter the whole complexion of everything
changed.

He never could have found the narrow path leading down into the canyon.
Arallanes was his guide. Walking on the sandy floor was hard work and
made him sweat. The loose sand and gravel dragged at his feet. Not long
was it before he had walked off the effects of the strong liquor. He
became curious as to why the Mexican had threatened Arallanes, and was
told that during the day the foreman had discharged this fellow.

"He ran after Margarita," added Arallanes, "and I kicked him out of the
house. The women, senor--ah! they do not mind what a man is!...Have a
care of Margarita. She has as many loves and lives as a spotted cat."

For the most part, however, the two men were silent on this laborious
walk. By and bye the canyon widened out so that Adam could view the great
expanse of sky, fretted with fire, and the mountain spurs, rising on all
sides, cold and dark against the blue. At last Arallanes announced that
they were home. Adam had not seen a single house in the grey shadows. A
few more steps, however, brought tangible substance of walls to Adam's
touch. Then he drew a long deep breath and realised how tired he was. The
darkness gradually changed from pitch black to a pale obscurity. He could
see dim, spectral outlines of mesquites, and a star shining through. At
first the night appeared to be absolutely silent, but after a while, by
straining his ears, he heard a rustling of mice or ground squirrels in
the adobe walls. The sound comforted him, however, and when one of them,
or at least some little animal, ran softly, over his bed the feeling of
utter loneliness was broken.

"I've begun it," he whispered, and meant the lonely life that was to be
his. The silence, the darkness, the loneliness seemed to give him deeper
thought. The thing that puzzled him and alarmed him was what seemed to be
swift changes going on in him. If he changed his mind every hour, now
cast down because of memories he could not wholly shake, or lifted to
strange exaltation by the beauty of a desert sunset, or again swayed by
the appeal of a girl's dusky eyes, and then instinctively leaping into a
fight with a Mexican--if he were going to be as vacillating and wild as
these impulses led him to suppose he might be, it was certain that he
faced a hopeless future.

But could he help himself? Then it seemed his fine instincts, his fine
principles, and the hopes and dreams that would not die, began to contend
with a new up-rising force in him, a wilder something he had never known,
a strange stirring and live emotion.

"But I'm glad," he burst out, as if telling his secret to the darkness.
"Glad to be rid of Guerd--damn him and his meanness!...Glad to be
alone!...Glad to come into this wild desert!...Glad that girl made eyes
at me! I'll not lie to myself. I wanted to hug her--to kiss her--and I'll
do it if she'll let me...That gambling hell disgusted me, and sight of
the greaser's knife scared me cold. Yet when I got hold of him--felt my
strength--how helpless he was--that I could have cracked his bones--why,
scared as I was, I felt a strange wild something that is not gone
yet...I'm changing. It's a different life. And I've got to meet things as
they come, and be game."

Next morning Adam went to work and it developed that this was to copy
MacKay's lead-pencil scrawls, and after that was done to keep accurate
account of ore mined and operated.

Several days passed before Adam caught up with his work to the hour. Then
MacKay, true to his word, said he would set him on a man's job part of
the time. The job upon which MacKay put Adam was no less than keeping up
the fire under the huge boilers. As wood had to be used for fuel and as
it was consumed rapidly, the task of stoking was not easy. Besides, hot
as the furnace was, it seemed the sun was hotter. Adam sweat till he
could wring water out of his shirt.

That night he made certain MacKay was playing a joke on him. Arallanes
confided this intelligence, and even Margarita had been let into the
secret. MacKay had many labourers for the hard work, and he wanted to
cure the tenderfoot of his desire for a man's job, such as he had asked
for. It was all good-natured, and amused Adam. He imagined he knew what
he needed, and while he was trying to find it he could have just as much
fun as MacKay.

Much to MacKay's surprise, Adam presented himself next afternoon, in
boots, overalls, and undershirt, to go on with his job of firing the
engine.

"Wasn't yesterday enough?" queried the boss.

"I can stand it."

Then it pleased Adam to see a considerable evidence of respect, in the
rough mill operator's expression. For a week Adam kept up with his office
work and laboured each afternoon at the stoking job. No one suspected
that he suffered, though it was plain enough that he lost flesh and was
exceedingly fatigued. Then Margarita's reception of him, when he trudged
home in the waning sunset hour, was sweet despite the fact that he tried
to repudiate its sweetness. Once she put a little brown hand on his
blistered arm, and her touch held the tenderness of woman. All women must
be akin. They liked a man who could do things, and the greater his feats
of labour or fight the better they liked him.

The following week MacKay took a Herculean labourer off a strenuous job
with the ore and put Adam in his place. MacKay maintained his good
humour, but he had acquired a little grimness. This long-limbed
tenderfoot was a hard nut to crack. Adam's father had been a man of huge
stature and tremendous strength; and many a time had Adam heard it said
that he might grow to be like his father. Far indeed was he from that
now; but he took the brawny and seasoned labourer's place and kept it. If
the other job had been toil for Adam, this new one was pain. He learned
there what labour meant. Also he learned how there was only one thing
that common men understood and respected in a labourer, and it was the
grit and muscle to stand the grind. Adam was eighteen years old and far
from having reached his growth. This fact might have been manifest to his
fellow workers, but it was not that which counted. He realised that those
long hours of toil at which he stubbornly stuck had set his spirit in
some immeasurable and unquenchable relation to the strange life that he
divined was to be his.

Two weeks and more went by. MacKay, in proportion to the growth of his
admiration and friendship for Adam, gradually weakened on his joke. And
one day, when banteringly he dared Adam to tip a car of ore that two
Mexicans were labouring at, and Adam in a single heave sent the tons of
ore roaring into the shaft, then MacKay gave up and in true Western
fashion swore his defeat and shook hands with the boy.

So in those few days Adam made friends who changed the colour and
direction of his life. From Merryvale he learned the legend and history
of the frontier. MacKay opened his eyes to the great health for mind and
body in sheer toil. Arallanes represented a warmth of friendship that
came unsought, showing what might be hidden in any man. Margarita was
still an unknown quantity in Adam's development. Their acquaintance had
gone on mostly under the eyes of the senora or Arallanes. Sometimes at
sunset Adam had sat with her on the sand of the river bank. Her charm
grew. Then the unexpected happened. A break occurred in the machinery and
a small but invaluable part could not be repaired. It had to come from
San Francisco.

Adam seemed to be thrown back upon his own resources. He did not know
what to do with himself. Arallanes advised him not to go panning for
gold, and to be cautious if he went up to Picacho, for the Mexican, Adam
had so roughly handled was the ringleader in a bad gang that it would be
well to avoid. All things conspired, it seemed, to throw Adam into the
company of Margarita, who always waited around the corner of every hour
watching with her dusky eyes.



CHAPTER IV

So as the slow, solemn days drifted onward, like the wonderful river
which dominated the desert valley, it came to pass that the dreaming,
pondering Adam suddenly awakened to the danger in this dusky-eyed maiden.

The realisation came to Adam at the still sunset hour when he and
Margarita were watching the river slide like a gleam of gold out of the
west. They were walking among the scattered mesquites along the sandy
bank, a place lonesome and hidden from the village behind, yet open to
the wide space of river and valley beyond. The air seemed full of
marvelous tints of gold and rose and purple. The majestic scene, beautiful
and sad, needed life to make it perfect. Adam, more than usually drawn
by Margarita's sympathy, was trying to tell her something of the burden
on his mind, that he was alone in the world, with only a hard grey future
before him, with no one to care whether he lived or died.

Then had come his awakening. It did not speak well for Margarita's
conceptions of behavior, but it proved her a creature of heart and blood.
To be suddenly enveloped by a wind of flame, in the slender twining form
of this girl of Spanish nature, was for Adam at once a revelation and a
catastrophe. But if he was staggered, he was also responsive, as in a
former moment of poignancy he had vowed he would be. A strong and
shuddering power took hold of his heart and he felt the leap, the beat,
the burn of his blood. When he lifted Margarita and gathered her in a
close embrace it was more than a hot upflashing of boyish passion that
flushed his face and started tears from under his tight-shut eyelids.
It was a sore hunger for he knew not what, a gratefulness that he could
express only by violence, a yielding to something deeper and more
far-reaching than was true of the moment.

Adam loosened Margarita's hold upon his neck and held her back from him
so he could see her face. It was sweet, rosy. Her eyes were shining, black
and fathomless as night, soft with a light that had never shone upon Adam
from any other woman's.

"Girl, do you--love me?" he demanded, and if his voice broke with the
strange eagerness of a boy, his look had all the sternness of a man.

"Ah...!" whispered Margarita.

"You--you big-hearted girl!" he exclaimed, with a laugh that was glad,
yet had a tremor in it. "Margarita, I--I must love you, too--since I
feel so queer."

Then he bent to her lips, and from these first real kisses that had ever
been spent upon him by a woman he realised in one flash his danger. He
released Margarita in a consideration she did not comprehend; and in
her pouting reproach, her soft-eyed appeal, her little brown hands that
would not let go of him, there was further menace to his principles.

Adam, gay and teasing, yet kindly and tactfully, tried to find a way to
resist her.

"Senorita, some one will see us," he said.

"Who cares?"

"But, child, we--we must think."

"Senor, no woman ever thinks when love is in her heart and on her lips."

Her reply seemed to rebuke Adam, for he sensed in it what might be true
of life, rather than just of this one little girl, swayed by unknown
and uncontrollable forces. She appeared to him then subtly and strongly,
as if there was infinitely more than willful love in her. But it did not
seem to be the peril of her proffered love that restrained Adam so much
as the strange consciousness of the willingness of his spirit to meet
hers halfway.

Suddenly Margarita's mood changed. She became like a cat that had been
purring under a soft, agreeable hand and then had been stroked the wrong
way.

"Senor think he love me?" she flashed, growing white.

"Yes--I said so--Margarita. Of course I do," he hastened to assure her.

"Maybe you--a gringo liar!"

Adam might have resented this insulting hint but for his uncertainty of
himself, his consequent embarrassment, and his thrilling sense of the
nearness of her blazing eyes. What a little devil she looked! This did not
antagonize Adam, but it gave him proof of his impudence, of his dreaming
carelessness. Margarita might not be a girl to whom he should have made
love, but it was too late. Besides, he did not regret that. Only he was
upset; he wanted to think.

"If the grande senor trifle--Margarita will cut out his heart!"

This swift speech, inflexible and wonderful with a passion that revealed
to Adam the half-savage nature of a woman whose race was alien to his,
astounded and horrified him, and yet made his blood tingle wildly.

"Margarita, I do not trifle," replied Adam, earnestly. "God knows I'm
glad you--you care for me. How have I offended you? What is it you want?"

"Let senor swear he love me," she demanded, imperiously.

Adam answered to that with the wildness that truly seemed flashing more
and more from him; and the laughter and boldness on his lips hid the
gravity that had settled there. He was no clod. Under the softness
of him hid a flint that struck fire.

As Margarita had been alluring and provocative, then as furious as a
barbarian queen, so she now changed again to another personality in which
it pleased her to be proud, cold, aloof, an outraged woman to be wooed
back to tenderness. If, at the last moment of the walk home, Margarita
evinced signs of another sudden transformation, Adam appeared not to note
them. Leaving her in the dusk at the door where the senora sat, he strode
away to the bank of the river. When he felt himself free and safe once
more, he let out a great breath of relief.

"Whew! Now I've done it!...So, she'd cut my heart out? And I had to swear
I loved her! The little savage!...But she's amazing--and she's adorable,
with all her cat claws. Wouldn't Guerd rave over a girl like
Margarita?...And here I am, standing on my two feet, in possession of all
my faculties, Adam Larey, a boy who thought he had principles--yet now
I'm a ranting lover of a dark-skinned, black-eyed slip of a greaser girl!
It can't be true!"

With that outburst came sobering thought. Adam's resolve not to ponder
and brood about himself was as if it had never been. He knew he would
never make such a resolve again. For hours he strolled up and down the
sandy bank, deep in thought, yet aware of the night and the stars, the
encompassing mountains, and the silent, gleaming river winding away in
the gloom. As he had become used to being alone out in the solitude and
darkness, there had come to him a vague awakening sense of their affinity
with his nature. Success and people might fail and betray him, but the
silent, lonely starlit nights were going to be teachers, even as they had
been to the Wise Men of the Arabian waste.

Adam at length gave up in despair and went to bed, hoping in slumber to
forget a complexity of circumstance and emotion that seemed to him an
epitome of his callow helplessness. The desert began to loom to Adam as a
region inimical to comfort and culture. He had almost decided that the
physical nature of the desert was going to be good for him. But what of
its spirit, mood, passion as typified by Margarita Arallanes?

Adam could ask himself that far-reaching query, and yet, all the answer
he got was a rush of hot blood at memory of the sweet fire of her kisses.
He saw her to be a simple child of the desert, like an Indian, answering
to savage impulses, wholly unconscious of what had been a breach of
womanly reserve and restraint. Was she good or bad? How could she be bad
if she did not know any better? Thus Adam pondered and conjectured, and
cursed his ignorance, and lamented his failings, all the time honest to
acknowledge that he was fond of Margarita and drawn to her. About the
only conclusion he formed from his perplexity was the one that he owed it
to Margarita to live up to his principles.

At this juncture he recollected Merryvale's significant remarks about the
qualities needed by men who were to survive in the desert, and his nobler
sentiments suffered a rout. The suddenness, harshness, fierceness of the
desert grafted different and combating qualities upon a man or else it
snuffed him out, like a candle blown by a gusty wind.

Next morning, as every morning, the awakening was sweet, fresh, new,
hopeful. Another day! And the wonderful dry keenness of the air, the
colours that made the earth seem a land of enchantment, were enough in
themselves to make life worth living. In the morning he always felt like
a boy.

Margarita's repentance for her moods of yesterday took a material turn in
the preparation of an unusually good breakfast for Adam. He was always
hungry and good meals were rare. Adam liked her attentions, and he
encouraged them; though not before the senora or Arallanes, for the
former approved too obviously and the latter disapproved too
mysteriously.

When, some time later, a boat arrived, Adam was among the first to meet
it at the dock.

He encountered MacKay coming ashore in the company of a man and two
women, one of whom was young. The manager showed a beaming face for the
first time in many days. Repairs for the mill engine had come. MacKay at
once introduced Adam to the party; and it so turned out that presently
the manager, who was extremely busy, left his friends for Adam to
entertain. They were people whom Adam liked immediately, and as the girl
was pretty, of a blonde type seldom seen in the south-west, it seemed to
Adam that his task was more than agreeable, He showed them around the
little village and then explained how interesting it would be for them to
see the gold mill. How long a time it seemed since he had been in the
company of a girl like those he had known at home! She was merry,
intelligent, a little shy.

He was invited aboard the boat to have lunch with the mother and
daughter. Everything tended to make this a red-letter day for Adam. The
hours passed all too swiftly and time came for the boat to depart. When
the boat swung free from the shore Adam read in the girl's eyes the
thought keen in his own mind--that they would never meet again. The round
of circumstances might never again bring a girl like that into Adam's
life, if it were to be lived in these untrodden ways. He waved his hand
with all the eloquence which it would express. Then the obtruding foliage
on the bank hid the boat and the girl was gone. His last thought was a
selfish one--that his brother Guerd would not see her at Ehrenberg.

Some of MacKay's labourers were working with unloaded freight on the
dock. One of these was Regan, the little Irishman who had been keen to
mark Adam on several occasions. He winked at MacKay and pointed at Adam.

"Mac, shure thot boy's a divil with the wimmen!"

MacKay roared with laughter and looked significantly past Adam as if this
mirth was not wholly due to his presence alone. Someone else seemed
implicated. Suddenly Adam turned. Margarita stood there, with face and
mien of a tragedy queen, and it seemed to Adam that her burning black
eyes did not see anything in the world but him. Then, with one of her
swift actions, graceful and lithe, yet violent, she wheeled and fled.

"O, Lord!" murmured Adam, aghast at the sudden-dawning significance of
the case. He had absolutely forgotten Margarita's existence. Most
assuredly she had seen every move of his with her big eyes, and read his
mind, too. He could not see the humour of his situation at the moment,
but as he took a short cut through the shady mesquites toward his hut, he
presently espied Margarita in ambush. What fiendish glee this predicament
of his would have aroused in his brother Guerd! Adam, the lofty, the
supercilious, had come a cropper at last--such would have been Guerd's
scorn and rapture!

Margarita came rushing from the side, right upon him even as he turned.
So swiftly she came that he could not get a good look at her, but she
appeared a writhing, supple little thing, instinct with fury. Hissing
Spanish maledictions, she flung herself upward, and before he could ward
her off she had slapped and scratched his face and beat wildly at him
with flying brown fists. He thrust her away, but she sprang back. Then,
suddenly hot with anger, he grasped her and, jerking her off her feet, he
shook her with far from gentle force, and did not desist till he saw that
he was hurting her. Letting her down and holding her at arm's length, he
gazed hard at the white face framed by dishevelled black hair and lighted
by eyes so magnificently expressive of supreme passion that his anger was
shocked into wonder and admiration. Desert eyes! Right there a conception
dawned in his mind--he was seeing a spirit through eyes developed by the
desert.

"Margarita!" he exclaimed, "are you a cat--that you----"

"I hate you," she hissed, interrupting him. The expulsion of her breath,
the bursting swell of her breast, the quiver of her whole lissom body,
all were exceedingly potent of an intensity that utterly amazed Adam.
Such a little girl, such a frail strength, such a deficient brain to hold
all that passion! What would she do if she had real cause for wrath?

"Ah, Margarita, you don't mean that. I didn't do anything. Let me tell
you."

She repeated her passionate utterance, and Adam saw that he could no more
change her then than he could hope to move the mountain. Resentment
stirred in him.

"Well," he burst out, boyishly, "if you're so darned fickle as that I'm
glad you do hate me."

Then he released his hold on her arms and, turning away without another
glance in her direction, he strode from the glade. He took the gun he had
repaired and set off down the river trail. When he got into the bottom
lands of willow and cottonwood he glided noiselessly along, watching and
listening for game of some kind.

In the wide mouth of a wash not more than a mile from the village, Adam
halted to admire some exceedingly beautiful trees. The first was one of a
species he had often noted there, and it was a particularly fine
specimen, perhaps five times as high as his head and full and round in
proportion. The trunk was large at the ground, soon separating into
innumerable branches that in turn spread and drooped and separated into a
million twigs and stems and points. Trunk and branch and twig, every inch
of this wonderful tree was a bright, soft green colour, as smooth as if
polished, and it did not have a single leaf. As Adam gazed at this
strange, unknown tree, grasping the nature of it and its exquisite colour
and grace and life, he wondered anew at the marvel of the desert.

As he walked around to the side toward the river he heard a cry. Wheeling
quickly, he espied Margarita running toward him. Margarita's hair was
flying. Blood showed on her white face. She had torn her dress.

"Margarita!" cried Adam, as he reached her. "What's the matter?"

She was so out of breath she could scarcely speak.

"Felix--he hide back there--in trail," she panted. "Margarita watch--she
know--she go round."

The girl laboured under extreme agitation, which, however, did not seem
to be fright.

"Felix? You mean the Mexican who drew a knife on your father? The fellow
I threw around--up at Picacho?"

"Si--senor," replied Margarita.

"Well, what of it? Why does Felix hide up in the trail?"

"Felix swore revenge. He kill you."

"Oh--ho!...So that's it," ejaculated Adam, and he whistled his surprise.
A hot, tight sensation struck deeply inside him. "Then you came to find
me--warn me?"

She nodded vehemently and clung to him, evidently wearied and weakening.

"Margarita, that was good of you," said Adam, earnestly, and he led her
out of the sun into the shade of the tree. With his handkerchief he wiped
the blood from thorn scratches on her cheek. The dusky eyes shone with a
vastly different light from the lurid hate of a few hours back. "I thank
you, girl, and I'll not forget it...But why did you run out in the sun
and through the thorns to warn me?"

"Senor know now--he kill Felix before Felix kill him," replied Margarita,
in speech that might have been naive had its simplicity not been so
deadly.

Adam laughed again, a little grimly. This was not the first time there
had been forced upon him a hint of the inevitableness of life in the
desert. But it was not his duty to ambush the Mexican who would ambush
him. The little coldness thrilled out of Adam to the close, throbbing
presence of Margarita. The fragrance, the very breath of her, went to his
head like wine.

"But girl--only a little while ago--you slapped me--scratched me--hated
me," he said, in wonder and reproach.

"No--no--no! Margarita love senor!" she cried, and seemed to twine around
him and climb into his arms at once. The same fire, the same intensity as
of that unforgetable moment of hate and passion, dominated her now, only
it was love.

And this time it was Adam who sought her red lips and returned her
kisses. Again that shuddering wild gust in his blood! It was as strange
and imperious to him then as in a sober reflection it had been bold,
gripping, physical, a drawing of him not sanctioned by his will. In this
instance he was weaker in its grip, but still he conquered. Releasing
Margarita, he led her to a shady place in the sand under the green tree,
and found a seat where he could lean against a low branch. Margarita fell
against his shoulder, and there clung to him and wept. Her dusky hair
rippled over him, soft and silky to the touch of his fingers. The poor,
faded dress, of a fabric unknown to Adam, ragged and dusty and torn, and
the little shoes, worn and cracked, showing the soles of her stockingless
feet, spoke eloquently of poverty. Adam noted the slender grace of her
slight form, the arch of the bare instep, and the shapeliness of her
ankles, brown almost as an Indian's. And all at once there charged over
him an overwhelming sense of the pitifulness and the wonderfulness of
her--a ragged, half-dressed little Mexican girl, whose care of her hair
and face, and the few knots of ribbon, betrayed the worshipful vanity
that was the jewel of her soul, and whose physical perfection was in such
strange contrast to the cramped, undeveloped mind.

"My God!" whispered Adam, under his breath. Something big and undefined
was born in him then. He saw her, he pitied her, he loved her, he wanted
her; but these feelings were not so much what constituted the bigness and
vagueness that waved through his soul. He could not grasp it. But it had
to do with the life, the beauty, the passion, the soul of this Mexican
girl; and it was akin to a reverence he felt for the things in her that
she could not understand.

Margarita soon recovered, and assumed a demeanour so shy and modest and
wistful that Adam could not believe she was the same girl. Nevertheless,
he took good care not to awaken her other characteristics.

"Margarita, what is the name of this beautiful tree?" he asked.

"Palo verde. It means green tree."

It interested him then to instruct himself further in regard to the
desert growths that had been strange to him; and to this end he led
Margarita from one point to another, pleased to learn how familiar she
was with every growing thing.

Presently Margarita brought to Adam's gaze a tree that resembled smoke, so
blue-grey was it, so soft and hazy against the sky, so columnar and
mushrooming. What a strange, graceful tree and what deep-blue blossoms it
bore! Upon examination Adam was amazed to discover that every branch and
twig of this tree was a thorn. A hard, cruel, beautiful tree of thorns
that at a little distance resembled smoke!

"Palo Christi," murmured Margarita, making the sign of the cross. And she
told Adam that this was the Crucifixion tree, which was the species that
furnished the crown of thorns for the head of Christ.

Sunset ended several happy and profitable hours for Adam. He had not
forgotten about the Mexican, Felix, and had thought it just as well to
let time pass and to keep out of trouble as long as he could. He and
Margarita reached home without seeing any sign of Felix. Arallanes,
however, had espied the Mexican sneaking around, and he warned Adam in no
uncertain terms. Merryvale, too, had a word for Adam's ear; and it was
significant that he did not advise a waiting course. In spite of all
Adam's reflections he did not need a great deal of urging. After supper
he started off for Picacho with Arallanes and a teamster who was
freighting supplies up to the camp.

Picacho was in full blast when they arrived. The dim lights, the
discordant yells, the raw smell of spirits, the violence of the crude
gambling hall worked upon Adam's already excited mind; and by the time he
had imbibed a few drinks he was ready for anything. But they did not find
Felix.

Then Adam, if not half drunk, at least somewhat under the influence of
rum, started to walk back to his lodgings. The walk was long and, by
reason of the heavy, dragging sand, one of considerable labour. Adam was
in full possession of his faculties when he reached the village. But his
blood was hot from the exercise, and the excitement of the prospective
battle of the early evening had given way to an excitement of the senses,
in the youthful romance felt in the dark, the starlight, the wildness of
the place. So when in the pale gloom of the mesquites Margarita glided to
him like a lissom spectre, to enfold him and cling and whisper, Adam had
neither the will, nor the heart, nor the desire to resist her.



CHAPTER V

Adam's dull eyelids opened on a dim, grey desert dawn. The coming of the
dawn was in his mind, and it showed pale through his shut lids. He could
not hold back the hours. Something had happened in the night and he would
never be the same again. With a sharp pang, a sense of incomprehensible
loss, Adam felt die in him the old unreasoning, instinctive boy. And
there was more, too deep and too subtle for him to divine. It had to do
with a feminine strain in him, a sweetness and purity inherited from his
mother and developed by her teachings. It had separated him from his.
brother Guerd and kept him aloof from a baseness common to their
comrades. Nevertheless, the wildness of this raw, uncouth, primitive West
had been his undoing.

It was with bitterness that Adam again faced the growing light. All he
could do was to resign himself to fate. The joy of life, the
enchantments--all that had made him feel different from other boys and
hide his dreams--failed now in this cool dark morning of reality. He
could not understand the severity of the judgment he meted out to
himself. His spirit suffered an ineffaceable blunting. And the
tight-drawing knot in his breast, the gnawing of remorse, the strange,
dark oppression--these grew and reached a climax, until something gave
way within him and there was a sinking of the heart, a weary and
inscrutable feeling.

Then he remembered Margarita, and the very life and current of his blood
seemed to change. Like a hot wave the memory of Margarita surged over
Adam, her strange new sweetness, the cunning of her when she waylaid him
in the dead of the night, the clinging lissomness of her and the
whispered incoherence that needed no translation, the inevitableness of
the silent, imperious demand of her presence, unashamed and insistent.

Adam leaped out of his blankets, breaking up this mood and thought by
violent action. For Adam then the sunrise was glorious, the valley was
beautiful, the desert was wild and free, the earth was an immense region
to explore, and nature, however insatiable and inexorable, was prodigal
of compensations. He drank a sweet cup that held one drop of poison
bitterness. Life swelled in his breast. He wished he were an Indian. As
he walked along there flashed into mind words spoken long ago by his
mother: "My son, you take things too seriously, you feel too intensely
the ordinary moments of life." He understood her now, but he could not
distinguish ordinary things from great things. How could anything be
little?

Margarita's greeting was at once a delight and a surprise. Her smile, the
light of her dusky eyes, would have made any man happier. But there was a
subtle air about her this morning that gave Adam a slight shock, an
undefined impression that he represented less to Margarita than he had on
yesterday.

Then came the shrill whistle of the downriver boat. Idle men flocked
toward the dock. When Adam reached the open space on the bank before the
dock he found it crowded with an unusual number of men, all manifestly
more than ordinarily interested in something concerning the boat. By
slipping through the mesquites Adam got around to the edge of the crowd.

A tall, gaunt man, clad in black, strode off the gangplank. His height,
his form, his gait were familiar to Adam. He had seen that embroidered
flowery vest with its silver star conspicuously in sight, and the brown
beardless face with its square jaw and seamy lines.

"Collishaw!" ejaculated Adam, in dismay. He recognised in this man one
whom he had known at Ehrenberg, a gambling, gun-fighting sheriff to whom
Guerd had became attached. As his glance swept back of Collishaw his
pulse beat quicker. The next passenger to stride off the gangplank was a
very tall, superbly built young man. Adam would have known that form in a
crowd of a thousand men. His heart leaped with a great throb. Guerd, his
brother!

Guerd looked up. His handsome, heated face, bold and keen and reckless,
flashed in the sunlight. His piercing gaze swept over the crowd upon the
bank.

"Hello, Adam!" he yelled, with gay, hard laugh. Then he prodded Collishaw
and pointed up at Adam. "There he is! We've found him."

Adam plunged away into the thickets of mesquites, and, indifferent to the
clawing thorns, he did not halt until he was far down the bank.

It died hard, that regurgitation of brother love. It represented most of
his life, and all of his home associations, and the memories of youth.
The strength of it proved his loyalty to himself. How warm and fine that
suddenly revived emotion! How deep seated, beyond his control! He could
have sobbed out over the pity of it, the loss of it, the fallacy of it.
Plucked out by the roots, it yet lived hidden in the depths of him. Adam
in his flight to be alone had yielded to the amaze and shame and fury
stirred in him by a realisation of joy in the mere sight of this brother
who hated him. For years his love had fought against the gradual truth of
Guerd's hate. He had not been able to prove it, but he felt it. Adam had
no fear of Guerd, nor any reason why he could not face him, except this
tenderness of which he was ashamed. When he had fought down the mawkish
sentiment he would show Guerd and Collishaw what he was made of. Money!
That was Guerd's motive, with an added possibility of further desire to
dominate and hound.

"I'll fool him," said Adam, resolutely, as he got up to return.

Adam did not know exactly what he would do, but he was certain that he
had reached the end of his tether. He went back to the village by a
roundabout way. Turning a sharp curve in the canyon he came suddenly upon
a number of workmen, mostly Mexicans. They were standing under a wooden
trestle that had been built across the canyon at this narrow point. All
of them appeared to be gazing upward, and naturally Adam directed his
gaze likewise.

Thus without warning he saw the distorted and ghastly face of a man
hanging by the neck on a rope tied to the trestle. The spectacle gave
Adam a terrible shock.

"That's Collishaw's work," muttered Adam, darkly, and he remembered
stories told of the sheriff's grim hand in more than one act of border
justice. What a hard country!

In front of the village store Adam encountered Merryvale, and he asked
him for particulars about the execution.

"Wal, I don't know much," replied the old watchman, scratching his head.
"There's been some placer miners shot an' robbed up the river. This
Collishaw is a regular sure-enough sheriff, takin' the law to himself.
Reckon there ain't any law. Wal, he an' his deputies say they tracked
thet murderin' gang to Picacho, an' swore they identified one of them.
Arallanes stuck up for thet greaser. There was a hot argument, an', by
Gosh! I jest swore Collishaw was goin' to draw on Arallanes. But
Arallanes backed down, as any man not crazy would have done. The greaser
swore by all his Virgins thet he wasn't the man, an' was swearin' he
could prove it when the rope choked him off....I don't know, Adam. I
don't know. I was fer waitin' a little to give the feller a chance. But
Collishaw came down here to hang someone an' you bet he was goin' to do
it."

"I know him, Merryvale, and you're betting right," replied Adam,
forcefully.

"Adam, one of his men is a fine-lookin' young chap thet sure must be your
brother. Now, ain't he?"

"Yes, you're right about that, too."

"Wal, wal! You don't seem powerful glad....Son, jest be careful what you
say to Collishaw. He's hard an' I reckon he's square as he sees justice,
but he doesn't ring right to an old timer like me. He courts the crowd.
An' he's been askin' fer you. There he comes now."

The sheriff appeared, approaching with several companions, and halted
before the store. His was a striking figure, picturesque, commanding, but
his face was repellent. His massive head was set on a bull neck of
swarthy and weathered skin like wrinkled leather; his broad face, of
similar hue, appeared a mass of crisscrossed lines, deep at the eyes, and
long on each side of the cruel, thin-lipped, tight-shut mouth; his chin
stuck out like a square rock; and his eyes, dark and glittering, roved
incessantly in all directions, had been trained to see men before they
saw him.

Adam knew that Collishaw had seen him first, and, acting upon the
resolution that he had made down in the thicket, he strode over to the
sheriff.

"Collishaw, I've been told you wanted me," said Adam. "Hello, Larey! Yes,
I was inquirin' aboot you," replied Collishaw, with the accent of a
Texan.

"What do you want of me?" asked Adam.

Collishaw drew Adam aside out of earshot of the other men.

"It's a matter of thet little gamblin' debt you owe Guerd," he replied,
in a low voice.

"Collishaw, are you threatening me with some such job as you put up on
that poor greaser?" inquired Adam, sarcastically, as he waved his hand up
the canyon.

Probably nothing could have surprised this hardened sheriff, but he
straightened up with a jerk and shed his confidential and admonishing
air.

"No, I can't arrest you on a gamblin' debt," he replied, bluntly, "but
I'm shore goin' to make you pay."

"You are, like hell!" retorted Adam. "What had you to do with it? If
Guerd owed you money in that game, I'm not responsible. And I didn't pay
because I caught Guerd cheating. I'm not much of a gambler, Collishaw,
but I'll bet you a stack of gold twenties against your fancy vest that
Guerd never collects a dollar of his crooked deal."

With that Adam turned on his heel and strode off toward the river. His
hard-earned independence added something to the wrong done him by these
men. He saw himself in different light. The rankling of the injustice he
had suffered at Ehrenberg had softened only in regard to the girl in the
case. Remembering her again, it seemed her part in his alienation from
Guerd did not loom so darkly and closely. Margarita had come between that
affair and the present hour This other girl had really been nothing to
him, but Margarita had become everything. A gratefulness, a big, generous
warmth, stirred in Adam's heart for the dark-eyed Mexican girl. What did
it matter who she was? In this desert he must learn to adjust differences
of class and race and habit in relation to the wildness of time and
place.

In the open sandy space leading to the houses near the river Adam met
Arallanes. The usually genial foreman appeared pale, sombre, sick. To
Adam's surprise, Arallanes would not talk about the hanging. Adam had
another significant estimate of the character of Collishaw. Arallanes,
however, was not so close lipped concerning Guerd Larey.

"Quien sabe, senor?" he concluded. "Maybe it's best for you. Margarita is
a she-cat. You are my friend. I should tell you...But, well, senor, if
you would keep Margarita, look out for your brother."

Adam gaped his astonishment and had not a word for Arallanes as he turned
away. It took him some time to realise the content of Arallanes' warning
and advice. But what fixed itself in Adam's mind was the fact that Guerd
had run across Margarita and had been attracted by her. How perfectly
natural! How absolutely inevitable! Adam could not remember any girl he
had ever admired or liked in all his life that Guerd had not taken away
from him. Among the boys at home it used to be a huge joke, in which Adam
had good-naturedly shared. All for Guerd! Adam could recall the time when
he had been happy to give up anything or anyone to his brother. But out
here in the desert, where he was beginning to assimilate the meaning of a
man's fight for his life and his possessions, he felt vastly different.
Moreover, he had gone too far with Margarita, regrettable as the fact
was. She belonged to him, and his principles were such that he believed
he owed her a like return of affection, and besides that, loyalty and
guardianship. Margarita was only seventeen years old. No doubt Guerd
would fascinate her if she was not kept out of his way.

"But--suppose she likes Guerd--and wants him--as she wanted me?" muttered
Adam, answering a divining flash of the inevitable order of things to be.
Still, he repudiated that. His intellect told him what to expect, but his
feeling was too strong to harbour doubt of Margarita. Only last night she
had changed the world for him--opened his eyes to life not as it was
dreamed, but lived! Adam found the wife of Arallanes home alone.

"Senora, where is Margarita?"

"Margarita is there," she replied, with dark, eloquent glance upon Adam
and a slow gesture toward the river bank.

Adam soon espied Guerd and Margarita on the river bank some few rods
below the landing place. Here was a pretty sandy nook, shaded by a large
mesquite, and somewhat out of sight of passers-by going to and fro from
village to dock. Two enormous wheels connected by an iron bar, a piece of
discarded mill machinery, stood in the shade of the tree. Margarita sat
on the cross-bar and Guerd stood beside her. They were close together,
facing a broad sweep of the river and the wonderland of coloured peaks
beyond. They did not hear Adam's approach on the soft sand.

"Senorita, one look from your midnight eyes and I fell in love with you,"
Guerd was declaring, with gay passion, and his hand upon her was as bold
as his speech. "You little Spanish princess!...Beautiful as the moon and
stars!...Hidden in this mining camp, a desert flower born to blush unseen!
I shall--"

It was here that Adam walked around the high wheels to confront them. For
him the moment was exceedingly poignant. But despite the tumult within
him he preserved a cool and quiet exterior. Margarita's radiance vanished
in surprise.

"Well, if it ain't Adam!" ejaculated her companion. "You
son-of-a-gun!...Why, you've changed!"

"Guerd," began Adam, and then his voice halted. To meet his brother this
way was a tremendous ordeal. And Guerd's presence seemed to charge the
very air. Worship of this magnificent brother had been the strongest
thing in Adam's life, next to love of mother. To see him again! Guerd
Larey's face was beautiful, yet virile and strong. The beauty was mere
perfection of feature. The big curved mouth, the square chin, the
straight nose, the large hazel-green eyes full of laughter and love of
life, the broad forehead and clustering fair hair--all these were
features that made him singularly handsome. His skin was clear brown-tan
with a tinge of red. Adam saw no change in Guerd, except perhaps an
intensifying of an expression of wildness which made him all the more
fascinating to look at. For Adam the mocking thing about Guerd's godlike
beauty was the fact that it deceived. At heart, at soul, Guerd was as
false as hell!

"Adam, are you goin' to shake hands?" queried Guerd, lazily extending his
arm. "You sure strike me queer, boy!"

"No," replied Adam, and his quick-revolving thoughts grasped at Guerd's
slipshod speech. Guerd had absorbed even the provincial words and idioms
of the uncouth West.

"All right. Suit yourself," said Guerd. "I reckon you see I'm rather
pleasantly engaged."

"Yes, I see," returned Adam, bitterly, with a fleeting glance at
Margarita. She had recovered from her surprise and now showed cunning
feminine curiosity. "Guerd, I met Collishaw, and he had the gall to brace
me for that gambling debt. And I've hunted you up to tell you that you
cheated me. I'll not pay it."

"Oh yes, you will," replied Guerd, smilingly.

"I will not," said Adam, forcefully.

"Boy, you'll pay it or I'll take it out of your hide," declared Guerd,
slowly frowning, as if a curious hint of some change in Adam had dawned
upon him.

"You can't take it that way--or any other way," retorted Adam.

"But, say--I didn't cheat," remonstrated Guerd, evidently making a last
stand of argument to gain his end.

"You lie!" flashed Adam. "You know it. I know it...Guerd, let's waste no
words. I told you at Ehrenberg--after you played that shabby trick on
me--over the girl there--I told you I was through with you for good."

Guerd seemed to realise with wonder and chagrin that he had now to deal
with a man. How the change in his expression thrilled Adam! What relief
came to him in the consciousness that he was now stronger than Guerd! He
had never been certain of that.

"Through and be damned!" exclaimed Guerd, and he took his arm from around
Margarita and rose from his leaning posture to his lofty height. "I'm
sick of your milksop ideas. All I want of you is that money. If you don't
pony up with it I'll tear your clothes off gettin' it. Savvy that?

"Ha-ha!" laughed Adam, tauntingly. "I say to you what I said to
Collishaw--you will--like hell!"

Guerd Larey's lips framed curses that were inaudible. He was astounded.
The red flamed his neck and face.

"I'll meet you after I get through talking to this girl," he said.

"Any time you want," rejoined Adam, bitingly, "but I'll have my say now,
once and for all...The worm has turned, Guerd Larey. Your goose has
stopped laying golden eggs. I will take no more burdens of yours on my
shoulders. You've bullied me all my life. You've hated me. I know now.
Oh, I remember so well! You robbed me of toys, clothes, playmates. Then
girl friends! Then money!...Then--a worthless woman!...You're a fraud--a
cheat--a liar...You've fallen in with your kind out here and you're going
straight to hell."

The whiteness of Guerd's face attested to his roused passion. But he had
more restraint than Adam. He was older, and the difference of age between
them showed markedly.

"So you followed me out here to say all that?" he queried.

"No, not altogether," replied Adam. "I came after Margarita."

"Came after Margarita?" echoed Guerd, blankly. "Is that her name? Say,
Adam, is this one of your goody-goody tricks? Rescuing a damsel in
distress sort of thing!...You and I have fallen out more than once over
that. I kick--I----"

"Guerd, we've fallen out for ever," interrupted Adam, and then he turned
to the girl. "Margarita, I want you--"

"But it's none of your damned business," burst out Guerd, hotly,
interrupting in turn. "What do you care about a Mexican girl? I won't
stand your interference. You clear out and let me alone."

"But Guerd--it is my business," returned Adam, haltingly. Some inward
force dragged at his tongue. "She's--my girl."

"What!" ejaculated Guerd, incredulously. Then he bent down to peer into
Margarita's face, and from that he swept a flashing, keen glance at Adam.
His eyes were wonderful then, intensely bright, quickened and sharpened
with swift turns of thought. "Boy, you don't mean you're on friendly terms
with this greaser girl?"

"Yes," replied Adam.

"You've made love to her!" cried Guerd, and the radiance of his face then
was beyond Adam's understanding.

"Yes."

Guerd violently controlled what must have been a spasm of fiendish glee.
His amaze, deep as it was, seemed not to be his predominant feeling, but
that very amaze was something to force exquisitely upon Adam how far he
had fallen. The moment was dark, hateful, far-reaching in effect,
impossible to realise. Guerd's glance flashed back and forth from Adam to
Margarita. But he had not yet grasped what was the tragic thing for
Adam--the truth of how fatefully far this love affair had fallen. Adam's
heart sank like lead in his breast. What humiliation he must suffer if he
betrayed himself! Hard he fought for composure and dignity to hide his
secret.

"Adam, in matters of the heart, where two gentlemen admire the lady in
question, the choice is always left to her," began Guerd, with something
of mockery in his rich voice. A devil gleamed from him then, and the look
of him, the stature, the gallant action of him as he bowed before
Margarita, fascinated Adam even in his miserable struggle to appear a
man.

"But, Guerd, you--you've known Margarita only a few moments," he
expostulated, and the sound of his voice made him weak. "How can you put
such a choice to--to her? It's--it's an insult."

"Adam, that is for Margarita to decide," responded Guerd. "Women change.
It is something you have not learned." Then as he turned to Margarita he
seemed to blaze with magnetism. The grace of him and the beauty of him in
that moment made of him a perfect physical embodiment of the emotions of
which he was master. He knew his power over women. "Margarita, Adam and I
are brothers. We are always falling in love with the same girl. You must
choose between us. Adam would tie you down--keep you from the eyes of
other men. I would leave you free as a bird."

And he bent over to whisper in her ear, with his strong brown hand on her
arm, at once gallant yet masterful.

The scene was a nightmare to Adam. How could this be something that was
happening? But he had sight! Margarita seemed a transformed creature,
shy, coy, alluring; with the half-veiled dusky eyes, heavy-lidded,
lighted with the same fire that had shone in them for Adam.

"Margarita, will you come?" cried Adam, goaded to end this situation.

"No," she replied, softly.

"I beg of you--come!" implored Adam.

The girl shook her black head. A haunting mockery hung around her, in her
slight smile, in the light of her face. She radiated a strange glow like
the warm shade of an opal. Older she seemed to Adam and surer of herself
and somewhat deeper in that mystic obsession of passion he had often
sensed in her. No spiritual conception of what Adam regarded as his
obligation to her could ever dawn in that little brain. She loved her
pretty face and beautiful body. She gloried in her power over men. And
the new man she felt to be still unwon--who was stronger of instinct and
harder to hold, under whose brutal hand she would cringe and thrill and
pant and fight--him she would choose. So Adam read Margarita in that
moment. If he had felt love for her, which he doubted, it was dead. A
great pity flooded over him. It seemed that of the three there, he was
the only one who was true and who understood.

"Margarita, have you forgotten last night?" asked Adam huskily.

"Ah, senor--so long ago and far away!" she said.

Adam whirled abruptly and, plunging into the thicket of mesquites, he
tore a way through, unmindful of the thorns. When he reached his quarters
there was blood on his hands and face, but the sting of the thorns was as
nothing to the hurt in his heart. He lay down.

"Again!" he whispered. "Guerd has come--and it's the same old story. Only
worse!...But, it's better so! I--I didn't know--her!...Arallanes knew--he
told me...And I--I dreamed so many--many fool things. Yes--it's
better--better. I didn't love her right. It--it was something she roused.
I never loved her--but if I did love her--it's gone. It's not loss
that--that stabs me now. It's Guerd--Guerd! Again--and I ran off from
him...'So long ago and far away,' she said! Are all women like that? I
can't believe it. I never will. I remember my mother."



CHAPTER VI

That night in the dead late hours Adam suddenly awoke. The night seemed
the same as all the desert nights--dark and cool under the mesquites--the
same dead, unbroken silence. Adam's keen intentness could not detect a
slightest sound of wind or brush or beast. Something had pierced his
slumbers, and as he pondered deeply there seemed to come out of the
vagueness beyond that impenetrable wall of sleep a voice, a cry, a
whisper. Had Margarita, sleeping or waking, called to him? Such queer
visitations of mind, often repeated, had convinced Adam that he possessed
a mystic power or sense.

When Adam awoke late, in the light of the sunny morning, unrealities of
the night dispersed like the grey shadows and vanished. He arose eager,
vigorous, breathing hard, instinctively seeking for action. The day was
Sunday. Another idle wait, fruitful of brooding moods! But he vowed he
would not go to the willow brakes, there to hide from Guerd and
Collishaw. Let them have their say--do their worst! He would go up to
Picacho and gamble and drink with the rest of the drifters. Merryvale's
words of desert-learned wisdom rang through Adam's head. As for
Margarita, all Adam wanted was one more look at her face, into her dusky
eyes, and that would for ever end his relation to her.

At breakfast Arallanes presented a thoughtful and forbidding appearance,
although this demeanour was somewhat softened by the few times he broke
silence. The senora's impassive serenity lacked its usual kindliness,
and her lowered eyes kept their secrets. Margarita had not yet arisen.
Adam could not be sure there was really a shadow hovering over the home,
or in his own mind, colouring, darkening his every prospect.

After breakfast he went out to stroll along the river bank and then
around the village. He ascertained from Merryvale that Collishaw, Guerd,
and their associates had found lodgings at different houses for the
night, and after breakfast had left for the mining camp. As usual,
Merryvale spoke pointedly: "You're brother said they were goin' to clear
out the camp. An' I reckon he didn't mean greasers, but whiskey an' gold.
Son, you stay away from Picacho to-day." For once, however, the kind old
man's advice fell upon deaf ears. Adam had to fight his impatience to be
off up the canyon; and only a driving need to see Margarita held him
there. He walked to and fro, from village to river and back again. By and
by he espied Arallanes and his wife, with their friends, dressed in their
best, parading toward the little adobe church. Margarita was not with
them.

Adam waited a little while, hoping to see her appear. He did not analyse
his strong hope that she would go to church this Sunday as usual. But as
no sign of her was forthcoming he strode down to the little brown house
and entered at the open door.

"Margarita!" he called. No answer broke the quiet. His second call,
however, brought her from her room, a dragging figure with a pale face
that Adam had never before seen pale.

"Senor Ad--dam," she faltered.

The look of her, and that voice, stung Adam out of the gentleness
habitual with him. Leaping at her, he dragged her into the light of the
door. She cried out in a fear that shocked him. When he let go of her,
abrupt and sharp in his emotions, she threw up her arms as if to ward off
attack.

"Do you think I would hurt you?" he cried, harshly. "No Margarita! I only
wanted to see you--just once more."

She dropped her arms and raised her face. Then Adam, keen in that
poignant moment, saw in her the passing of an actual fear of death. It
struck him mute. It betrayed her. What had been the dalliance of
yesterday, playful and passionate in its wild youth, through the night
had become dishonour. Yesterday she had been a cat that loved to be
stroked; to-day she was a maimed creature, a broken woman.

"Lift your face--higher," said Adam, hoarsely, as he put out a shaking
hand to touch her. But he could not touch her. She did lift it and
looked at him, denying nothing, still unashamed. But now there was soul
in that face. Adam felt it limned on his memory for ever--the stark truth
of her frailty, the courage of a primitive nature fearing only death,
yearning for brutal blows as proof of the survival of jealous love, a
dawning consciousness of his honesty and truth. Terrible was it for Adam
to realise that if she had been given that choice again she would have
decided differently. But it was too late.

"Adios, senorita," he said, bowing, and backed out of the door. He
stopped, and the small pale face with its tragic eyes, straining,
unutterably eloquent of wrong to him and to herself, passed slowly out of
his sight.

Swiftly Adam strode up the canyon, his fierce energy in keeping with his
thoughts. He overtook the Irishman, Regan, who accosted him.

"Hullo, Wansfell, ould fri'nd!" he called. "Don't yez walk so dom'
fast."

"Wansfell! Why do you call me that?" asked Adam. How curiously the name
struck his ear!

"Ain't thot your noime?"

"No, it's not."

"Wal, all right. Will yez hey a dhrink?" Regan produced a brown bottle
and handed it to Adam.

They walked on up the canyon. Regan with his short, stunted legs being
hard put to it to keep up with Adam's long strides. The Irishman would
attach himself to Adam, that was evident; and he was a most talkative and
friendly fellow. Whenever he got out of breath he halted to draw out the
bottle. The liquor in an ordinary hour would have befuddled Adam's wits,
but now it only heated his blood.

"Wansfell, if yez ain't the dorndest foinest young feller in these
diggin's!" ejaculated Regan.

"Thank you, friend. But don't call me that queer name. Mine's Adam."

"A-dom?" echoed Regan. "Phwat a hell of a noime! Adom an' Eve, huh? I
seen yez with that black-eyed wench. She's purty."

They finished the contents of the bottle and proceeded on their way.
Regan waxed warmer in his regard for Adam and launched forth a strong
argument in favour of their going on a prospecting trip.

"Yez would make a foine prospector an' pard," he said. "Out on the desert
yez are free an' happy, b'gorra! No place loike the desert, pard, whin
yez come to know it! Thar's air to breathe an' long days wid the sun on
yer back an' noights whin a mon knows shlape. Mebbe we'll hey the luck to
foind Pegleg Smith's lost gold mine."

"Who was Pegleg Smith and what gold mine did he lose?" queried Adam.

Then as they plodded on up the canyon, trying to keep to the shady strips
and out of the hot sun, Adam heard for a second time the story of the
famous lost gold mine. Regan told it differently, perhaps exaggerating
after the manner of prospectors. But the story was impelling to any man
with a drop of adventurous blood in his veins. The lure of gold had not
yet obsessed Adam, but he had begun to feel the lure of the desert.

Adam concluded that under happier circumstances this Regan would be a man
well worth cultivating in spite of his love for the bottle. They reached
the camp about noon, had a lunch at the stand of a Chinaman, and then,
entering the saloon, they mingled with the crowd, where Adam soon became.
separated from Regan. Liquor flowed like water, and gold thudded in sacks
and clinked musically in coins upon the tables. Adam had one drink, and
that incited him to take another. Again the throb and burn of his blood
warmed out the coldness and bitterness of his mood. Deliberately he drank
and deliberately he stifled the voice of conscience until he was in a
reckless and dangerous frame of mind. There seemed to be a fire consuming
him now, to which liquor was only fuel.

He swaggered through the crowded hall, and for once the drunken miners,
the painted hags, the cold-faced gamblers, did not disgust him. The smell
of rum and smoke, the feel of the thick sand under his feet, the sight of
the motley crowd of shirt-sleeved and booted men, the discordant din of
music, glasses, gold, and voices--all these sensations struck him full
and intimately with their proof that he was a part of this wild assembly
of free adventurers. He remembered again Merryvale's idea of a man
equipped to cope with this lawless gang and hold his own. Suddenly when
he espied his brother Guerd he shook with the driving passion that had
led him there.

Guerd sat at table, gambling with Collishaw and MacKay and other men of
Picacho well known to Adam. Guerd looked the worse for liquor and bad
luck. When he glanced up to see Adam, a light gleamed across his hot
face. He dropped his cards, and as Adam stepped near he rose from the
table and in two strides confronted him, arrogant, menacing, with the
manner of a man dangerous to cross.

"I want money," demanded Guerd.

Adam laughed in his face.

"Go to work. You're not slick enough with the cards to hide your tricks,"
replied Adam, in deliberate scorn. Temper, and not forethought, actuated
Guerd then. He slapped Adam, with the moderate force of an older brother
punishing an impertinence. Swift and hard, Adam returned that blow,
staggering Guerd, who fell against the table, but was upheld by
Collishaw. He uttered a loud and piercing cry.

Sharply the din ceased. The crowd slid back over the sand, leaving Adam
in the centre of a wide space, confronting Guerd, who still leaned
against Collishaw. Guerd panted for breath. His hot face turned white
except for the red place where Adam's fist had struck. MacKay righted the
table, then hurriedly drew back. Guerd's fury of astonishment passed to
stronger controlled passion. He rose from Collishaw's hold and seemed to
tower magnificently. He had the terrible look of a man who had waited
years for a moment of revenge, at last to recognise it.

"You hit me! I'll beat you for that--I'll smash your face," he said,
stridently.

"Come on," cried Adam.

At this instant the Irishman, Regan, staggered out of the crowd into the
open circle. He was drunk.

"Sic 'em, Wansfell, sic 'em," he bawled. "I'm wid yez. We'll lick
thot--loidy face--an' ivery dom'----"

Some miner reached out a long arm and dragged Regan back.

Guerd Larey leaned over to pound with his fist on the table. A leaping
glow radiated from his face, as if a mask of hate had inspired some word
or speech that Adam must find insupportable. His look let loose a
bursting gush of blood through Adam's throbbing veins. This was no
situation built on a quarrel or a jealous rivalry. It was backed by
years, and by some secret not easily to be divined, though its source was
the very soul of Cain.

"So that's your game," declared Guerd, with ringing passion. "You want to
fight and you make this debt of yours a pretence. But I'm on to you. It's
because of the girl I took from you."

"Shut up! Have you no sense of decency? Can't you be half a man?" burst
out Adam, beginning to shake.

"Ha! Ha! Ha! Listen to Goody-Goody!...Mother's nice boy--"

"By Heaven, Guerd Larey, if you speak of my--my mother--here--I'll tear
out your tongue!"

They were close together now, with only the table between them--Cain and
Abel--the old bitter story plain in the hate of one flashing face and the
agony of the other. Guerd Larey had divined the means to torture and to
crucify this brother whose heart and soul were raw.

"Talk about the fall of Saint Anthony!" cried Guerd, with a voice magical
in its steely joy. "Never was there a fall like Adam Larey's--the
Sunday-school boy--too sweet--too innocent--too pure to touch the hand of
a girl!...Ha-ha! Oh, we can fight, Adam. I'll fight you. But let me
talk--let me tell my friends what a damned hypocrite you are...Gentlemen,
behold the immaculate Saint Adam whose Eve was a little greaser girl!"

There was no shout of mirth. The hall held a low-breathing silence. It
was a new scene, a diversion for the gamblers and miners and their
painted consorts, a clash of a different kind and spirit. Guerd paused to
catch his breath and evidently to gather supreme passion for the delivery
of what seemed more to him than life itself. His face was marble white,
quivering and straining, and his eyes blazed with a piercing flame.

Adam saw the living, visible proof of a hate he had long divined. The
magnificence of Guerd's passion, the terrible reality of his hate, the
imminence of a mortal blow, locked Adam's lips and jaws as in a vice,
while a gathering fury, as terrible as Guerd's hate, flooded and damned
at the gates of his energy, ready to break out in destroying violence.

"She told me!" Guerd flung the words like bullets. "You needn't bluff it
out with your damned lying white face. She told me...You--you Adam Larey,
with your pure thoughts and lofty ideals...the rot of them! You--damn
your milksop soul!--you were the slave of a dirty little greaser girl who
fooled you, laughed in your face, left you for me--for me at the snap of
my fingers...And, by God! my cup would be full--if your mother could only
know----"

It was Collishaw's swift hand that knocked up Adam's flinging arm and the
gun which spouted red and boomed heavily. Collishaw grappled with
him--was flung off--and then Guerd lunged in close to save himself. A
writhing, wrestling struggle--quick, terrible; then the gun boomed with
muffled report--and Guerd Larey uttering a cry of agony, fell away from
Adam, backward over the table. His gaze, conscious, appalling, was fixed
on Adam. A dark crimson spot stained his white shirt. Then he lay there
with fading eyes--the beauty and radiance and hate of his face slowly
shading.

Collishaw leaned over him. Then with hard, grim gesture he shouted,
hoarsely: "Dead, by God!...You'll hang for this!"

A creeping horror was slowly paralysing Adam. But at that harsh speech he
leaped wildly, flinging his gun with terrific force into the sheriff's
face. Like an upright stone dislodged Collishaw fell. Then Adam, bounding
forward, flung aside the men obstructing his passage and fled out of the
door.

Terror lent wings to his feet. In a few moments he was beyond the
outskirts of the camp. Even here, fierce in his energy, he bounded
upward, from rock to rock, until he reached the steep jumble of talus
where swift progress was impossible. Then with hands and feet working in
unison, as if he had been an ape, he climbed steadily.

From the top of the first rocky slope he gazed back fearfully. Yes, men
were pursuing him, strung out along the road of the mining camp; and
among the last was a tall, black-coated, bareheaded man that Adam took to
be Collishaw. This pursuer was staggering along, flinging his arms.

Adam headed straight up the ascent. Picacho loomed to the right, a
colossal buttress of red rock, wild and ragged and rugged. But the ascent
that had looked so short and easy--how long and steep! Every shadow was a
lie, every space of slope in the sunlight hid the truth of its width.
Sweat poured from his hot body. He burned. His breath came in laboured
bursts. A painful stab in his side spread and swelled to the whole region
of his breast. He could hear the mighty throb of his heart, and he could
hear it in another way--a deep muffled throb through his ears.

At last he reached the height of the slope where it ended under a wall of
rock, the backbone of that ridge, bare and jagged, with no loose shale on
its almost perpendicular side. Here it took hard labour of hand and foot
to climb and zigzag and pull himself up. Here he fell exhausted.

But the convulsion was short lived. His will power was supreme and his
endurance had not been permanently disabled. He crawled before he could
walk, and when he recovered enough to stagger erect he plodded on,
invincible in his spirit to escape.

From this height, which was a foothill to the great peak, he got his
bearings and started down.

"They can't--trail me--here," he whispered, hoarsely, as he looked back
with the eyes of a fugitive. "And--down there--I'll keep off the road."

After that brief moment of reasoning he became once more victim to fear
and desperate passion to hurry. He had escaped, his pursuers could not
see him now, he could hide, the descent was tortuous; yet these apparent
facts, favourable as they were, could not save him. Adam pushed on,
gaining strength as he recovered breath. As his direction led him
downhill, he went swiftly, sometimes at a rapid walk, again sliding down
here and rushing there, and at other places he stepped from rock to rock,
like a balancing rope walker.

The descent here appeared to be a long, even slant of broken rocks, close
together like cobblestones in a street, and of a dark-bronze hue. They
shone as if they had been varnished. And a closer glance showed Adam the
many reddish tints of bisnagi cactus growing in the cracks between the
stones.

His misgivings were soon verified. He had to descend here, for the
afternoon was far gone, and whatever the labour and pain, he must reach
the road before dark. The rocks were sharp, uneven, and as slippery as if
they had been wet. At the very outset Adam slipped, and, falling with
both hands forward, he thrust them into a cactus. The pain stung, and
when he had to pull hard to free himself from the thorns, it was as if
his hands had been nailed. He could not repress moans as he tried to pull
out the thorns with his teeth. They stuck tight. The blood ran in little
streams. But he limped on, down the black slope.

The white road below grew closer and closer. It was a goal. This slope of
treacherous rocks and torturing cacti was a physical ordeal that
precluded memory, of the past or consideration of the present. When Adam
at last reached the road, there to fall exhausted and wet and burning
upon a flat rock, it seemed that he had been delivered from an inferno.

Presently he sat up to look around him. A wonderful light showed upon the
world--the afterglow of sunset. Picacho bore a crown of gold. All the
lower tips of ranges were purpling in shadow. To the southward a wide
grey barren road led to an endless bleak plateau, flat and dark, with dim
spurs of mountains in the distance. Desolate, lifeless, silent--the
gateway to the desert! Adam felt steal over him a sense of awe. The
vastness of seen and suggested desert seemed flung at him, as if nature
meant to reveal to him the mystery and might of space. The marvellous
light magnified the cacti and the rocks and the winding ranges and the
bold peaks, and the distances, until all were unreal. Adam felt that he
had overcome a great hardship, accomplished a remarkable feat, had
climbed and descended a range as sharp toothed as jagged lava. But to
what end! Something in the bewildering light of the west, in the purple
shadows growing cold in the east, in the tremendous oppression of
illimitable space and silence and solitude and desolation--something
inexplicable repudiated and mocked his physical sense of great
achievement.

All at once, in a flash, he remembered his passion, his crime, his
terror, his flight. Not until that instant had intelligence operated in
harmony with his feelings. He lifted his face in the cool, darkening
twilight. The frowning mountains held aloof, and all about him seemed
detached, rendering his loneliness absolute and immutable.

"Oh! Oh!" he moaned. "What will become of me?...No family--no
friends--no hope!...Oh, Guerd, my brother! His blood on my hands!...He
ruined my life! He's killed my soul!...Oh, damn him, damn him! he's made
me a murderer!"

Adam fell face down on the rock with breaking heart. His exceeding bitter
cries seemed faint and lost in the midst of the vastness of desert and
sky. The deepening of twilight to darkness, the cold black grandeur of
the great peak, the mournful wail of a desert wolf, the pure pale evening
star that pierced the purple sky, the stupendous loneliness and silence
of that solitude--all these facts seemed Nature's pitiless proof of her
indifference to man and his despair. His hope, his prayer, his frailty,
his fall, his burden and agony and life--these were nothing to the desert
that worked inscrutably through its millions of years, nor to the
illimitable expanse of heaven, deepening its blue and opening its cold,
starry eyes. But a spirit as illimitable and as inscrutable breathed out
of the universe and over the immensity of desert space--a spirit that
breathed to the soul of the ruined man and bade him rise and take up his
burden and go on down the naked shingles of the world.

Despair and pride and fear of death, and this strange breath of life,
dragged Adam up and drove him down the desert road. For a mile he
staggered and plodded along, bent and bowed like an old man, half blinded
by tears and choked by sobs, abject in his misery; yet even so, the
something in him that was strongest of all--the instinct to survive--made
him keep to the hard, gravelly side of the road, that his tracks might
not show in the dust.

And that action of blood and muscle, because it came first in the order
of energy, gradually assumed dominance of him, until again he was an
escaping fugitive, mostly concerned with direction and objective things.
The direction took care of itself, being merely a matter of keeping along
the edge of the road that gleamed pale in front of him. Objects near at
hand, however, had to be carefully avoided. Rocks were indistinct in the
gloom; ocatilla cacti thrust out long spectral arms, like the tentacles
of an octopus; and shadows along the road took the alarming shape of men
and horses and wagons. All around him, except to the west, was profound
obscurity, and in that direction an endless horizon, wild and black and
sharp, with sweeping bold lines between the spurs, stood silhouetted
against a pale-blue, star-fired sky. Miles and miles he walked, and with
a strength that had renewed. He never looked up at the heavens above.
Often he halted to turn and listen. These moments were dreaded ones. But
he heard only a faint breeze.

Morning broke swiftly and relentlessly, a grey, desert dawning. Dim
columns of smoke scarce a mile away showed him that Yuma was close.
Fields and cattle along the road, and then an Indian hut, warned him that
he was approaching the habitations of men and sooner or later he would be
seen. He must hide by day and travel by night. Bordering the road to his
left was a dense thicket of arrow-weed, indicating that he had reached
the bottom lands of the river. Into this Adam crawled like a wounded and
stealthy deer. Hunger and thirst were slight, but his whole body seemed a
throbbing ache. Both mind and body longed for the oblivion that came at
once in sleep.



CHAPTER VII

Adam's heavy slumbers were punctuated by periods when he half awakened,
drowsily aware of extreme heat, of discomfort and sluggish pain, and of
vague sounds.

Twilight had fallen when he fully awakened, stiff and sore, with a
gnawing at his stomach and a parching of mouth and throat from thirst. He
crawled out of the copse of arrow-weed, to the opening by which he had
entered it, and, stealthily proceeding on to the road, he peered out and
listened. No man in sight--no sound to alarm! Consciousness of immense
relief brought bitterly home to him the fact that he was a fugitive.
Taking to the road, he walked rapidly in the direction of the lights. He
passed low, dark huts somewhat back from the road, and he heard strange
voices, probably of Indians.

In about a quarter of an hour he came to the river basin, where the road
dropped down somewhat into the outskirts of Yuma. Most of the lights were
across the river on the Arizona side. He met both Mexicans and Indians
who took no apparent notice of him, and this encouraged Adam to go on
with them down to a ferryboat.

The boat was shoved off. Adam saw that it was fastened to the cable
overhead by ropes and pulleys. The current worked it across the river.
Adam got out with the rest of the passengers, and, leaving them, he walked
down the bank a few rods. He found a little dock with a skiff moored to
it, and here he lay flat and drank his fill. The water was full of sand,
but cool and palatable. Then he washed his face and hands. The latter
were swollen and stiff from the cactus thorns, rendering them clumsy.

Next in order for him was to find a place to eat, and he came at once
upon an eating house where several rough-looking white men and some
Mexicans were being served by a Chinaman.

When he ended this meal he had determined upon a course to take. He
needed a gun, ammunition, canteen, burro, and outfit; and he hardly
expected to be able to purchase them after dark, without exciting
suspicion. All the same, he set out to look.

A short walk brought Adam to a wide street, dimly lighted by the flare of
lamps from open doors of saloons and stores. He halted in a shadow on the
corner. A stream of men was passing--rugged, unshaven, dusty-booted white
men, and Mexicans with their peaked sombreros and embroidered jackets and
tight braided trousers.

Presently Adam ventured forth and walked up the street. The town
resembled Picacho in its noisiest hours, magnified many times. He felt a
wildness he could not see or hear. It dragged at him. It somehow made him
a part of the frontier life. He longed to escape from himself.

A glimpse of a tall man in black frock coat startled Adam. That coat
reminded him of Collishaw. He sheered down a side street into the gloom.
He saw wagons and heard the munch of horses in stalls. Evidently this
place was a barnyard and might afford him a safe retreat for the night.
The first wagon he examined contained straw. Climbing into it he lay
down. For a long time he lay there, worrying over the risk he must run
next day, until at length he fell asleep.

When day dawned, however, Adam had not such overpowering dread. The sun
was rising in red splendour and the day promised to be hot. As it was
early, but few people were to be encountered, and this fact lent Adam
more courage. He had no difficulty in finding the place where he had
eaten the night before. Adam ate as heartily as he could, not because he
was hungry, but for the reason that he had an idea, he might have to
travel far on this meal.

That done, he sallied forth to find a store where he could purchase the
outfit he needed; and he approached the business section by a street that
climbed to what was apparently the highest point in Yuma.

Adam entered a store, and almost forgot himself in the interest of the
purchases he wanted to make. He needed a small mule, or burro, to pack
his outfit, and while the storekeeper went out to get it for Adam several
Mexicans entered. One of them recognised Adam. He cried out, "Santa
Maria!" and ran out, followed by his amazed but less hurried comrades. It
took Adam a moment to place the man in mind. Felix the Mexican that had
drawn a knife on Arallanes.

Therefore Adam pondered. He must take risks to get away with this
necessary outfit. The storekeeper, who had gone out through the back of
the store, returned to say he could furnish a good burro ready to be
packed at once. Adam made a deal with him for the whole outfit and began
to count out the money. The storekeeper did not wait, and, gathering up
an armful of Adam's purchases, he carried them out through the back door.
This gave Adam opportunity to have a look from the front door into the
street. There strode Felix, gesticulating wildly to the white man Adam
had seen before, the black-coated tall Collishaw, significant and grim,
with a white bandage over his face.

A shock pierced Adam's heart, and it was followed by a terrible icy
compression, and then a bursting gush of blood, a flood of fire over all
his body. Leaping like a deer, he bounded back through the store, out of
the door, and across an open space full of implements, wagons, and
obstacles he had to run around or jump over. He did not see the
storekeeper. One vault took him over a high board fence into an alley,
and through this he ran into a street. He headed for the river, running
fleetly, blind to all around him but the ground flying under his feet and
the end of the street. He gained that. The river, broad and swirling, lay
beneath him. Plunging down the bank, he flew toward the dock. Upon
reaching the dock, Adam espied a skiff, with oars in place, with bow
pulled up on the sand. One powerful shove sent it, with him aboard, out
into the stream. He bent the oars in his long, strong sweeps, and it took
him only a few moments to cross. Not yet had any men appeared in pursuit
or even to take notice of him. As he jumped out on the California shore
of the river and began to run north, he found that he faced the lone
black mountain peak which dominated the rise of the desert. The dust was
ankle deep. It stifled him, choked him, and caked on his sweaty face and
hands. He strode swiftly, oppressed by the dust and intolerant of the
confining borders of yellow brush. The frequent bends in the road were at
once a relief and a dread. They hid him, yet obstructed his own view. He
seemed obsessed by a great, passionate energy to escape. When he looked
back he thought of Collishaw, of sure pursuit; when he looked ahead he
thought of the road, the dust, the brush into which he wanted to hide,
the physical things to be overcome.

By and bye he climbed and passed out of the zone of brush. He was on the
open gravel ridges, like the ridges of a washboard, up and down, and just
as bare. Yet, as a whole, there was a distinct slope upward. He could not
see the level of the desert, but the lone mountain peak, close at hand
now, red and black and shining, towered bleakly over him.

Adam derived satisfaction from the fact that the hard gravel ridges did
not take imprint of his boots. Assured now that escape was in his grasp,
he began to put his mind upon other considerations of his flight. He was
not such a fool as to underrate the danger of his venturing out upon the
desert without food, and especially without water. Already he was
thirsty. These thoughts, and counter ones, pressed hard upon him until he
surmounted the long slope to the top of the desert mesa. Here he looked
back.

First he saw clouds of dust puffing up from the brush-covered lowlands,
and then, in an open space where the road crossed, he espied horsemen
coming at a gallop. Again, and just as fiercely, did his veins seem to
freeze, his blood to halt, and then to burst into flame.

"Collishaw--and his men!" gasped Adam, his jaw dropping. "They've trailed
me!...They're after me--on horses!"

The apparent fact was terrific in its stunning force. Adam reeled; his
sight blurred. It was a full moment before he could rally his forces.
Then, gazing keenly, he saw that his pursuers were still miles away.

At first he ran fleetly, with endurance apparently unimpaired; but he
meant to slow down and husband his strength as soon as he dared. Before
him stretched a desert floor of fine, shining gravel, like marbles,
absolutely bare of any vegetation for what seemed hundreds of yards; and
then began to appear short bunches of low meagre brush called greasewood,
and here and there isolated patches of ocatilla. These multiplied and
enlarged in the distance until they looked as if they would afford cover
enough to hide Adam from his pursuers. Hot, wet with sweat, strong, and
panting, he ran another mile, to find the character of the desert
changing.

Reaching the zone of plant life, he soon placed a thin but effective
barrier of greasewood and ocatilla behind him. Then he slowed down to
catch his breath. Before him extended a vast hazy expanse, growing darker
with accumulated growths in the distance. To the right rose the chocolate
mountain range, and it ran on to fade in the dim horizon. Behind him now
stood the lone black peak, and to the left rose a low, faint wavering
line of white, like billows of a sea. This puzzled him until at length he
realised it was sand. Sand--and it, like the range, faded in the distant
horizon.

Adam also made the discovery that as he looked back over his shoulder he
was really looking down a long, gradual slope. Plainly he could see the
edge of the desert where he had come up, and often, as he travelled along
at a jog trot, he gazed around with fearful expectancy. He had imagined
that his running had given rise to the breeze blowing in his face. But
this was not so. A rather stiff wind was blowing straight at him. It
retarded his progress, and little puffs of fine, invisible sand or dust
irritated his eyes. Then the tears would flow and wash them clear again.
With all his senses and feelings there mingled a growing preponderance
of thought or realisation of the tremendous openness of the desert. He
felt as though a door of the universe had opened to him, and all before
him was boundless. He had no fear of it; indeed, there seemed a comfort
in the sense of being lost in such a vastness; but there was something
intangible working on his mind. The wind weighed upon him, the coppery
sky weighed upon him, the white sun weighed upon him, and his feet began
to take hold of the ground. How hot the top of his head and his face! All
at once the sweat appeared less copious and his skin drier. With this
came a strong thirst. The saliva of his mouth was pasty and scant. He
swallowed hard and his throat tightened. A couple of pebbles that he put
into his mouth mitigated these last sensations.

Intelligence gave him pause then, and he halted in his tracks. If death
was relentlessly pursuing him, it was no less confronting him there to
the fore, if he passed on out of reach of the river. Death from thirst
was preferable to capture, but Adam was not ready to die. He who had
loved life clung to it all the more fiercely now that the sin of Cain
branded his soul. He still felt unlimited strength and believed that he
could go far. But the sun was hotter than he had ever experienced it; the
heat appeared to strike up from the earth as well as burn down from
above; and it was having a strange effect upon him. He had sensed a
difficulty in keeping to a straight line of travel, and at first had put
it down to his instinct for zigzagging to his greasewood bush and that
ocatilla plant to place them behind him. Moving on again, he turned
towards the chocolate mountain and the river.

It seemed close. He saw the bare grey desert with its green growths slope
gradually to the rugged base of the range. Somewhere between him and
there ran the river. He strained his eyesight. How strangely and clearly
the lines of one ridge merged into the lines of another. There must be
distance between them. But it could not be seen. The range looked larger
and farther away the more he studied it--the air more full of transparent
haze, the red and russet and chocolate hues more quiveringly suggestive
of illusion.

"Look here," panted Adam, as he halted once more. "I've been told about
the desert. But I didn't pay particular attention and now I can't
remember. I only know it's hot--and this won't do."

It was just then that Adam, gazing back down the grey desert, saw puffs
of dust and horses.

Panic seized him. He ran directly away from his pursuers, bending low,
looking neither to right nor to left, violent, furious, heedless, like an
animal in flight. And with no sense of direction, with no use of reason,
he ran on till he dropped.

Then his breast seemed to split and his heart to lift with terrific
pressure, agonising and suffocating. He lay on the ground and gasped,
with his mouth in the dust. Gradually the paroxysm subsided.

He arose to go on, hot, dry, aching, dizzy, but still strong in his
stride.

"I've--got--away," he said, "and now--the river--the river."

Fear of Collishaw had been dulled. Adam could think of little besides the
heat and his growing thirst, and this thing--the desert--that was so
strange, so big, so menacing. It did not alarm him that his skin was no
longer wet with sweat, but the fact struck him singularly.

The wind was blowing sand in his face, obstructing his sight. Suddenly
his feet dragged in sand. Dimly then he made out low sand dunes with
hollows between, and farther on larger dunes waving and billowing on to
rise to what seemed mountains of sand. He saw them as through a veil of
dust. Turning away, he plodded on, half blinded, fighting the blast of
wind that was growing stronger. The air cleared somewhat. Sand dunes were
all around him, and to his right, in the direction he thought was wrong,
loomed the chocolate range. He went that way, and again the flying sand
hid a clear view. A low, seeping, silken rustle filled the air, sometimes
rising to a soft roar. He thought of what he had heard about sand-storms,
but he knew this was not one. Unwittingly he had wandered into the region
of the dunes, and the strong gusty wind swept up the fine sand in sheets
and clouds. He must get out. It could not be far to the level desert
again. He plodded on, and the way he chose, with its intermittent views
of the mountains, at last appeared to be the wrong one. So he turned
again. And as he turned, a stronger wind, now at his back, whipped up the
sand till all was pale yellow around him, thick and opaque and moaning,
through which the sun shone with strange magenta hue. He did not dare
rest or wait. He had to plod on. And the way led through soft, uneven
sand, always dragging at his feet.

After a while Adam discovered that when he trudged down into the hollows
between dunes he became enveloped in flying sand that forced him to cover
mouth and eyes with his scarf and go choking on, but when he climbed up
over a dune the air became clearer and he could breathe easier. Thus
instinctively he favoured the ascents, and thus he lost himself in a
world of curved and sculptured sand dunes, grey and yellow through the
flying mists, or steely silver under the gleaming sunlight. The wind
lulled, letting the sand settle, and then he saw he was lost as upon a
trackless ocean, with no landmarks in sight. On all sides heaved
beautiful white mounds of sand, ribbed and waved and laced with
exquisitely delicate knife-edged curves. And these crests changed like
the crests of waves, only, instead of flying spray, these were curled and
shadowed veils of sand blowing from the scalloped crowns. Then again the
wind, swooping down, whipped and swept the sand in low thick sheets on
and on over the dunes, until thin rising clouds obscured the sky.

Adam climbed on, growing weaker. As the heat had wrought strangely upon
his blood, so the sand had dragged strength from his legs. His situation
was grave, but, though he felt the dread and pity of it, a certain
violence of opposition had left him. That was in his will. He feared more
the instinctive reaction--the physical resistance that was growing in
him. Merryvale had told him how men lost on the desert could die of
thirst in one day. But Adam had scarcely credited that; certainly he did
not believe it applicable to himself. He realised, however, that unless
he somehow changed the present condition sun and sand would overwhelm
him. So when from a high knoll of sand he saw down into a large
depression, miles across, where clumps of mesquites showed black against
the silver, he descended toward them and eventually reached them, ready
indeed to drop into the shade.

Here under a thick-foliaged mesquite he covered his face with a
handkerchief, his head with his coat, and settled himself to rest and
wait. It was a wise move. At once he felt by contrast what the fierce sun
had been. Gradually the splitting headache subsided to a sensation that
seemed to Adam like a gentle boiling of blood in his brain. He could hear
it. His dry skin became a little moist; the intolerable burn left it: his
heart and pulse ceased such laboured throbbing; and after a time his
condition was limited to less pain, a difficulty in breathing, and
thirst. These were bearable.

From time to time Adam removed the coverings to look about him. The sun
was westering. When it sank the wind would cease to blow and then he could
find a way out of this wilderness of sand dunes. Leaning back against a
low branch of the tree, he stretched out, and such was his exhaustion and
the restfulness of the posture that he fell asleep.

When he awoke he felt better, though half smothered. He had rested. His
body was full of dull aches, but no more pain. His mouth did not appear
so dry or his tongue so swollen; nevertheless, the thirst remained,
giving his throat a sensation of puckering, such as he remembered he used
to have after eating green persimmons.

Then Adam, suddenly realising what covered his head, threw off the coat
and handkerchief. And his eyes were startled by such a sight as they had
never beheld--a marvellous unreality of silver sheen and black shadow, a
starry tracery of labyrinthine streams on a medium as weird and
beautiful and intangible as a dream.

"O God! am I alive or dead?" he whispered in awe. And his voice proved to
him that he and his burden had not slipped into the oblivion of the
beyond.

Night had fallen. The moon had arisen. The stars shone lustrously. The
sky burned a deep rich blue. And all this unreal beauty that had mocked
him was only the sculptured world of sand translating the magnificence
and splendour of the heavens.

More than all else, Adam grew sensitive to the oppressiveness of the
silence. His first steps were painful, a staggering, halting gait, that
exercise at length worked into some semblance of his old stride. The cold
desert air invigorated him, and had it not been for the discomfort of
thirst he would have been doing well under the circumstances.

A sense of direction that had nothing to do with his intelligence
prompted him to face east. He obeyed it. And he walked for what seemed
hours over a moon-blanched sea of sand, to climb at last a high dune from
which he saw the dark, level floor of the desert, and far across the
shadowy space a black range of mountains. He thought he recognised the
rugged contour, and when, sweeping his gaze southward, he saw the lone
mountain looming like a dark sentinel over the desert gateway, then he
was sure of his direction. Over there to the east lay the river. And he
had long hours of the cool night to travel.

From this vantage point Adam looked back over the silver sea of sand
dunes; and such was the sight of it that even in his precarious condition
he was stirred to his depths. The huge oblong silver moon hung low over
that vast heaving stretch of desert. It was a wasteland, shimmering with
its belts and plains of moonlit sand, blank and mysterious in its
shadows, an abode of loneliness. An inexplicable sadness pervaded Adam's
soul. This wasteland and he seemed identical. How strange to feel that he
did not want to leave it! Life could not be sustained in this sepulchre
of the desert. But it was not life that his soul yearned for then--only
peace. And peace dwelt there in that solitude of the sands.

Grey dawn found Adam many miles closer to the mountain range. Yet it was
still far and his former dread returned. On every side what interminable
distances!

A deepening rose colour over the eastern horizon appeared to be reflected
upon the mountain peaks, and this glow crept down the dark slopes. Grey
dawn changed to radiant morning with an ethereal softness of colour. When
the blazing disc of the sun shone over the ramparts of the east all that
desert world underwent a wondrous transfiguration. The lord of day had
arisen and this was his empire. Red was the hue of his authority,
emblazoned in long vivid rays over the ranges and the wastelands. Then
the great orb of fire cleared the horizon and the desert seemed aflame.

One moment Adam gave to the marvel and glory of the sunrise, and then he
looked no more. That brief moment ended in a consciousness of the gravity
of his flight. For the first touch of sun on face and hands burned hot,
as if it suddenly aggravated a former burn that the night had soothed.

"Got to reach--river soon," he muttered, thickly, "or never will."

He walked on while the sun climbed.

Desert vegetation increased. Adam toiled on, breathing hard, careless now
of the reaching thorns and heedless of the rougher ground.

He was perfectly conscious of a subtle changing of his spirit, but
because it seemed a drifting farther and farther from thought he could
not comprehend it. Courage diminished as fear augmented. More and more
his will and intelligence gave way to sensorial perceptions. More and
more he felt the urge to hurry, and, though reason warned against the
folly of this, it was not strong enough to compel him to resist. He did
hurry more and stumbled along. Like breath of a furnace the heat rose
from the rocky, sandy soil; and from above there seemed to bear down the
weight of the leaden fire.

His skin became as dry as dust and began to shrivel. It did not blister.
The pain now came from burn of the flesh underneath. He felt that his
blood was drying up. A stinging sensation as of puncture by a thousand
thorns throbbed in his face and neck. The heat burned through his
clothes, and the soles of his boots were coals of fire. Doggedly he
strove forward. A whistle accompanied his panting breaths. Most
intolerable of all was thirst--the bitter, astringent taste in the scant
saliva that became pasty and dry, the pain in his swelling tongue, the
parched constriction in his throat.

At last he reached the base of a low rocky ridge which for long had
beckoned to him and mocked him. It obstructed sight of the slope to the
mountain range. Surely between that ridge and the slope ran the river.
The hope spurred him upward.

As he climbed he gazed up into the coppery sky, but his hot and tired
eyes could not endure the great white blaze that was the sun. Halfway up
he halted to rest, and from here he had measureless view of the desert.
Then his dull brain revived to a final shock. For he seemed to see a
thousand miles of green-grey barrenness, of lifting heat veils like
transparent smoke, of wastes of waved sand, and of ranges of upheaved
rock. How terribly it confronted him! Pitiless mockery of false distances
on all sides A sun-blasted world not meant for man!

Then Adam ascended to the summit of the ridge. A glaring void seemed
flung at him. His chocolate-hued mountain range was not far away. From
this height he could see all the grey-green level of desert between him
and the range. He stared. Again there seemed flung in his face a hot
glare of space. There was no river.

"Where, where's--the river?" gasped Adam, mistrusting his eyesight.

But the wonderful Rio Colorado, the strange, red river beloved by desert
wanderers, did not flow before him--or to either side--or behind. It must
have turned to flow on the other slope of this insurmountable range.

"God has--forsaken me!" cried Adam, in despair, and he fell upon the
rocks.

But these rocks, hot as red-hot plates of iron, permitted of no contact,
even in a moment of horror. Adam was burned to stagger up, to plunge and
run and fall down the slope, out upon the level, to the madness that
awaited him.

He must rush on to the river--to drink and drink--to bathe in the cool
water that flowed down from the snow-fed lakes of the north. Thoughts
about water possessed his mind--pleasant, comforting, hurrying him
onward. Memory of the great river made pictures in his mind, and there
flowed the broad red waters, sullen and eddying and silent. All the
streams and rivers and lakes Adam had known crowded their images across
his inward eye, and this recall of the past was sweet. He remembered the
brook near his old home--the clear green water full of bright minnows and
gold-sided sunfish; how it used to flow swiftly under the willow banks
where, violets hid by mossy stones, and how it tarried in deep dark pools
under shelving banks, green and verdant and sweet smelling; how the ferns
used to bend over in graceful tribute and the lilies float white and
gold, with great green-backed frogs asleep upon the broad leaves. The
watering trough on the way to school, many and many a time, in the happy
days gone by, had he drunk there and splashed his brother Guerd. Guerd,
who hated water and had to be made to wash, when they were little boys!
The old well on Madden's farm with its round cobblestoned walls where the
moss and lichen grew, and where the oaken bucket, wet and dark and green,
use to come up bumping and spilling, brimful of clear cold water--how
vividly he remembered that his father had called it granite water, and
the best, because it flowed through the cold subterranean caverns of
granite rock. Then there was the spring in the orchard, sweet, soft water
that his mother used to send him after, and as he trudged home, burdened
by the huge bucket, he would spill some upon his bare feet.

Yes, as Adam staggered on, aimlessly now, he was haunted more and more by
memories of water. That dear, unforgetable time of boyhood when he used
to love the water, to swim like a duck and bask like a turtle--it seemed
far back in the past, across some terrible interval of pain, vague now,
yet hateful. Where was he--and where was Guerd? Something like a blade
pierced his heart.

Suddenly Adam was startled out of this pleasant reminiscence by something
blue and bright that danced low down along the desert floor. A lake! He
halted with an inarticulate cry. There was a lake of blue water,
glistening, exquisitely clear, with borders of green. He could not help
but rush forward. The lake shimmered, thinned, shadowed, and vanished.
Adam halted and, rubbing his eyes, peered hard ahead and all around.
Behind him shone a strip of blue, streaked up and down by desert plants,
and it seemed to be another lake, larger, bluer, clearer, with a delicate
vibrating quiver, as if exquisitely rippled by a gentle breeze. Green
shores were marvellously reflected in the blue. Adam gaped at this. Had
he waded through a lake? He had crossed the barren flat of greasewood to
reach the spot upon which he now stood. Almost he was forced to run back.
But this must be a deceit of the desert or a madness of his sight. He
bent low, and the lake of blue seemed to lift and quiver upon a thin
darkling line of vapour or transparent shadow. Adam took two strides
back--and the thing vanished! Desert magic! A deception of nature! A
horrible illusion to a lost man growing crazed by thirst!

"Mirage!" whispered Adam, hoarsely. "Blue water! Ha-ha!...Damned lie--it
shan't fool me!"

But as clear perception failed these mirages of the desert did deceive
him. All objects took on a hazy hue, tinged by the red of blood in his
eyes, and they danced in the heat-veiled air. Shadows, glares, cactus,
and brush stood as immovable as the rocks of ages. Only the illusive and
ethereal mirages gleamed as if by magic and shimmered and moved in that
midday trance of the sun-blasted desert.

The time came when Adam plunged toward every mirage that floated so blue
and serene and mystical in the deceiving atmosphere, until hope and
despair and magnified sight finally brought on a mental state bordering
on the madness sure to come.

Then, as he staggered toward this green-bordered pond and that
crystal-blue lake, already drinking and laving in his mind, he began to
hear the beautiful sounds of falling rain, of gurgling brooks, of lapping
waves, of roaring rapids, of gentle river currents, of water--water--water
sweetly tinkling and babbling, of wind-laden murmur of a mountain stream.
And he began to wander in a circle.



CHAPTER VIII

Consciousness returned to Adam. He was lying under an ironwood tree, over
branches of which a canvas had been stretched, evidently to shade him
from the sun. The day appeared to be far spent.

His head seemed to have been relieved of a hot metal band; his tongue was
no longer bursting in his mouth; the boil of his blood had subsided. His
skin felt moist.

Then he heard the rough voice of a man talking to animals, apparently
burros. Movement of body was difficult and somewhat painful; however, he
managed to sit up and look around. Hide-covered boxes and packsaddles,
with duffle and utensils of a prospector, were littered about, and
conspicuous among the articles near him were three large canvas-covered
canteens, still wet. Upon the smouldering embers of a camp fire steamed a
black iron pot. A little beyond the first stood a very short, broad man,
back turned; and he was evidently feeding choice morsels of some kind to
five eager and jealous burros.

"Spoiled--every darn one of you!" he was saying, and the kindness of his
voice belied its roughness. "Why, I used to have burros that could lick
labels off tin cans an' call it a square meal!"

Then he turned and espied Adam watching him.

"Hullo! You've come to," he said, with interest.

Adam's gaze encountered an extraordinary-looking man. He could not have
been taller than five and a half feet, and the enormous breadth of him
made him appear as wide as he was long. He was not fat. His immense bulk
was sheer brawn, betokening remarkable strength. His dusty, ragged
clothes were patched like a crazy-quilt. He had an immense head, a shock
of shaggy hair beginning to show streaks of grey, and a broad face tanned
dark as an Indian's, the lower half of which was covered with a scant
grizzled beard. His eyes, big, dark, rolling, resembled those of an ox.
His expression seemed to be one of set tranquillity--the impressiveness
of bronze.

Adam's voice was a husky whisper: "Where am--I? Who are you?"

"Young man, my name's Dismukes," came the reply, "an' you're ninety miles
from anywhere--an' alive, which's more than I'd bet on yesterday."

The words brought Adam a shock of memory. Out there the desert smoked,
sweltering in the spent heat of the setting sun. Slowly Adam lay back
upon the blanket and bundle that had been placed under him for a bed. The
man sat down on one of the hide-covered boxes, fastening his great eyes
upon Adam.

"Am I--all right?" whispered Adam.

"Yes, but it was a close shave," replied the other.

"You said--something about yesterday. Tell me."

Dismukes fumbled in his patched vest and, fetching forth a stumpy pipe,
he proceeded to fill it. It was noticeable that he had to use his little
finger to press down the tobacco into the bowl, as the other fingers of
his enormous hands were too large. Adam had never before seen such
scarred calloused hands.

"It was day before yesterday I run across you," began Dismukes, after a
comfortable pull at his pipe. "My burro Jinny has the best eyes of the
pack outfit. When I seen her ears go up I got to lookin' hard, an'
presently spied you staggerin' in a circle. I'd seen men do that before.
Sometimes you'd run, an' again you'd wag along, an' then you'd fall an'
crawl. I caught you an' had to tie you with my rope. You were out of your
head. An' you looked hard--all dried up--tongue black an' hangin' out. I
thought you were done for. I poured a canteen of water over your head an'
then packed you over here where there's wood an' water. You couldn't make
a sound, but all the same I knew you were ravin' fur water. I fed you
water a spoonful at a time, an' every little while I emptied a canteen
over you. Was up all night with you that night. You recovered awful slow.
Yesterday I'd not have gambled much on your chances. But to-day you came
round. I got you to swallow some soft grub, an' I guess you'll soon be
pretty good. You'll be weak, though. You're awful thin. I'm curious about
how much you weighed. You look as if you might have been a husky lad."

"I was," whispered Adam. "Hundred and eighty-five--or ninety."

"So I thought. You'll not go over one hundred an' twenty now. You've lost
about seventy pounds...Oh, it's a fact! You see, the body is 'most all
water, an' on this desert in summer a man just dries up an' blows away."

"Seventy--pounds!" exclaimed Adam, incredulously. But when he glanced at
his shrunken hands he believed the incomprehensible fact. "I must be
skin--and bones."

"Mostly bones. But they're long, heavy bones, an' if you ever get any
flesh on them you'll be a darned big man. I'm glad they're not goin' to
bleach white on the desert, where I've seen so many these last ten
years."

"You saved my life?" suddenly queried Adam.

"Boy, there's no doubt of that," returned the other. "Another hour would
have finished you."

"I--I thank you...But--so help me God--I wish you hadn't," whispered
Adam, poignantly.

Dismukes spent a strange gaze upon Adam.

"What's your name?" he asked.

Adam halted over the conviction that he could never reveal his identity;
and there leaped to his lips the name the loquacious Regan had given him.

"Wansfell," he replied.

Dismukes averted his gaze. Manifestly he divined that Adam had lied.
"Well, it's no matter what a man calls himself in this country," he said.
"Only everybody an' everything has to have a name."

"You're a prospector?"

"Yes. But I'm more a miner. I hunt for gold. I don't waste time tryin' to
sell claims. Years ago I set out to find a fortune in gold. My limit was
five hundred thousand dollars. I've already got a third of it--in banks
an' hid away safe."

"When you get it--your fortune--what then?" inquired Adam, with thrilling
curiosity.

"I'll enjoy life. I have no ties--no people. Then I'll see the world,"
replied the prospector, in deep and sonorous voice.

A wonderful passion radiated from him. Adam saw a quiver, run over the
huge frame. This Dismukes evidently was as extraordinary in character as
in appearance. Adam felt the man's strangeness, his intelligence, and the
inflexible will and fiery Yet all at once Adam felt steal over him an
emotion of pity that he could not understand. How strange men were!

At this juncture the prospector was compelled to drive the burros out of
camp. Then he attended to his cooking over the fire, and presently
brought a bowl of steaming food to Adam.

"Eat this slow--with a spoon," he said gruffly. "Never forget that a man
starved for grub or water can kill himself quick."

During Adam's long drawn-out meal the sun set and the mantle of heat
seemed to move away for the coming of shadows. Adam found that his
weakness was greater than he had supposed, rendering the effort of
sitting up one he was glad to end. He lay back on the blankets, wanting
to think over his situation rather than fall asleep, but he found himself
very drowsy, and his mind vaguely wandered until it was a blank. Upon
awakening he saw the first grey dawn arch the sky. He felt better, almost
like his old self, except for that queer sensation of thinness and
lightness, most noticeable when he lifted his hand. Dismukes was already
astir, and there, a few rods from camp, stood the ludicrous burros, as if
they had not moved all night. Adam got up and stretched his limbs,
pleased to find that he appeared to be all right again, except for a
little dizziness.

Dismukes evinced gladness at the fact of Adam's improvement. "Good!" he
exclaimed. "You'd be strong enough to ride a burro to-day. But it's goin'
to be hot, like yesterday. We'd better not risk travellin'."

"How do you know it's going to be as hot as yesterday?" inquired Adam.

"I can tell by the feel an' smell of the air, an' mostly that dull lead
coloured haze you see over the mountains."

Adam thought the air seemed cool and fresh, but he did see a dull pall
over the mountains. Farther toward the east, where the sunrise lifted an
immense and wondrous glow, this haze was not visible.

The remark of Dismukes anent the riding of a burro disturbed Adam. This
kindly prospector meant to take him on to his destination. Impossible!
Adam had fled to the desert to hide, and the desert must hide him, alive
or dead. The old, thick, clamouring emotions knocked at his heart. Adam
felt gratitude toward Dismukes for not questioning him, and that
forbearance made him want to tell something of his story. Yet how
reluctant he was to open his lips on that score! He helped Dismukes with
the simple morning meal, and afterward with odds and ends of tasks, all
the time cheerful and questioning, putting off what he knew was
inevitable. The day did come on hot--so hot that life was just bearable
for men and beasts in the shade of the big ironwood tree. Adam slept some
of the hours away. He awoke stronger, with more active mind. Of the next
meal Dismukes permitted Adam to eat heartily. And later, while Dismukes
smoked and Adam sat before the camp fire, the moment of revelation came,
quite unexpectedly.

"Wansfell, you'll not be goin' to Yuma with me to-morrow," asserted
Dismukes quietly.

The words startled Adam. He dropped his head. "No--no! Thank you--I
won't--I can't go," he replied, trembling. The sound of his voice
agitated him further.

"Buy, tell me or not, just as you please. But I'm a man you can trust."

The kindliness and a nameless power invested in this speech broke down
what little restraint remained with Adam.

"I--I can't go...I'm an outcast...I must hide--hide in the--desert,"
burst out Adam, covering his face with his hands.

"Was that why you came to the desert?"

"Yes--yes."

"But, boy, you came without a canteen or grub or burro or gun--or
anythin'. In all my years on the desert I never saw the like of that
before. An' only a miracle saved your life. That miracle was Jinny's
eyes. You owe your life to a long-eared, white-faced burro. Jinny has
eyes like a mountain sheep. She saw you--miles off. An' such luck won't
be yours twice. You can't last on this desert without the things to
sustain life...How did it happen that I found you here alone--without
anythin'?"

"No time. I--I had to run!" panted Adam.

"What'd you do? Don't be afraid to tell me. The desert is a place for
secrets, and it's a lonely place where a man learns to read the souls of
men--when he meets them. You're not vicious. You're no----But never
mind--tell me without wastin' more words. Maybe I can help you."

"No one can--help me," cried Adam.

"That's not so," quickly spoke up Dismukes, his voice deep and rolling.
"Some one can help you--an' maybe it's me."

Here Adam completely broke down. "I--I did--something--awful!"

"No crime, boy--say it was no crime," earnestly returned the prospector.

"O my God! Yes--yes! It was--a crime!" sobbed Adam, shuddering. "But,
man--I swear, horrible as it was--I'm innocent! I swear that. Believe me.
I was driven--driven by wrongs, by hate, by taunts. If I'd stood them
longer I'd have been a white-livered coward. But I was driven and half
drunk."

"Well--well!" ejaculated Dismukes, shaking his shaggy head. "It's bad.
But I believe you an' you needn't tell me any more. Life is hell! I was
young once...An' now you've got to hide away from men--to live on the
desert--to be one of us wanderers of the wastelands?"

"Yes. I must hide. And I want--I need to live--to suffer--to atone!"

"Boy, do you believe in God?" asked the prospector.

"I don't know. I think so," replied Adam, lifting his head and striving
for composure. "My mother was religious. But my father was not."

"Well--well, if you believed in God your case would not be hopeless. But
some men--a few out of the many wanderers--find God out here in these
wilds. Maybe you will...Can you tell me what you think you want to do?"

"Oh--to go alone--into the loneliest place--to live there for years--for
ever," replied Adam, with passion.

"Alone. That is my way. An' I understand how you feel--what you need. Are
you going to hunt gold?"

"No--no."

"Have you any money?"

"Yes. More than I'll ever need. I'd like to throw it all away--or give it
to you. But it--it was my mother's...And I promised her I'd not squander
it--that I'd try to save."

"Boy, never mind--an' I don't want your money," interrupted Dismukes.
"An' don't do any fool trick with it. You'll need it to buy outfits. You
can always trust Indians to go to the freightin' posts for you. But
never let any white men in this desert know you got money. That's a hard
comparison, an' it's justified."

"I'm already sick with the love men have for money," said Adam bitterly.

"An' now to figure out an' make good all that brag of mine," went on
Dismukes, reflectively. "I'll need only two days' grub to get to Yuma.
There's one sure water hole. I can give you one of my canteens an' Jinny,
the burro that saved your life. She's tricky, but a blamed good burro.
An' by making up enough bread I can spare my oven. So, all told, I guess
I can outfit you good enough for you to reach a canyon up here to the
west where Indians live. I know them. They're good. You can stay with
them until the hot weather passes. No danger of any white men runnin'
across you there."

"But you mustn't let me have all your outfit," protested Adam.

"I'm not. It's only the grub an' one burro."

"Won't you run a risk--with only two days' rations?"

"Wansfell, every move you can make on this desert is a risk," replied
Dismukes, seriously. "Learn that right off. But I'm sure. Only accidents
or unforeseen circumstances ever make risks for me now. I'm what they
call a desert rat."

"You're most kind," said Adam, choking up again, "to help a
stranger--this way."

"Boy, I don't call that help," declared Dismukes. "That's just doin' for
a man as I'd want to be done by. When I talked about help I meant
somethin' else."

"What? God knows I need it. I'll be grateful. I'll do as you tell me,"
replied Adam, with a strange thrill stirring in him.

"You are a boy--no matter if you're bigger than most men. You've got the
mind of a boy. What a damn pity you've got to do this hidin' game!" Under
strong feeling the prospector got up, and, emptying his pipe, he began to
take short strides to and fro in the limited shade cast by the ironwood
tree. The indomitable forces of the man showed in his step, in the way he
carried himself. Presently he turned to Adam and the great ox eyes burned
intensely. "Wansfell, if you were a man, I'd never feel the way I do. But
you're only a youngster--you're not bad--you've had bad luck--an' for you
I can break my rule--an' I'll do it if you're in earnest. I've never
talked about the desert--about its secrets--what it's taught me. But I'll
tell you what the desert is--how it'll be your salvation--how to be a
wanderer of the wasteland is to be strong, free, happy--if you are
honest, if you're big enough for it."

"Dismukes, I swear I'm honest--and I'll be big, by God or I'll die
trying," declared Adam, passionately.

The prospector gave Adam a long, steady stare, a strange gaze such as
must have read his soul.

"Wansfell, if you can live on the desert you'll grow like it," he said,
solemnly, as if he were pronouncing a benediction.

Adam gathered from this speech that Dismukes meant to unbosom himself of
many secrets of this wonderful wasteland. Evidently, however, the
prospector was not then ready to talk further. With thoughtful mien and
plodding gait he resumed his short walk to and fro. It struck Adam then
that his appearance was almost as ludicrous as that of his burros, yet at
the same time his presence somehow conveyed a singular sadness. Years of
loneliness burdened the wide bowed shoulders of this desert man. Adam
divined then, in a gust of gratitude, that this plodding image of
Dismukes would always remain in his mind as a picture, a symbol of the
actual good in human nature.

The hot day closed without Adam ever venturing out of the shade of the
tree. Once or twice he had put his hand in a sunny spot to feel the heat,
and it had burned. The night mantled down with its tense silence,
all-embracing, and the stars began to glow white. As Dismukes sat down
near Adam in the glow of the camp fire it was manifest from the absence
of his pipe, and the penetrating, possession-taking power in his eyes,
that he was under the dominance of a singular passion.

"Wansfell," he began, in low, deep voice, "it took me many years to
learn how to live on the desert. I had the strength an' the vitality of
ten ordinary men. Many time in those desperate years was I close to death
from thirst--from starvation--from poison water--from sickness--from bad
men--and last, though not least--from loneliness. If I had met a man like
myself, as I am now, I might have been spared a hell of sufferin'. I did
meet desert men who could have helped me. But they passed me by. The
desert locks men's lips. Let every man save his own life--find his own
soul. That's the unwritten law of the wastelands of the world. I've
broken it for you because I want to do by you as I'd have liked to be
done by. An' because I see somethin' in you."

Dismukes paused here to draw a long breath. In the flickering firelight
he seemed a squatting giant immovable by physical force, and of a will
unquenchable while life lasted.

"Men crawl over the desert like ants whose nests have been destroyed an'
who have become separated from one another," went on Dismukes. "They all
know the lure of the desert. Each man has his own idea of why the desert
claims him. Mine was gold--is gold--so that some day I can travel over
the world, rich an' free, an' see life. Another man's will be the need to
hide--or the longin' to forget--or the call of adventure--or hate of the
world--or love of a woman. Another class is that of bad men. Robbers,
murderers. They are many. There are also many men, an' a few women, who
just drift or wander or get lost in the desert. An' out of all these, if
they stay in the desert, but few survive. They die or they are killed.
The Great American Desert is a vast place an' it is covered by unmarked
graves an' bleached bones. I've seen so many--so many."

Dismukes paused again while his broad breast heaved with a sigh.

"I was talkin' about what men think the desert means to them. In my case
I say gold, an' I say that as the other man will claim he loves the
silence or the colour or the loneliness. But I'm wrong, an' so is he. The
great reason why the desert holds men lies deeper. I feel that. But I've
never had the brains to solve it. I do know, however, that life on this
wasteland is fierce an' terrible. Plants, reptiles, beasts, birds, an'
men all have to fight for life far out of proportion to what's necessary
in fertile parts of the earth. You will learn that early, an' if you are
a watcher an' a thinker you will understand it.

"The desert is no place for white men. An oasis is fit for Indians. They
survive there. But they don't thrive. I respect the Indians. It will be
well for you to live a while with Indians...Now what I most want you to
know is this."

The speaker's pause this time was impressive, and he raised one of his
huge hands, like a monstrous claw, making a gesture at once eloquent and
strong.

"When the desert claims men it makes most of them beasts. They sink to
that fierce level in order to live. They are trained by the eternal
strife that surrounds them. A man of evil nature survivin' in the desert
becomes more terrible than a beast. He is a vulture. On the other hand.
there are men whom the desert makes like it. Yes--fierce an' elemental
an' terrible, like the heat an' the storm an' the avalanche, but greater
in another sense--greater through that eternal strife to live--beyond any
words of mine to tell. What such men have lived--the patience, the
endurance, the toil--the fights with men an' all that makes the
desert--the wanderin's an' perils an' tortures--the horrible loneliness
that must be fought hardest, by mind as well as action--all these
struggles are beyond ordinary comprehension an' belief. But I know. I've
met a few such men, an' if it's possible for the divinity of God to walk
abroad on earth in the shape of mankind, it was invested in them. The
reason must be that in the development by the desert, in case of these
few men who did not retrograde, the spiritual kept pace with the
physical. It means these men never forgot, never reverted to mere
unthinking instinct, never let the hard, fierce, brutal action of
survival of the desert kill their souls. Spirit was stronger than body.
I've learned this of these men, though I never had the power to attain
it. It takes brains. I was only fairly educated. An' though I've studied
all my years on the desert, an' never gave up, I wasn't big enough to
climb as high as I can see. I tell you all this, Wansfell, because it may
be your salvation. Never give up to the desert or to any of its minions!
Never cease to fight! You must fight to live--an' so make that fight
equally for your mind an' your soul! Thus you will repent for your crime,
whatever that was. Remember--the secret is never to forget your hold on
the past--your memories--an' through thinkin' of them to save your mind
an' apply it to all that faces you out there."

Rising from his seat, Dismukes made a wide, sweeping gesture, symbolical
of a limitless expanse. "An' the gist of all this talk of mine--this hope
of mine to do for you as I'd have been done by--is that if you fight an'
think together like a man meanin' to repent of his sin--somewhere out
there in the loneliness an' silence you will find God!"

With that he abruptly left the camp fire to stride off into the darkness:
and the sonorous roll of his last words seemed to linger on the quiet
air.

Every one of his intense words had been burned into Adam's sensitive mind
in characters and meanings never to be forgotten. Dismukes had found
eager and fertile soil for the planting of the seeds of his toil-earned
philosophy. The effect upon Adam was profound, and so wrought upon his
emotions that the black and hateful consciousness which had returned to
haunt him was as but a shadow of his thought. Adam stared out into the
night where Dismukes had vanished. Something great had happened. Was the
man Dismukes a fanatic, a religious wanderer of the wasteland who
imagined he had found in Adam an apt pupil, or who had preached a sermon
because the opportunity presented? No! The prospector had the faith to
give out of his lesson of life on the desert. His motive was the same as
when he had risked much to follow Adam, staggering blindly across the hot
sands to his death. And as Adam felt the mounting passion of conviction,
of gratitude, his stirred mind seemed suddenly to burst into a radiant
and scintillating inspiration of resolve to be the man Dismukes had
described, to fight and to think and to remember as had no one ever
before done on the desert. It was all that seemed left for him.
Repentance! Expiation! True to himself at the last in spite of a horrible
and fatal blunder!

"Oh, Guerd! Guerd, my brother!" he cried, shuddering at the whisper of
that name. "Wherever you are in spirit--hear me!...I'll rise above wrongs
and hate and revenge I'll remember our boyhood--how I loved you! I'll
atone for my crime! I'll never forget...I'll fight and think to save my
soul--and pray for yours! Hear me and forgive--you who drove me out into
the wastelands!"



CHAPTER IX

Adam lay awake for some length of time, waiting for Dismukes to return,
but he did not come. Adam at length succumbed to drowsiness. It was
Dismukes's call that awakened him. The sun already tipped the eastern
range, rosy red, and all the open land lay fresh and colourful in, the
morning light. Adam felt no severe effects from his hard experience,
except an inordinate hunger, which Dismukes was more disposed to appease.
Still he cautioned Adam not to eat too much.

"Now, Wansfell, you must learn all about burros," began Dismukes. "The
burro is the most important part of your outfit. This desert would still
be a blank waste, unknown to white man, if it had not been for those
shaggy, lazy, lop-eared little donkeys. Whenever you get sore at one an'
feel inclined to kill him for some trick or other, just remember that you
could not get along without him.

"Most burros are alike. They hang near camp, as you see mine, hopin' they
can steal a bite of somethin' if you don't give it to them. They'll eat
paper, or 'most anythin' except greasewood. They love paper off bacon. I
had one once that ate my overalls. They never get homesick an' seem
contented in the most desolate places. I had a burro that was happy in
Death Valley, which's the hell hole of this wasteland. Burros are seldom
responsive to affection. They'll stand great abuse. Never expect any
thanks. Always patient. They are usually easy to catch. But they must
know you. Only way to catch them is to head them off. Then they stop.
Young burros are easily broke, an' will follow others. They must be
driven. Never knew but one that I could lead. Don't forget this. They
have the most wonderful endurance--never stumble or fall--an' can exist
on practically nothin'. When you turn them loose they'll nibble around a
while, then stop an' stand like rocks, never movin' for hours and hours,
as if they were wrapped in prehistoric thought. In the mornin' when you
start off on your day's travel the burros are fresh an' they drive fine.
But in the afternoon, when they get tired, they think of tricks. They'll
lie down--roll over on a pack--knock against a rock or tree. They'll get
together in a bunch and tangle the packs. When a burro intends to lie
down he humps his back an' wriggles his tail. It's hard to get burros
across streams. Scared of water! Strange, isn't that? I've had to carry
my burros many a time. But they'll climb or go down the steepest,
roughest mountain trail without fear. They can slide down a steep slope
that a man will not stick on. Burros have more patience and good
qualities, an' also cussedness, than any other beasts. They pick out
pardners an' stick together all the time. A big bunch of burros will pair
off regardless of sex. Never give each other up! They bray at night--an
awful sound till you get used to it. Remember this quick some night when
you're lifted out of a sleep by a terrible unearthly roar...Well, I guess
that's an introduction to desert burros. It's all serious fact, Wansfell,
as you'll learn, an' to your cost, unless you remember."

How singular for Adam to have the closing words of Dismukes reveal the
absorbing interest of this simple and practical talk about burros! It
amazed Adam to find that he had even been amused, ready to laugh.

"I'll remember," he asserted, with conviction.

"Dare say you will," replied Dismukes, "but the idea is you must remember
before you get into trouble, not after. I can't tell you when to know a
burro is goin' to trick you. I'm just givin' you facts as to the nature
of burros in general. You must study and learn them yourself. A man could
spend his life studyin' burros an' then have lots to learn. Most
prospectors lose half their time trackin' their burros. It's tryin' to
find burros that has cost many a desert man his life. An' this is why, if
you've chosen the desert to live in, you must learn the habits of the
burro. He's the camel of this Sahara."

With that the prospector appeared to have talked himself out for the
present, and he devoted his efforts to a selection of parts of his outfit
that manifestly he meant to turn over to Adam. At length having made the
selection to his satisfaction, he went out to wake up the burro Jinny. As
he led Jinny into camp all the other burros trooped along.

"Watch me pack an' then you try your hand on Jinny," he said.

Adam was all eyes while the prospector placed in position the old ragged
pads of skins and blankets, and the pack-saddles over them, to be buckled
carefully. It was all comparatively easy until it came to tying the pack
on with a rope in what Dismukes called a hitch. However after Dismukes
had accomplished it on three of the other burros, Adam believed he could
make a respectable showing. To this end he began to pack Jinny, and did
very well indeed till he got to the hitch, which was harder to tie than
it looked. After several attempts he succeeded. During this procedure
Jinny stood with one long ear up and the other down, as if nothing on
earth mattered to her.

"Carry the canteen of water yourself," said Dismukes, as he led Adam out
from under the tree and pointed west. "See where that long, low, sharp
ridge comes down to the desert?...Well, that's fifty miles. Around that
point lies a wide canyon. Indians live up that canyon. They are good
people. Stay with them--work for them till you learn the desert...Now as
to gettin' there. Go slow. Rest often in the shade of ironwoods like this
one. Take a good rest durin' the middle of the day. As long as you sweat
you're in no danger. But if your skin gets dry you need to get out of the
sun an' to drink. There are several springs along the base of this range.
Chocolate Mountains, they're called. By keepin' a sharp eye for patches
of bright-green brush you'll see where the water is. An' don't ever
forget that water is the same as life blood."

Adam nodded solemnly as he realised how the mere thought of thirst
constricted his throat and revived there a semblance of the pain he had
endured.

"Go slow. Maybe you'll take two or three days to reach the Indians. By
keepin' that ridge in sight you can't miss them."

The next move of the prospector was to take Adam around on the other side
of the tree and wave his hand at the expanse of desert.

"Now follow me an' get these landmarks in your mind. Behind us lies the
Chocolate Range. You see it runs down almost south-east. That shiny black
mountain standin' by itself is Pilot Knob. It's near Yuma, as of course
you remember. Now straight across from us a few miles lies a line of sand
dunes. They run same way as the Chocolates. But they're low----can't be
seen far. Do you make out a dim, grey, strange-lookin' range just over
the top of them?"

"Yes, I see that clearly. Looks like clouds," replied Adam.

"That's the Superstition Mountains. You will hear queer stories about
them. Most prospectors are afraid to go there, though it's said Pegleg
Smith's lost gold mine is somewhere in there. The Indians think the range
is haunted. An' every one who knows this desert will tell you how the
Superstition range changes somehow from time to time. It does change.
Those mountains are giant sand dunes an' they change their shape with the
shiftin' of the winds. That's the fact, but I'm not gainsayin' how
strange an' weird they are. An' I, for one, believe Pegleg Smith did find
gold there. But there's no water. An how can a man live without
water?...Well, to go on, that dim, purple, high range beyond the
Superstition lies across the line of Mexico...Now, lookin' round to the
right of the Superstitions, to the north-west, an' you see how the desert
slopes down an' down on all sides to a pale, hazy valley that looks like
a lake. It's the Salton Sink--below sea level--an' it's death for a man
to try to cross there at this season. It looks obscured an' small, but
it's really a whole desert in itself. In times gone by the Colorado River
has broken its banks while in flood an' run back in there to fill that
sink. Miles an' miles of fresh water which soon evaporated! Well, it's a
queer old earth an' this desert teaches much...Now look straight up the
valley. The ragged high peak is San Jacinto an' the other high one
farther north is San Gorgonio--two hundred miles from here. Prospectors
call this one Greyback because it has the shape of a louse. These
mountains are white with snow in the winter. Beyond them lies the Mohave
Desert, an immense waste, which hides Death Valley in its iron-walled
mountains...Now comin' back down the valley on this side you see the
Cottonwood range an' it runs down to meet the Chocolates. There's a break
in the range. An' still farther down there's a break in the Chocolate
range an' there's where your canyon comes out. You'll climb the pass some
day, to get on top of the Chuckwalla Mountains, an' from there you will
see north to the Mohave an' east to the Colorado--all stark naked desert
that seems to hit a man in the face. An', well, I guess I've done my best
for you."

Adam could not for the moment safely trust himself to speak. The expanse
of desert shown him, thus magnified into its true perspective, now
stretched out with the nature of its distance and nudity strikingly
clear. It did seem to glare menace into Adam's face. It made him tremble.
Yet there was fascination in the luring, deceitful Superstition range,
and a sublimity in the measureless sweep of haze and purple slope leading
north to the great peaks, and a compelling beckoning urge in the mystery
and unknown that seemed to abide beyond the bronze ridge which marked
Adam's objective point.

"I'll never forget your--your kindness," said Adam, finally turning to
Dismukes.

The prospector shook hands with him, and his grip was something to
endure.

"Kindness is nothin'. I owed you what a man owes to himself. But don't
forget anythin' I told you."

"I never will," replied Adam. "Will you let me pay you for the--the burro
and outfit?" Adam made this request hesitatingly, because he did not know
the law of the desert, and he did not want to offer what might be an
offence.

"Sure you got plenty of money?" queried Dismukes, gruffly.

"Indeed I have," rejoined Adam, eagerly.

"Then I'll take what the burro an' grub cost."

He named a sum that appeared very small to Adam, and, receiving the money
in his horny hands, he carefully deposited it in a greasy buckskin sack.

"Wansfell, may we meet again," he said in farewell. "Good luck an' good
bye...Don't forget."

"Good-bye," returned Adam, unable to say more.

With a whoop at the four burros and a slap on the haunch of one of them,
Dismukes started them southward. They trotted ahead with packs bobbing
and wagging. What giant strides Dismukes took! He seemed the incarnation
of dogged strength of manhood, yet something ludicrous clung about him in
his powerful action as well as in his immense squat form. He did not look
back.

Adam slapped Jinny on the haunch and started her westward.

The hour was still early morning. A rosy freshness of the sunrise still
slanted along the bronze slopes of the range and here and there blossoms
of ocatilla shone red. The desert appeared to be a gently rising floor of
gravel, sparsely decked with ironwood and mesquite, and an occasional
cactus, that, so far as Adam could see, did not harbour a living
creature. The day did not seem to feel hot, but Adam knew from the rising
heat veils that it was hot. Excitement governed his feelings. Actually he
was on the move, with an outfit and every hope to escape possible
pursuers, with the absolute surety of a hard yet wonderful existence
staring him in the face.

Not until he felt a drag in his steps did he think of his weakened
condition. Resting awhile in the shade of a tree, he let the burro graze
on the scant brush, and then went on again. Thus he travelled on, with
frequent rests, until the heat made it imperative for him to halt till
afternoon. About the middle of the afternoon he packed and set forth
again.

A direct line westward appeared to be bringing him closer to the slope of
the mountains; and it was not long before he saw a thick patch of green
brush that surely indicated a water hole. The very sight seemed to
invigorate him. Nevertheless, the promised oasis was far away, and not
before he had walked till he was weary and rested many times did he reach
it. To find water and grass was like making a thrilling discovery. Adam
unpacked Jinny and turned her loose, not, however, without some
misgivings as to her staying there.

Though he suffered from an extreme fatigue and a weakness that seemed to
be in both muscle and bone, a kind of cheer came to him with the
camp-fire duties. Never had he been so famished! The sun set while he
ate, and, despite his hunger, more than once he had to stop to gaze down
across the measureless slope, smoky and red, that ended in purple
obscurity. It struck him suddenly, as he was putting some sticks of dead
ironwood on the fire, how he had ceased to look back over his shoulder
toward the south. The fire sputtered, the twilight deepened, the silence
grew vast and vague. His eyelids were as heavy as lead, and all the
nerves and veins of his body seemed to run together and to sink into an
abyss the restfulness of which was unutterably sweet.

Some time during Adam's slumbers a nightmare possessed him. At the moment
he was about to be captured he awakened, cold with clammy sweat and
shaking in every limb. With violent start of consciousness, with fearful
uncertainty, he raised himself to peer around. The desert night
encompassed him. It was late, somewhere near the morning hour. Low down
over the dark horizon line hung a wan distorted moon that shone with
weird lustre. Adam saw the black mountain wall above him apparently
lifting to the stars, and the thick shadow of gloom filling the mouth of
the canyon where he lay. He listened. And then he breathed a long sigh of
relief and lay back in his blankets. The silence was that of a grave.
There were no pursuers. He had only dreamed. And he closed his eyes
again, feeling some blessed safeguard in the fact of his loneliness.

Dawn roused him to his tasks, stronger physically, eager and keen, but
more watchful than he had been the preceding day and with less thrill
than he had felt. He packed in half an hour and was travelling west when
the sun rose. Gradually with the return of his habit of watchfulness came
his former instinctive tendency to look back over his shoulder. He
continually drove this away and it continually returned. The only sure
banishment of it came through action, with its attendant exercise of his
faculties. Therefore he rested less and walked more, taxing his strength
to its utmost that morning, until the hot noon hour forced him to halt.
Then while Jinny nibbled at the bitter desert plants Adam dozed in the
thin shade of a mesquite. Close by grew a large ocatilla cactus covered
with red flowers among which bees hummed. Adam never completely lost
sense of this melodious hum, and it seemed to be trying to revive
memories that he shunned.

The sun was still high and hot when Adam resumed travel, but it was
westering and the slanting rays were bearable. After he got thoroughly
warmed up and sweating freely he did not mind the heat, and was able to
drive Jinny and keep up a strong stride for an hour at a time. His course
now led along the base of the mountain wall, and that long low edge which
marked his destination began to seem less unattainable. The afternoon
waned, the sun sank, the heat declined, and Jinny began to show signs of
weariness. It bothered Adam to keep her headed straight. He searched the
line where the desert slope met the mountain wall for another green
thicket of brush marking a water hole, but he could not see one. Darkness
overtook him and he was compelled to make dry camp. This occasioned him
some uneasiness, not that he did not have plenty of water for himself,
but because he worried about the burro and the possibility of not finding
water the next day. Nevertheless, he slept soundly.

On the following morning, when he had been tramping along for an hour or
more, he espied far ahead the unmistakable green patch of thicket that
heralded the presence of water. The sight stirred him. He walked well
that morning, resting only a couple of hours at noon; but the green
patch, after the manner of distant objects on the desert seemed just as
far away as when he saw it first. The time came, however, when there was
no more illusion and he knew he was getting close to the place. At last
he reached it, a large green thicket that choked the mouth of a narrow
canyon. He found a spring welling from under the mountain base and
sending a slender stream out to be swallowed by the sand.

Adam gave Jinny a drink before he unpacked her. There was a desirable
camp site, except that it lacked dead firewood close at hand. Adam
removed the pack, being careful to put boxes and bags together and to
cover them with the canvas. Then he started out to look for some dead
ironwood or mesquite to burn. All the desert growths, mostly greasewood
and mesquite, were young and green. Adam searched in one direction and
then in another, without so much as finding a stick. Next he walked west
along the rocky wall, and had no better success until he came to a deep
recession in the wall, full of brush; and here with considerable labour
he collected a bundle of dry sticks. With this he trudged back toward
camp.

Before long he imagined he saw smoke. "Queer how those smoke trees fool a
fellow," he said. And even after he thought he smelled smoke, he was sure
of deception. But upon nearing the green thicket that hid his camp he
actually did see thin blue smoke low down against the background of
rocky wall. The sight alarmed him. The only explanation which offered
itself to his perplexity was the possibility that a prospector had
arrived at the spring during his absence and had started a fire. Adam
began to hurry. His alarm increased to dread.

When he ran around the corner of thicket to his campsite he did see a
fire. It was about burned out. There was no prospector, no signs of packs
or burros. And Jinny was gone!

"What-what?" stammered Adam, dropping his bundle of sticks. He was
bewildered. A sense of calamity beset him. He ran forward.

"Where--where's my pack?" he cried.

The dying fire was but the smouldering remains of his pack. It had been
burned. Blankets, boxes, bags had been consumed. Some blackened utensils
lay on the ground near the charred remains of his canvas. Only then did
the truth of this catastrophe burst upon him. All his food had been
burned.



CHAPTER X

Some moments elapsed before the stunning effects of this loss had worn
off enough to permit Adam's mind to connect the cause of it with the
disappearance of Jinny.

After careful scrutiny of tracks near where the pack had lain, Adam
became convinced that Jinny was to blame for his destitution. His proofs
cumulated in a handful of unburnt matches that manifestly had been flung
and scattered away from the pack. The tricky burro, taking advantage of
Adam's absence, had pulled the canvas off the pack, and in tearing around
in the boxes for morsels to eat she had bitten into the box of matches
and set them on fire.

"I didn't think--I didn't think!" cried Adam, remembering the advice of
Dismukes.

Overcome by the shock, he sank upon the ground and fell prey to gloomy
and hopeless forebodings.

"I'll lie down and die," he muttered. But he could not so much as lie
down. He seemed possessed by a devil who would not permit the idea of
surrender or death. And this spirit likewise seemed to take him by the
hair of his head and lift him up to scatter the tears from his eyes. "Why
can't I cuss the luck like a man--then look around to see what's got to
be done?"

Jinny had made good her escape. When Adam gave up all hope of finding the
burro the hour was near sunset and it was high time that he should decide
what to do.

"Go on--to the Indian camp," he declared, tersely.

He decided to start at once and walk in the cool of night, keeping close
to the mountain wall so as not to lose his way. His spirits rallied.
Going back to the camp scene, he carefully gathered up all the unburnt
matches and placed them with others he carried in his pocket. He found
his bag of salt only partly consumed, and he made haste to secure it. His
canteen lay beside the spring.

The ruddy sunset and the stealing down of twilight and the encroaching
blackness of night had no charms for Adam now. His weariness increased as
the hours prolonged themselves. Short, frequent rests were more advisable
than long ones. The canopy of stars seemed in procession westward; and
many a bright one he watched sink behind the black slope of mountain
toward which he was bound. There were times when his eyes closed
involuntarily and all his body succumbed to sleep as he toiled on. These
drowsy spells always came to a painful end, for he would walk into a
thorny mesquite. Adam saw a weird, misshapen moon rise late over a dark
range to blanch the desert with wan light. He walked all night, and when
dawn showed him landmarks now grown familiar he had a moment of
exhilaration. The long, low-reaching ridge of mountain loomed right
before him. When he rounded the sharp, blunt corner his eyes were greeted
by sight of a deep-mouthed canyon yawning out of the range, and full of
palms and other green trees. He saw a white stream bed and the shine of
water, and what he took to be the roofs of palm-thatched huts.

"I've got there. This is the Indian canyon--where Dismukes told me to
stay," said Adam, with pride in his achievement. A first sight of what he
took to be habitations cheered him. Again that gloomy companion of his
mind was put to rout. It looked worth striving and suffering for--this
haven. The barrenness of the desert all around made this green canyon
mouth an oasis. It appeared well hidden, too. Few travellers passing
along the valley would have suspected its presence. The long, low ridge
had to be rounded before the canyon could be detected.

With steps that no longer dragged Adam began his descent of the canyon
slope. It was a long, gradual incline, rough toward the bottom, and the
bottom was a good deal farther down than it had seemed. At length he
reached the wide bed of white boulders, strewn about in profusion, where
some flood had rolled them. In the centre of this bed trickled a tiny
stream of water, slightly alkaline, Adam decided, judging from the white
stain on the margin of sand. Following the stream bed, he made his way up
into the zone of green growths, a most welcome change from the open glare
of the desert. He plodded on perhaps a mile, without reaching the yellow
thatch of palms.

"Will I--never--get there?" panted Adam, almost spent.

Finally Adam reached a well-defined trail leading up out of the stream
bed. He followed it to a level flat covered with willows and cottonwoods,
all full foliaged and luxuriantly green, and among which stately palms
swaddled in huge straw sheaths of their own making, towered with loftily
tufted crowns. The dust in the trail showed no imprints of feet. Adam
regarded that as strange. Still, he might be far from the camp or village
that had looked so close from the slope above. Suddenly he emerged from
the green covert into an open glade that contained palm-thatched huts,
and he uttered a little cry of joy. But it took only a second glance to
convince him that the huts were deserted, and his joy was short lived.
Hastily he roamed from one hut to another. He found ollas, great, clay
water jars, and pieces of broken pottery, and beds of palm leaves through
which the lizards rustled, but no Indians, nor any signs of recent
habitation.

"Gone! Gone!" he whispered, hoarsely. "Now--I'll starve--to death!"

His accents of despair contained a note of hardness, of indifference born
of his extreme fatigue. His eyes refused to stay open, and sleep glued
them shut. When he opened them again it was to the light of another day.
Stiff and lame, with a gnawing at the pit of his stomach and an oppressed
mind, Adam found himself in sad plight. Limping down to the stream, he
bathed his face and quenched his thirst, and then, removing his boots, he
saw that his feet were badly blistered. He decided to go barefoot, to
save his boots as well as to give the raw places a chance to heal.

Then without any more reflection he wrought himself into a supreme effort
of will, and it was so passionate and strong that he believed it would
hold as long as intelligence governed his actions.

"My one chance is to live here until the Indians come back," he decided.
"There's water here and green growths. It's an oasis where animals,
birds, living creatures come to drink...I must eat."

His first move was to make slow and careful examination of the trails.
One which led toward the mountain bore faint traces of footprints that a
recent rain had mostly obliterated. He lost this trail on the smooth rock
slope. The others petered out in the stones and sage. Then he searched
along the sand bars of the stream for tracks of living creatures; and he
found many, from cat tracks to the delicate ones of tiny birds. After
all, then, the desert was an abode for livings thing. The fact stimulated
Adam, and he returned to the glade to exercise every faculty he possessed
in the invention of instruments or traps or snares.

He had a knife and a pair of long leather boot strings. With these, and a
bundle of arrow-weed sticks, and a tough elastic bow of ironwood, and
strips of bark, and sharp bits of flinty rock Adam set to work under the
strong, inventive guiding spirit of necessity. As a boy he had been an
adept at constructing figure-four traps. How marvellous the accuracy of
memory! He had been the one to build traps for his brother Guerd, who had
not patience or skill, but who loved to set traps in the brier patches
for redbirds. Adam's nimble fingers slacked a little as his mind surveyed
that best part of his life. To what extremity a man could be reduced! The
dexterity of his idle youth to serve him thus in his terrible hour of
need! He remembered then his skill at making slings and following this
came the inspired thought of the possibility of constructing one. He had
a strong rubber band doubled round his pocketbook. Sight of it thrilled
him. He immediately left off experimenting with the bow and went to
making a sling. His difficulty was to find cords to make connections
between the rubbers and a forked prong, and also between the rubbers
and a carrier of some sort. For the latter he cut a triangular piece out
of the top of his boot. Always in the old days he had utilised leather
from cast-off shoes, and had even made a collection of old footgear for
this purpose. But where to get the cords? Bark would not be pliable and
strong enough. Somewhere from the clothes he wore he must extract cords.
The problem proved easy. His suspenders were almost new and they were
made of linen threads woven together. When he began to ravel them he made
the discovery that there was enough rubber in them to serve for a second
sling.

When the instrument was finished he surveyed it with satisfaction. He had
no doubt that the deadly accuracy he had once been master of with this
boyish engine of destruction would readily return to him. Then he went
back to work on the other contrivances he had planned.

A failing of the daylight amazed him. For an instant he imagined a cloud
had crossed the sun. But the sun had set and darkness was at hand.

"If days fly like this one, life will soon be over," he soliloquised,
with a sigh.

In one of the thatched huts he made a comfortable bed of palm leaves.
They seemed to retain the heat of the day. When Adam lay down to go to
sleep he experienced a vague, inexplicable sense that the very
strangeness of the present circumstance was familiar to him. But he could
not hold the sensation, so did not understand it. He was very tired and
very sleepy, and there was an uncomfortable empty feeling within him. He
looked out and listened, slowly aware of a great, soft, silent black
enveloping of his environment by the desert night. There seemed to be an
aloofness in the immensity of this approach and insulation--a nature
that, once comprehended, would be appalling. This thought just flashed
by. His mind seemed concerned with something between worry and fear which
persisted till he fell asleep.

In the dim, grey dawn he awoke and realised that it was hunger which had
awakened him. And he stole out on his imperative quest. He did not see
the sunrise nor the broadening day. His instinct was to hunt. Doves and
blackbirds visited the stream, and a covey of desert quail seemed tame;
but, owing to overeagerness and clumsiness, he did not succeed in killing
a single one. He followed them from place to place, all over the oasis,
until he lost sight of them. He baited his two traps with cactus fruit
and set them, and he prowled into every nook and cranny of the canyon
oasis. Lizards, rattlesnakes, rats, ground squirrels rustled from his
stealthy steps. It amazed him how wary they were. He might have caught
the rattlesnakes, but the idea of eating them was repugnant and
impossible to him. The day passed more swiftly than had yesterday. Its
close found him so tired he could scarcely stand, and with gnawing hunger
growing worse. The moment he lay down sleep claimed him.

Next day he had more and better opportunities to secure meat, but he
failed through haste and poor judgment and inaccuracy. His lessons were
severe and they taught him the stern need of perfection. That day he saw
a hawk poise high over a spot, dart down swiftly, to rise with a
squealing rat in its claws. Again he saw a shrike, marked dull grey and
black, sail down from a tree, fly very low along an open space of ground
to avoid detection, and pounce upon a lizard. Likewise he saw a horned
toad shoot out an extraordinary long and almost invisible tongue, to
snatch a bee from a flower. In these actions, Adam divined his first
proof of the perfection of desert hunters. They did not fail. But he was
not thus equipped.

All during the hot period of the day, when birds and animals rested, Adam
practised with his crude weapons. His grave, serious eagerness began to
give way to instinctive force, a something of fierceness that began to
come out in him. It seemed every moment had its consciousness of self,
of plight, of presaged agony, but only in flashes of thought, only
fleeting ideas instantly repudiated by the physical. He had given a
tremendous direction to his mind and it spent its force that way.

The following morning, just at sunrise, he located the covey of desert
quail. They had sailed down from the sage slopes to alight among the
willows bordering the stream. Adam crawled on the sand, noiseless as a
snake, his sling held in readiness. He was breathless and hot. His blood
gushed and beat in his veins. The very pursuit of meat made the saliva
drip from his mouth and made his stomach roll with pangs of emptiness.
Then the strain, the passion of the moment, were beyond his will to
control, even if there had not been a strange, savage joy in them. He
glided through the willows, never rustling a branch. The plaintive notes
of the quail guided him. Then through an opening he saw them--grey,
sleek, plump birds, some of them with tiny plumes. They were picking in
the damp sand near the water. Adam, lying flat, stretched his sling and
waited for a number of the quail to bunch. Then he shot. The heavy pebble
sped true, making grey feathers fly. One quail lay dead. Another fluttered
wildly The others ran off through the willows Adam rushed upon the
crippled quail, plunging down swift and hard; and catching it, he wrung
its neck. Then he picked up the other.

"I got 'em. I got 'em!" he cried, elated, as he felt the warm plump
bodies. It was a moment of strange sensation. Breathless, hot, wet with
sweat, shaking all over, he seemed to have reverted to the triumph of the
boy hunter. But there was more, and it had to do with the physical
reactions inside his body. It had to do with hunger.

Picking the feathers off these birds required too much time. Adam skinned
them, and cleaned them, and then washed them in the stream. That done, he
hurried back to his camp to make a fire and cook them. A quick method
would be to broil them. He had learned how to do this with strips of
meat. His hunger prevented him from waiting until the fire was right, and
it also made him hurry the broiling. The salt that he had rescued from
his pack now found its use, and it was not long before he had picked
clean the bones of these two quail.

Adam found that this pound or so of meat augmented his hunger. It changed
the gnawing sensations, in fact modified them, but it induced a greedy,
hot hunger for more. An hour after he had eaten, as far as appetite was
concerned, he seemed worse off. Then he set out again in quest of meat.

The hours flew, the day ended, night intervened, and another dawn broke.
Success again crowned his hunt. He feasted on doves. Thereafter, day by
day, he decimated the covey of tame quail and the flock of tame doves
until the few that were left grew wary and finally departed. Then he
hunted other birds. Quickly they learned the peril of the white man; and
the day came when few birds visited the oasis.

Next to invite Adam's cunning, were the ground squirrels, the trade rats,
and the kangaroo rats. He lived off them for days. But they grew so wary
that he had to dig them out of the ground, and they finally disappeared.
At this juncture, a pair of burros wandered into the oasis. They were
exceedingly wild. Adam failed to trap one of them. He watched for hours
from a steep place where he might have killed one by throwing down a
large rock. But it was in vain. At last, in desperation, holding his
naked knife in hand, he chased them over stones and through the willows
and under the thorny mesquites, all to no avail. He dropped from
exhaustion and weakness, and lay where he had fallen till the next
morning.

The pangs of hunger now were maddening. He had suffered them, more or
less, and then alleviated them with meat, and then felt them grow keener
and stronger until the edge wore off. After a few more meatless days the
pains gradually subsided. It was a relief. He began to force himself to
go out and hunt. Then an exceedingly good stroke of fortune befell him in
that he killed a rabbit. His strength revived, but also his pains.

Then he lost track of days, but many passed, and each one of them took
something from him in effort, in wakefulness, in spirit. His
aggressiveness diminished daily and lasted only a short while. The time
came when he fell to eating rattlesnakes and any living creatures in the
oasis that he could kill with a club.

But at length pain left him, and hunger, and then his peril revealed
itself. He realised it. The desire to kill diminished. With the cessation
of activity there returned a mental state in which he could think back
and remember all that he had done there, and also look forward to the
inevitable prospect. Every morning he dragged his weary body, now merely
skin and bones, out to the stream to drink, and then around and around in
a futile hunt. He chewed leaves and bark; he ate mesquite beans and
cactus fruit. After a certain number of hours the longer he went without
meat the less he cared for it, or for living. But when, now and then, he
did kill something to eat, then his instinct to survive flashed up with
revived hunger. The process of detachment from passion to live was one of
agony, infinitely worse than starvation. He had come to learn that
starvation would be the easiest and most painless of deaths. It would
have been infinitely welcome but for the thought that always followed
resignation--that he had sworn to fight. That kept him alive.

His skin turned brown and shrivelled up like dried parchment wrinkling
around bones. He did not recognise his hands, and when he lay flat on the
stones to drink from the stream, he saw reflected there a mummified mask
with awful eyes.

Longer and longer grew the hours wherein he slept by night and lay idle
by day, watching, listening, feeling. Something came back to him or was
born in him during these hours. But the truth of his state eluded him. It
had to do with peace, with dream, with effacement. He seemed no longer
real. The hot sun, the pleasant wind, the murmur of bees, the tinkle of
water, the everlasting processional march of the heat veils across the
oasis--with all these things his mind seemed happily concerned. At dawn
when he awoke his old instinct predominated, and he searched for meat.
But unless he had some success this questing mood did not last. It
departed as weakness and lassitude overbalanced the night's rest. For the
other hours of that day he lay in the sun, or the shade--it did not
matter--and felt or dreamed as he starved.

As he watched thus one drowsy noon hour, seeing the honeybees darting to
and fro, leaving the flowers to fly in straight line across the oasis,
there occurred to him the significance of their toil. He watched these
flying bees come and go; and suddenly it flashed over him that at the end
of the bee line there must be a hive. Bees made nests in trees. If he
could find the nest of the bees that were working here he would find
honey. The idea stimulated him.

Adam had never heard how bee hunters lined bees to their hives, but in
his dire necessity he instinctively adopted the correct method. He
watched the bees fly away, keeping them in sight as long as possible,
then he walked to the point he had marked as the last place he had seen
them, and here he watched for others. In half an hour the straight bee
flights led to a large dead cottonwood, hollow at top and bottom, a tree
he had passed hundreds of times. The bees had a hive in the upper chamber
of the trunk. Adam set fire to the tree and smoked the bees out. Then the
problem consisted of felling the tree, for he had not the strength to
climb it. The trunk was rotten inside and out. It burned easily, and he
helped along the work by tearing out pieces of the soft wood. Nearly all
the day was consumed in this toil, but at length the tree fell, splitting
and breaking to pieces. The hollow chamber contained many pounds of
honey.

Adam's struggle then was to listen to an intelligence that warned him
that if he made a glutton of himself it would cause him great distress,
and perhaps kill him. How desperately hard it was to eat sparingly of the
delicious honey! He tried, but did not succeed. That restraint was beyond
human nature. Nevertheless, he stopped far short of what he wanted. He
stored the honey away in ollas left there by the Indians.

All night and next day he paid it severe illness for the honey of which
he had partaken. The renewed exercise of internal organs that had ceased
to function produced convulsions and retching that made him roll on the
ground as a man poisoned. Life was tenacious in him and he recovered; and
thereafter, while the honey lasted, he slowly gained strength enough to
hunt once more for meat. But the fertile oasis was now as barren of
living creatures as was the naked desert outside. Adam's hope revived
with his barely recovered strength. He pitied himself in his moments of
deluded cheeerfulness, of spirit that refused to die. Long ago his
physical being had resigned itself, but his soul seemed beyond defeat.
How strange the variations of his moods! His intelligence told him that
sight of an animal would instantly revert him to the level of a beast of
prey or a stalking, bloodthirsty savage.

During these days his eyes scanned the bronze slope of mountain where the
tracks of the Indians had faded. They might return in time to save his
life. He hoped in spite of himself. In the early time of his imprisonment
there he had prayed for succour, but he had long since ceased that. The
desert had locked him in. Every moment, every hour that had passed, the
ceaseless hunts and then the dreaming spells, held their clear-cut niches
in his memory. Looked back at, they seemed far away in the past, even
those as close as yesterday; and every sensation was invested by a pang.
At night he slept the slumber of weakness, and so the mockery of the dark
hours did not make their terrible mark upon his mind. But the solemn
days! They sped swiftly by, yet, remembered, they seemed eternities.
Desert-bound days--immeasurably silent--periods of the dominance of the
blasting sun; days of infinite space, beyond time, beyond life, as they
might have been upon the burned-out moon! The stones that blistered
unprotected flesh, the sand and the dust, the rock-ribbed ranges of
bronze and rust--these tangible evidences of the earth seemed part of
those endless days. There were sky and wind, the domain of the open and
its master; but these existed for the eagles, and perhaps for the spirits
that wailed down the naked shingles of the desert. A man was nothing.
Nature filled this universe and had its inscrutable and ruthless laws.

How little the human body required to subsist on! Adam lived long on that
honey; and he gained so much from it that after it was gone the hunger
pangs revived a hundred times more fiercely than ever. They had been
deadened, which fact left him peace; revived by a windfall of food, they
brought him agony. It drove him out to hunt for meat. He became a
stalking spectre whose keen eye an insect could not have escaped. Hunger
now beset him with all its terrors magnified. To starve was nothing, but
to eat while starving was hell! The pangs were as if made by a serpent
with teeth of fire tearing at his vitals. Tighter and tighter he buckled
his belt until he could squeeze his waist in his long, skinny hands so
that his fingers met. Whenever his pains began to subside, like worms
growing quiet, then a rat or a stray bird or a lizard or a scaly little
side-winder rattlesnake would fall to his cunning, as if in mockery of
the death that ever eluded him; and next day the old starving pains would
convulse his bowels again.

So that he was driven, a gaunt and ever gaunter shadow of a man, up and
down the beaten trails of the oasis. Soon he would fall and die, be
sun-dried and blow away like powdered leather on the desert wind. By his
agonies he measured the inhospitableness and inevitableness of the
wasteland. Every thought had some connection with his torture or some
relation to his physical being in its fight for existence. In this desert
oasis were living things, creatures grown too wary for him now, and
willows, cacti, sages, that had conquered over the barrenness of the
desert. On his brain had been etched by words of steel the fact that no
power to fight was so great and unquenchable as that of man's. He lived
on, he staggered on through the solemn, glaring days.

One morning huge columnar clouds, white as fleece, with dark-grey shades
along their lower borders, blotted out the sun. How strangely they shaded
the high lights! Usually when clouds formed on the desert they lodged
round the peaks and hung there. But these were looming across the
wasteland, promising rain. A fresh breeze blew the leaves.

Adam was making his weary round of the oasis, dragging one foot like a
dead weight after the other. Once he thought he heard an unusual sound,
and with lips wide and with bated breath he listened. Only the mocking,
solemn silence! Often he was haunted by the memory of sounds. Seldom
indeed did he hear his own voice any more. Then he plodded on again with
the eyes of a ferret roving everywhere.

He had proceeded a few rods when a distant but shrill whistle brought him
to a startled and thrilling halt. It sounded like the neigh of a horse.
Often he had heard the brays of wild burros. In the intense silence, as
he strained his ears, he heard only the laboured, muffled throbs of his
heart. Gradually his hopes, so new and strange, subsided. Only another
mockery of his memory! Or perhaps it was a whistle of the wind in a
crevice, or of an eagle in flight.

Parting the willows before him as he walked, he went through the thicket
out into the open where the stream flowed. It was very low, just a tiny
rill of crystal-clear water. He was about to step forward toward the flat
rock where he always knelt to drink when another sound checked him. A
loud, high buzz, somehow startling! It had life.

Suddenly he espied a huge rattlesnake coiled in the sand, with head erect
and its rattles quivering like the wings of a poised humming bird. The
snake had just shed an ugly, brown, scaly skin, and now shone forth
resplendent, a beautiful clean grey with markings of black. It did not
show any fear. The flat triangular head, sleek and cunning, with its
deadly jewel-like eyes, was raised half a foot above the plump coils.

Adam's weary, hopeless hunting instinct sustained a vivifying,
galvanising shock. Like a flash he changed, beginning to tremble. He
dropped his sling as an ineffective weapon against so large a snake. His
staring eyes quivered like the vibrating point of a compass needle as he
tried to keep them on the snake and at the same time sight a stone or
club with which to attack his quarry. A bursting gush of blood, hot in
its tearing pangs, flooded out all over his skin, starting the sweat. His
heart lifted high in his breast, almost choking him. A terrible
excitement animated him and it was paralleled by a cold and sickening
dread that the snake would escape and pounds of meat be lost to him.

Never taking eyes off the snake, Adam stooped down to raise a large rock
in his hand. He poised it aloft and, aiming with intense keenness, he
flung the missile. It struck the rattlesnake a glancing blow, tearing its
flesh and bringing blood. With the buzz of a huge bee caught in a trap
the snake lunged at Adam, stretching its mutilated length on the sand.

It was long, thick, fat. Adam smelled the exuding blood and it inflamed
him. Almost he became a beast. The savage urge in him then was to fall
upon his prey and clutch it with his bare hands and choke and tear and
kill. But reason still restrained such limit as that. Stone after stone
he flung, missing every time. Then the rattlesnake began to drag itself
over the sand. Its injury did not retard a swift progress. Adam tried to
bound after it, but he was so weak that swift action seemed beyond him.
Still, he headed off the snake and turned it back. Stones were of no
avail. He could not hit with them, and every time he bent over to pick
one up he got so dizzy that he could scarcely rise.

"Club! Club! Got--have club!" he panted, hoarsely. And espying one along
the edge of the stream, he plunged to secure it. This moment gave the
rattlesnake time to get ahead. Wildly Adam rushed back, brandishing the
club. His tall gaunt form, bent forward, grew overbalanced as he moved,
and he made a long fall, halfway across the stream. He got up and reached
the snake in time to prevent it from escaping under some brush.

Then he swung the club. It was not easy to hit the snake crawling between
the stones. And the club was of rotten wood. It broke. With the blunt end
Adam managed to give his victim a blow that retarded its progress.

Adam let out a hoarse yell. Something burst in him--a consummation of the
instinct to kill and the instinct to survive. There was no difference
between them. Hot, and mad and weak, he staggered after the crippled
snake. The chase had transformed the whole internal order of him. He was
starving to death, and he smelled the blood of fresh meat. The action
infuriated him and the odour maddened him. Not far indeed was he then
from the actual seizing of that deadly serpent in his bare hands.

But he tripped and fell again in a long forward plunge. It brought him to
the sand almost on top of the snake. And here the rattlesnake stopped to
coil, scarcely two feet from Adam's face.

Adam tried to rise on his hands. But his strength had left him. And
simultaneously there left him the blood madness of that chase to kill and
eat. He realised his peril. The rattlesnake would strike him. Adam had
one flashing thought of the justice of it--one sight of the strange,
cold, deadly jewel eyes, one swift sense of the beauty and magnificent
spirit of this reptile of the desert, and then horror possessed him. He
froze to his marrow. The icy mace of terror had stunned him. And with it
had passed the flashing of his intelligence. He was only a fearful
animal, fascinated by another, dreading death by instinct. And as he
collapsed, sagging forward, the rattlesnake struck him in the face with
the stinging blow of a red-hot iron. Then Adam fainted.

CHAPTER XI

When Adam recovered consciousness he imagined he was in a dream.

But a dragging, throbbing pain in his face seemed actuality enough to
discredit any illusions of slumber. It was shady where he lay or else his
eyes were dimmed. Presently he made out that he reclined under one of the
palm-thatched roofs.

"I've been moved!" he cried, with a start. And that start, so full of
pain and queer dragging sensations as of a weighted body, brought back
memory to him. His mind whirled and darkened. The sickening horror of
close proximity to the rattlesnake, its smell and colour and deadly
intent, all possessed Adam again. Then it cleared away. What had happened
to him? His hand seemed to have no feeling; just barely could he move it
to his face, where the touch of wet cloth bandages told a story of his
rescue by someone. Probably the Indians had returned. It had been the
whistle of a horse that had thrilled him.

"I've--been--saved!" whispered Adam, and he grew dizzy. His eyes closed.
Dim shapes seemed to float over the surface of his mind; and there were
other strange answerings of his being to this singular deliverance.

Then he heard voices--some low, and others deep and guttural. Voices of
Indians! How strong the spirit of life in him! "I--I wasn't ready--to
die," he whispered. Gleams of sunlight low down, slanting on the palm
leaves, turning them to gold, gave him the idea that the time was near
sunset. In the corner of the hut stood ollas and bags which had not been
there before, and on the ground lay an Indian blanket.

A shadow crossed the sunlit gleams. An Indian girl entered. She had very
dark skin and straight hair as black as night. Upon seeing Adam staring
at her with wide-open eyes she uttered a cry and ran out. A hubbub of low
voices sounded outside the shack. Then a tall figure entered; it was that
of an Indian, dressed in the ragged clothes of a white man. He was old,
his dark bronze face like a hard wrinkled mask.

"How?" he asked, gruffly, as he bent over Adam. He had piercing black
eyes.

"All right--good," replied Adam, trying to smile. He sensed kindliness in
this old Indian.

"White boy want dig gold--get lost--no grub--heap sick belly?" queried
the Indian, putting a hand on Adam's flat abdomen.

"Yes--you bet," replied Adam.

"Hahh! Me Charley Jim--heap big medicine man. Me fix um. Snake bite no
hurt...White boy sick bad--no heap grub--long time."

"All right--Charley Jim," replied Adam.

"Hahh!" Evidently this exclamation was Charley Jim's expression for good.
He arose and backed away to the opening that appeared blocked by
dark-skinned, black-haired Indians. Then he pointed at one of them. Adam
saw that he indicated the girl who had first come to him. She appeared
very shy. Adam gathered the impression that she had been the one who had
saved him.

"Charley Jim, who found me--who saved me from that rattlesnake?"

The old Indian understood Adam well enough. He grinned and pointed at the
young girl, and pronounced a name that sounded to Adam like "Oella."

"When? How long ago? How many days?" asked Adam.

Charley Jim held up three fingers, and with that he waved the other
Indians from the opening and went out himself.

Adam was left to the bewildered thoughts of a tired and hazy mind. He had
no strength at all, and the brief interview, with its excitement, and
exercise of voice, brought him near the verge of unconsciousness. He
wavered amid dim shadows of ideas and thoughts. When that condition
passed, he awoke to dull, leaden pain in his head. And his body felt like
an empty sack the two sides of which were pasted together flat.

The sunlit gleams vanished and the shades of evening made gloom around
him. He smelled fragrant wood smoke, and some other odour, long
unfamiliar, that brought a watery flow to his mouth and a prickling as of
many needles. Then in the semi-darkness one of the Indians entered and
knelt beside him. Adam distinguished the face of the girl, Oella. She
covered him with a blanket. Very gently she lifted his head, and moved
her body so that it would support him. The lifting hurt Adam; he seemed
to reel and sway, and a blackness covered his sight. The girl held him
and put something warm and wet between his lips. She was trying to feed
him with a stick or a wooden spoon. The act of swallowing made his throat
feel as if it was sore. What a slow process! Adam rather repelled than
assisted his nurse, but his antagonism was purely physical and
involuntary. Whatever the food was, it had no taste to him. The heat of
it, however, and the soft, wet sensation, grew pleasant. He realised when
hunger awakened again in him, for it ran like a shot through his vitals.

Then the girl laid him back, spread the blanket high, and left him. The
strange sensation of fullness, of movement inside Adam's breast, occupied
his mind until drowsiness overcame him.

Another day awakened Adam to the torture of reviving hunger and its
gnawing pains, so severe that life seemed unwelcome. The hours were weary
and endless. But next day was not so severe, and thereafter gradually he
grew better and was on the road to a slow recovery.

The Indians that had befriended Adam were of a family belonging to the
Coahuila tribe. Charley Jim appeared to be a chief of some degree,
friendly toward the whites, and nomadic in spirit, as he wandered from
oasis to oasis. He knew Dismukes, and told Adam that the prospector and
he had found gold up this canyon. Charley Jim's family consisted of
several squaws, some young men, two girls, of whom Oella was the younger,
and a troop of children, wild as desert rats.

Adam learned from Charley Jim that the head of this canyon contained a
thicket of mesquite trees, the beans of which the Indians prized as food.
Also there were abundant willows and arrow-weeds, with which wood the
Indians constructed their huge, round, basket granaries. The women of the
family pounded the mesquite beans into meal or flour, which was dampened
and put away for use. Good grass and water in this remote canyon were
further reasons why Charley Jim frequented it. But he did not appear to
be a poor Indian, for he had good horses, a drove of burros, pack outfits
that were a mixture of Indian and prospector styles, and numerous tools,
utensils, and accoutrements that had been purchased at some freighting
post.

Adam was so long weak, and dependent upon Oella, that when he did grow
strong enough to help himself the Indian girl's habit of waiting upon him
and caring for him was hard to break. She seemed to take it for granted
that she was to go on looking after him; and the fineness and
sensitiveness of her, with the strong sense of her delight in serving
him, made it impossible for Adam to offend her. She was shy and reserved,
seldom spoke, and always maintained before him a simplicity, almost a
humility, as of servant to master. With acquaintance, too, the still,
dark, impassive face of her had become attractive to look at, especially
her large, black, inscrutable eyes, soft as desert midnight. They watched
Adam at times when she imagined he was unaware of her scrutiny, and the
light of them then pleased Adam, and perturbed him also, reminding him of
what an old aunt had told him once, "Adam, my boy, women will always love
you!" The prophecy had not been fulfilled, Adam reflected with sadness,
and in Oella's case he concluded his fancies were groundless.

Still, he had to talk to somebody or grow into the desert habit of
silence, and so he began to teach Oella his language and to learn hers.
The girl was quick to learn and could twist her tongue round his words
better than he could round hers. Moreover, she learned quickly anything
he cared to teach her; and naturally even in the desert there were
customs into which Adam preferred to introduce something of the white
man's way. Indians were slovenly and dirty, and Adam changed this in
Oella's case. The dusky desert maiden had little instinctive vanities
that contact with him developed.

One day, when the summer was waning and Adam was getting about on his
feet, still a gaunt and stalking shadow of his former self, but gaining
faster, the old Indian chief said:

"White man heap strong--ride--go away soon?"

"No, Charley Jim, I want stay here," replied Adam.

"Hahh!" replied the Indian, nodding.

"Me live here--work with Indian. White man no home--no people. He like
Indian. He work--hunt meat for Indian:"

"Heap sheep," replied Charley Jim, with a slow, expressive wave of his
hand toward the mountain peaks.

"Charley Jim take white man's money, send to freight post for gun,
shells, clothes, flour, bacon--many things white man need?"

"Hahh!" The chief held up four fingers and pointed west, indicating what
Adam gathered was four days' ride to a freighting post.

"Charley Jim no tell white men about me."

The Indian took the money with grave comprehension, and also shook the
hand Adam offered.

The Indian boys who rode away to the freighting post on the river were
two weeks in returning. To celebrate the return of the boys Adam
suggested a feast and that he would bake the bread and cook the bacon.
Oella took as by right the seat of honour next to Adam, and her habitual
shyness did not inhibit a rather hearty appetite. On this occasion Adam
finally got the wild little half-naked, dusky children to come to him.
They could not resist sweets.

A shining new rifle, a Winchester .44, was the cynosure of all eyes in
that Indian encampment. When Adam took it out to practice, the whole
family crowded around to watch, with the intense interest of primitive
people who marvelled at the white man's weapon. Only the little children
ran from the sharp report of the rifle, and they soon lost their fear.
Whenever Adam made a good shot it was Oella who showed pride where the
others indicated only their wonder.

Thus the days of simplicity slipped by, every one of which now added to
Adam's fast-returning strength. Flour and bacon quickly built up his
reduced weight; and as for rice and dried fruits, they were so delicious
to Adam that he feared it would not be a great while before he must needs
send for more. He remembered the advice of Dismukes anent the value of
his money.

The hot summer became a season of the past. The withering winds ceased to
blow. In the early autumn days Adam began his hunting. Charley Jim led
the way keeping behind a fringe of mesquite, out to a grey expanse of
desert, billowy and beautiful in the ruddy sunlight. They crawled through
sage to the height of a low ridge, and from here the chief espied game.
He pointed down a long grey slope, but Adam could see only a monotonous
beauty, spotted by large tufts of sage, and here and there a cactus. Then
the Indian took Adam's sombrero, and the two scarfs he had, one red and
one blue, and tied them round the hat, which he elevated upon a stick.
After that he bent his falcon gaze on the slope. Adam likewise gazed,
with infinite curiosity, thrill, and expectation.

"Hahh!" grunted Charley Jim presently, and his sinewy dark hand clutched
Adam. Far down vague grey spots seemed to move. Adam strained his eyes.
It seemed a long time till they approached close enough to distinguish
their species.

"Antelope, by jiminy!" ejaculated Adam, in excitement.

"Heap jiminy--you bet!" responded Charley Jim.

Adam was experiencing that thrill to its utmost, and also other
sensations of wonder and amaze. Was it possible these wild-looking desert
creatures were actually so curious about the brightly decked sombrero
that they could not resist approaching it to see what it was? There they
came, sleek, tawny-grey, alert, deerlike animals, with fine pointed
heads, long ears, and white rumps. The bold leader never stopped at all.
But some of his followers hesitated, trotted to and fro, then came on.
How graceful they were! How suggestive of speed and wildness! Adam's
finger itched to shoot off the gun and scare them to safety. "Fine
hunter, I am," he muttered. "This is murder...Why on earth does a man
have to eat meat?" The Indian beside him was all keen and strung with his
instincts and perhaps they were truer to the needs of human life.

Soon, however, all of Adam's sensations were blended in a thrilling
warmth of excitement. The antelope were already within range, and had it
not been for Charley Jim's warning hand Adam would not have been able to
resist the temptation to fire. Perhaps he would have missed then, for he
certainly shook in every muscle, as a man with the ague. Adam forced
himself to get the better of this spell of nerves.

"Heap soon!" whispered Charley Jim, relaxing the pressure of his hand on
Adam. The leader approached to within fifty feet, with several other
antelope close behind, when the Indian whistled. Like statues they
became. Then Adam fired. The leader fell, and also one of those behind
him. The others flashed into grey speeding shapes with rumps darting
white; and Adam could only stare in admiring wonder at their incomparable
swiftness.

"Hahh!" ejaculated the chief, in admiration. "White man heap hunter--one
shoot--two bucks. Him eye like eagle!"

Thus did a lucky shot by Adam, killing two antelope when he aimed at only
one, initiate him into his hunting on the desert and win for him the
Indian soubriquet of Eagle.

And so began Adam's desert education. He had keen appreciation of his
good fortune in his teacher. The Coahuila chief had been born on that
desert and he must have been nearly sixty years old. As a hunter he had
the eye of a mountain sheep, the ear of a deer, the nose of a wolf. He
had been raised upon meat. He loved the stalking of game. Thus Adam,
through this old Indian's senses and long experience and savage skill,
began to see the life of the desert. It unfolded before his eyes,
manifold in its abundance, infinitely strange and marvellous in its
ferocity and ability to survive. Adam learned to see as the Indian, and
had his own keen mind to analyse and weigh and ponder. But his knowledge
came slowly, painfully, hard earned, in spite of its thrilling
time-effacing quality.

In those wonderful autumn days Adam learned that the antelope could go
long without water, that nature had endowed it with great speed to escape
the wolves and cats of the desert, that from its prominent eyes it could
see in any direction, that its colouring was the protective grey of the
sage plains.

He learned that the lizard could change its colour like the chameleon,
adapting itself to the colour of the rock upon which it basked in the
sun, that it could dart across the sands almost too swiftly for the eye
to follow.

He learned that the grey desert wolf was a king of wolves, living high in
the mountains and coming down to the flats; and there, by reason of his
wonderfully developed strength and speed, chasing and killing his prey in
the open.

He learned that the coyote was an eater of carrion, of rabbits and rats,
of birds' eggs, of mesquite beans, of anything that happened to come its
way--a grey, skulking, cunning beast, cowardly as the wolf was brave,
able like the antelope and the jack rabbit, to live without water, and
best adapted of all beasts to the desert.

He learned that the jack rabbit survived through the abnormal development
of his ears and legs--the first extraordinarily large organs built to
catch sounds, and the latter long, strong members that enabled him to run
with ease away from his foes. And he learned that the cottontail rabbit
lived in thickets near holes into which he could pop, and that his
fecundity in reproducing his kind saved his species from extinction.

Adam learned about the desert ants, the kangaroo rats, the trade rats,
the horned toads, the lizards, the snakes, the spiders, the bees, the
wasps--the way they lived and what they lived upon. How marvellously
nature adapted them to their desert environment, each perfect, each in
its place, each fierce and self-sufficient, each fulfilling its
mysterious destiny of sacrificing its individual life to the survival of
its species! How cruel nature was to the individual--how devoted to the
species!

Adam learned that the same fierce life of all desert creatures was
likewise manifested in the life of the plants. By thorns and poison sap
and leafless branches, and by roots penetrating far and deep, and by
organs developed to catch and store water, so the plants of the desert
outwitted the beasts and endured the blasting sun and drought. How beyond
human comprehension was the fact that a cactus developed a fluted
structure less exposed to heat--that a tree developed a leaf that never
presented its broad surface to the sun!

The days passed, with ruddy sunrises, white, glaring, solemn noons, and
golden sunsets. The simplicity and violence of life on the desert passed
into Adam's being. The greatness of stalking game came to him when the
Indian chief took him to the heights after bighorn sheep but it was not
the hunting and killing of this wariest and finest of wild beasts,
wonderful as it was, that constituted for Adam something great. It was
the glory of the mountain heights. All his life he had dreamed of high
places, those to which he could climb physically and those that he
aspired to spiritually. Lost indeed were hopes of the latter, but of the
former he had all-satisfying fulfilment. Adam dated his changed soul from
the day he first conquered the heights. There, on top of the Chocolate
range, his keen sight, guided by the desert eyes of the old Indian,
ranged afar over the grey valleys and red ranges to the Rio Colorado,
down the dim wandering line of which he gazed, to see at last Picacho, a
dark, purple mass above the horizon. From the moment Adam espied this
mountain he suffered a return of memory and a sleepless and eternal
remorse. The terrible past came back to him: never again, he divined, to
fade while life lasted. His repentance, his promise to Dismukes, his vow
to himself, began there on the heights with the winds sweet and strong in
his face and the dark blue of the sky over his head, and beneath the vast
desert, illimitable on all sides, lonely and grand, the abode of silence.

The days passed into months. Far to the north the dominating peaks of San
Jacinto and San Gorgonio took on the pure-white caps of snow, that slowly
spread as the days passed, down the rugged slopes. Winter abided up
there. But on the tops of the Chocolate and Chuckwalla ranges no snow
fell, although the winter wind sometimes blew cold and bleak. Adam loved
the wind of the heights. How cold and pure, untainted by dust or life or
use! He grew to have the stride of the mountaineer. And the days passed
until that one came in which the old Indian chief let Adam hunt alone.
"Go, Eagle!" he said, with sorrow for his years and pride in the youth of
his white friend. "Go!" And the slow gestures of his long arms were as
the sailing movement of the wings of an eagle.

The days passed, and few were they that did not see Adam go out in the
sweet, cool dawn, when the east glowed like an opal, to climb the bronze
slope, sure footed as a goat, up and up over the bare ridges and through
the high ravines where the lichens grew and a strange, pale flower
blossomed, on and on over the jumble of weathered rock to the heights.
And there he would face the east with its glorious burst of golden fire,
and spend the last of that poignant gaze on the sunrise-crowned glory of
old Picacho. The look had the meaning of a prayer to Adam, yet it was
like a blade in his heart. In that look he remembered his home, his
mother, his brother, and the vivid days of play and love and hope, his
fateful journey west, his fall and his crime and his ruin. Alone on the
heights, he forced that memory to be ever more vivid and torturing. Hours
he consecrated to remorse, to regret, to suffering, to punishment. He
lashed his soul with bitter thoughts, lest he forget and find peace. Life
and health and strength had returned to him in splendid growing measure
which he must use to pay his debt.

But there were other hours. He was young. Red blood throbbed in his
veins, and action sent that blood in a flame over his eager body. To
stride along the rocky heights was something splendid. How free--alone!
It connected Adam's present hour with a remote past he could not
comprehend. He loved it. He was proud that the Indians called him Eagle.
For to watch the eagles in their magnificent flights became a passion
with him. The great blue condors and the grisly vultures and the
bow-winged eagles--all were one and the same to him, indistinguishable
from one another as they sailed against the sky, sailing, sailing so
wondrously, with never a movement of wings, or shooting across the
heavens like thunderbolts, or circling around and upward to vanish in the
deep blue. There were moments when he longed to change his life to that
of an eagle, to find a mate and a nest on a lofty crag, and there, ringed
by the azure world above and with the lonely barren below, live with the
elements.

Here on the heights Adam was again visited by that strange sensation,
inexplicable and illusive and fast fleeting, which had been born in him
one lonely hour in the desert below. Dismukes had told him how men were
lured by the desert and how they all had their convictions as to its
cause, and how they missed the infinite truth.

"It will come to me!" cried Adam as he faced the cool winds.

Stalking mountain sheep upon the mighty slopes was work to make a man. It
was a wild and perilous region of jagged ridges and hare slants and loose
slopes of weathered rocks. The eyes of the sheep that lived at this
height were like telescopes; they had the keenest sight of all wild
beasts. The marvellous organ of vision stood out on the head as if it
were the half of a pear, so that there was hardly an angle of the compass
toward which a sheep could not see. Like the antelope, mountain sheep
were curious and could be lured by a bright colour and thereby killed.
But Adam learned to abhor this method. He pitted his sight and his
strength and endurance against those of the sheep. In this way he
magnified the game of hunting. His exhaustion and pain and peril he
welcomed as lessons to the end that his knowledge and achievement must be
in a measure what Dismukes might have respected. Failure to Adam was
nothing but a spur to renewed endeavour. The long climb, the crumbling
ledge, the slipping rock, the deceitful distance, the crawl over sharp
rocks, the hours of waiting--these too he welcomed as one who had set
himself limitless tasks. Then when he killed a ram and threw it over his
shoulder to carry it down the mountain, he found labour which was harder
even than the toil of the gold mill at Picacho. To stride erect with a
rifle in one hand, and a hold upon a heavy sheep with the other, down the
slippery ledges, across the sliding banks, over the cracked and rotten
lava, from the sunset-lighted heights to the gloomy slopes below--this
was how in his own estimation he must earn and keep the respect of the
Indians. They had come to look up to the white man they 'called' Eagle.
He taught them things to do with their hands, work of white men which
bettered their existence, and he impressed them the more by his mastery of
some of their achievements.

The days passed into months. Summer came again and the vast oval bowl of
desert glowed in the rosy sunrise, glared in the white noon hours, and
burned at sunset. The moving heat veils smoked in rippling clouds over
the Salton Sink; the pale wavering line of the Superstition Mountains
changed mysteriously with each day; the fog clouds from the Pacific
rolled over to lodge against the fringed peaks. Time did not mean
anything to the desert, though it worked so patiently and ceaselessly in
its infinite details. The desert might have worked for eternity. Its
moments were but the months that were growing into years of Adam's life.
Again he saw San Jacinto and San Gorgonio crowned with snow that gleamed
so white against the blue.

Once Charley Jim showed Adam a hole in the gravel and sand of a gulley,
where Dismukes had dug out a pocket of gold. Adam gathered that the
Indian had brought Dismukes here, "White man gold mad," said the chief.
"No happy, little gold. Want dig all--heap hog--dam' fool!"

So Charley Jim characterised Dismukes. Evidently there had been some just
cause, which he did not explain, for his bringing Dismukes into this
hidden canyon. And also there was some significance in his bringing Adam
there. Many had been the rewards of Charley Jim and his family for saving
and succouring Adam.

"Indian show Eagle heap gold," said Charley Jim, and led him to another
gully opening down into the canyon. In the dry sand and gravel of this
wash Adam found gold. The discovery gave him a wonderful thrill. But it
did not drive him mad. Adam divined in the dark, impassive face of his
guide, something of the Indian's contempt for a white man's frenzy over
gold.

Then the chief said in his own tongue that the Indian paid his debt to
friend and foe, good for good and evil for evil--that there were white
men to whom he could trust the secret treasures of the desert.

The day came when something appeared to stimulate the wandering spirit of
the Coahuila chief. Taking his family and Adam, he began a nomadic quest
for change of scene and work and idleness. The life suited Adam, for he
knew Charley Jim did not frequent the trails of white men.

No time so swiftly fleeting as days and nights out in new and strange
places of the desert! Adam kept track of time by the coming and going of
the white crowns of snow on the peaks, and by the green and gold and then
barren grey of the cottonwoods.

Like coming home was it to get back to the oasis in the canyon of the
Chocolate range. Adam loved the scene of his torture. Every stone, every
tree, was a familiar friend, and seemed to whisper welcome to him. Here
also had passed the long, long months of mental anguish. On this flat
rock he had sat a whole day in hopeless pain. In this sandy-floored aisle
of palms he had walked hour by hour, through many weary days, possessed
by the demon of remorse.

Best of all, out there reached the grey, endless expanse of desert, so
lonely and melancholy and familiar, extending away to the infinitude of
purple distance; and there loomed the lofty, bare heights of rock which,
when he scaled them as an Indian climbing to meet his spirits, seemed to
welcome him with sweet, cold winds in his face. How he thrilled at sight
of the winding gleam of the Rio Colorado! What a shudder, as keen and new
a pang as ever, wrenched him at sight of Picacho! It did not change. Had
he expected that? It towered there in the dim lilac colours of the desert
horizon, colossal and commanding, immutable and everlasting, like the sin
he had committed in its shadow.

Somewhere in the shadow of that domed and turreted peak lay the grave of
his brother Guerd.

"I'll go back some day!" whispered Adam, and the spoken words seemed the
birth of a long-germinating idea. Picacho haunted him. It called him. It
was the place that had given the grey colour and life to his destiny. And
suddenly into his memory flashed an image of Margarita. Poor, frail,
dusky-eyed girl! She had been but the instrument of his doom. He held her
guiltless--long ago he had forgiven her. But memory of her hurt. Had she
not spoken so lightly of what he meant to hold sacred? "Ah, senor--so
long ago and far away!" Faithless, mindless, soulless! Adam would never
forget. Never a sight of a green palo verde but a pang struck through his
breast!

At sunset the old chief came to Adam, sombre and grave, but with dignity
and kindness tempering the seriousness of his aspect. He spoke the
language of his people.

"White man, you are of the brood of the eagle. Your heart is the heart of
an Indian. Take my daughter Oella as your wife."

Long had Adam feared this blow, and now it had fallen. He had tried to
pay his debt, but it could not be paid.

"No, chief, the white man cannot marry Oella. He has blood upon his
hands--a price on his head. Some day--he might have to hang for his
crime. He cannot be dishonest with the Indian girl who saved him."

Perhaps the chief had expected that reply, but his inscrutable face
showed no feeling. He made one of his slow, impressive gestures--a wave
of his hand, indicating great distance and time; and it meant that Adam
was to go.

Adam dropped his head. That decree was irrevocable and he knew it was
just. While he packed for a long journey twilight stole down upon the
Indian encampment. Adam knew, when he faced Oella in the shadow of the
palms, that she had been told. Was this the Indian maiden who had been so
shy, so strange? No, this seemed a woman of full, heaving breast, whose
strong, dark face grew strained, whose magnificent eyes, level and
piercing, searched his soul. How blind he had been! All about her seemed
eloquent of woman's love. His heart beat with quick, heavy throbs.

"Oella, your father has ordered me away," said Adam. "I am an outcast. I
am hunted. If I made you my wife it might be to your shame and sorrow."

"Stay. Oella is not afraid. We will hide in the canyons," she said.

"No. I have sinned. I have blood on my hands. But, Oella, I am not
dishonourable...I will not cheat you."

"Take me," she cried, and the soft, deep-toned, passionate voice shook
Adam's heart. She would share his wanderings.

"Good-bye, Oella," he said, huskily. And he strode forth to drive his
burro out into the lonely, melancholy desert night.



CHAPTER XII

The second meeting between Adam and the prospector Dismukes occurred at
Tecopah, a mining camp in the Mohave Desert.

The mining camp lay in a picturesque valley where green and grey growths
marked the course of the gravel-lined creek, and sandy benches spread out
to dark, rocky slopes, like lava, that heaved away in the bleak ranges.

It was in March, the most colourful season in the Mohave, that Adam
arrived at Tecopah to halt on a grassy bench at the outskirts of the
camp. A little spring welled up here and trickled down to the creek. It
was drinking water celebrated among desert men, who had been known to go
out of their way to drink there. The tell-tale ears of Adam's burros
advised him of the approach of some one, and he looked up from his camp
tasks to find a familiar figure approaching him. He rubbed his eyes. Was
that strange figure the same as the one so vividly limned on his memory?
Squat, huge, grotesque, the man coming toward him was Dismukes! His
motley, patched garb, his old slouch hat, his boots yellow with clay and
alkali, appeared the same he had worn on the memorable day Adam's eyes
had unclosed to see them.

Dismukes drove his burros up to the edge of the bench, evidently having
in mind the camp site Adam occupied. When he espied Adam he hesitated
and, gruffly calling to the burros, he turned away.

"Hello, Dismukes!" called Adam. "Come on. Plenty room to camp here."

The prospector halted stolidly and slowly turned back. "You know me?" he
asked, gruffly, as he came up.

"Yes, I know you, Dismukes," replied Adam, offering his hand.

"You've got the best of me," said Dismukes, shaking hands. He did not
seem a day older, but perhaps there might have been a little more grey in
the scant beard. His great ox eyes, rolling and dark, bent a strange,
curious glance over Adam's lofty figure.

"Look close. See if you can recognise a man you befriended once,"
returned Adam. The moment was fraught with keen pain and a melancholy
assurance of the changes time had made. Strong emotion of gladness, too,
was stirring deep in him. This was the man who had saved him and who had
put into his mind the inspiration and passion to conquer the desert.

Dismukes was perplexed, and a little ashamed. His piercing gaze was that
of one who had befriended many men and could not remember.

"Stranger, I give it up. I don't know you."

"Wansfell," said Adam, his voice full.

Dismukes stared. His expression changed, but it was not with recognition.

"Wansfell! Wansfell!" he ejaculated. "I know that name... Hell, yes! I've
heard of you all over the Mohave! I'm sure glad to meet you. But, I never
met you before."

The poignancy of that meeting for Adam reached a climax in the absolute
failure of Dismukes to recognise him. Last and certain proof of change!
The desert years had transformed Adam Larey, the youth, into the man
Wansfell. For the first moment in all that time did Adam feel an absolute
sense of safety. He would never be recognised, never be apprehended for
his crime. He seemed born again.

"Dismukes, how near are you to getting all your five hundred thousand?"
queried Adam, with a smile. There seemed to be a sad pleasure in thus
baffling the old prospector.

"By Gad! how'd you know about that?" exclaimed Dismukes.

"You told me."

"Say, Wansfell! Am I drunk, or are you a mind reader?" demanded the
prospector, bewildered. "Comin' along here I was thinkin' about that five
hundred thousand. But I never told any one--except a boy once--an' he's
dead."

"How about your white-faced burro Jinny--the one that used to steal
things out of your pack?" asked Adam, slowly.

"Jinny Jinny!" ejaculated Dismukes, with a start. His great ox eyes
dilated and something of shock ran through his huge frame. "That burro I
never forgot. I gave her away to a boy who starved on the desert. She
came back to me. Tracked me to Yuma. An' you--you--how'd you know Jinny
Man, who are you?"

"Dismukes, I was the boy you saved--down under the Chocolates--ninety
miles from Yuma. Remember it was Jinny saw me wandering in a circle, mad
with thirst. You saved me--gave me Jinny and a pack--told me how to learn
the desert--sent me to the Indians...Dismukes, I was that boy. I am
now--Wansfell."

The prospector seemed to expand with the increased strain of his gaze
into Adam's eyes, until the instant of recognition.

"By God! I know you now!" he boomed, and locked his horny hands on Adam
in a gladness that was beyond the moment and had to do, perhaps, with a
far-past faith in things. "I thought you died on the desert. Jinny's
comin' back seemed proof of that...But you lived! You--that boy, tall as
a mescal plant--with eyes of agony. I never forgot. An' now you're
Wansfell!"

"Yes, my friend. Life is strange on the desert," replied Adam. "And now
unpack your burros. Make camp with me here. We'll eat and talk together."

A sunset, rare on the Mohave, glowed over the simple camp tasks of these
men who in their wanderings had met again. Clouds hung along the mountain
tops, coloured into deeper glory as the sun sank. The dark purples had an
edge of silver, and the fleecy whites turned to pink and rose, while
golden rays shot up from behind the red-hazed peaks. Over the valley fell
a beautiful and transparent light, blending and deepening until a shadow
as blue as the sea lay on Tecopah.

While the men ate their frugal repast they talked, each gradually growing
used to a situation that broke the desert habit of silence. There was an
unconscious deference of each man toward the other--Wansfell seeing in
Dismukes the saviour of his life and a teacher who had inspired him to
scale the heights of human toil and strife; Dismukes finding in Wansfell
a development of his idea, the divine spirit of man rising above the
great primal beasts of the desert, self-preservation and ferocity.

"Wansfell, have you kept track of time?" asked Dismukes, reflectively, as
he got out a black, stumpy pipe that Adam remembered.

"No. Days and weeks glide into years--that's all I can keep track of,"
replied Adam.

"I never could, either. What is time on the desert? Nothin'. Well, it
flies, that's sure. An' it must be years since I met you first down there
in the Colorado. Let's see. Three times I went to Yuma--once to
Riverside--an' twice to San Diego. Six trips inside. That's all I've made
to bank my money since I met you. Six years. But, say, I missed a year or
so."

"Dismukes, I've seen the snows white on the peaks eight times. Eight
years, my friend, since Jinny cocked her ears that day and saved me. How
little a thing life is in the desert!"

"Eight years!" echoed Dismukes, and wagged his huge shaggy head. "It can't
be...Well, well, time slips away. Wansfell, you're a young man, though I
see grey over your temples. And you can't have any more fear because of
that--that crime you confessed to me. Lord! man, no one would ever know
you as that boy!"

"No fear that way any more. But fear of myself, Dismukes. If I went back
to the haunts of men I would forget."

"Ah yes, yes!" sighed Dismukes. "I understand. I wonder how it'll be with
me when my hour comes to leave the desert. I wonder."

"Will that be long?"

"You can never tell. I might strike it rich to-morrow. Always I dream I'm
goin' to. It's the dream that keeps a prospector nailed to the lonely
wastes."

Indeed, this strange man was a dreamer of dreams. Adam understood him
now, all except that obsession for just so much gold. It seemed the only
flaw in a great character. But the fidelity to that purpose was great, as
it was inexplicable.

"Dismukes, you had a third of your stake when we met years ago. How much
now?"

"More than half, Wansfell, safe in banks an' some hid away," came the
answer, rolling and strong. What understanding of endless effort abided
in that voice!

"A quarter of a million! My friend, it is enough. Take it and go--fulfil
your cherished dream. Go before it's too late."

"I've thought of that. Many times when I was sick an' worn out with the
damned heat an' loneliness I've tempted myself with what you said. But
no. I'll never do that. It's the same to me now as if I had no money at
all."

"Take care, Dismukes," warned Adam. "It's the gaining of gold--not what
it might bring--that drives you."

"Ah! Quien sabe, as the Mexicans say?...Wansfell, have you learned the
curse--or it may be the blessing--of the desert--what makes us wanderers
of the wastelands?"

"No. I have not. Sometimes I feel it's close to me, like the feeling of
a spirit out there on the lonely desert at night. But it's a great thing,
Dismukes. And it is linked to the very beginnings of us. Some day I'll
know."

Dismukes smoked in silence, thoughtful and sad. The man's forceful
assurance and doggedness seemed the same, yet Adam sensed a subtle
difference in him, beyond power to define. The last gold faded from the
bold domes of the mountains, the clouds turned grey, the twilight came on
as a stealthy host. And from across the creek came discordant sounds of
Tecopah awakening to the revelry of a gold diggings by night.

"How'd you happen along here?" queried Dismukes, presently.

"Tecopah was just a water hole for me," replied Adam.

"Me, too. An' I'm sure sayin' that I like to fill my canteens here. Last
year I camped here, an' when I went on I kept one of my canteens so long
the water spoiled. Found some gold trace up in Kingston range, but my
supplies ran low an' I had to give up. My plan now is to go in there an'
then on to the Funeral Mountains. They're full of mineral. But a dry,
hard, poison country for a prospector. Do you know that country?"

"I've been on this side of the range."

"Bad enough, but the other side of the Funerals is Death Valley. That
gash in summer is a blastin', roarin' hell. I've crossed it every month
in the year. None but madmen ever tackle Death Valley in July, in the
middle of the day. I've seen the mercury go to one hundred and forty
degrees. I've seen it one hundred and twenty five at midnight, an',
friend, when them furnace winds blow down the valley at night sleep or
rest is impossible You just gasp for life. But strange to say, Wansfell,
the fascination of the desert is stronger in Death Valley than at any
other place."

"Yes, I can appreciate that," replied Adam, thoughtfully. "It must be the
sublimity of death and desolation--the terrible loneliness and awfulness
of the naked earth. I am going there."

"So I reckoned. An' see here, Wansfell, I'll get out my pencil an' draw
you a little map of the valley, showin' my trails an' water holes. I know
that country better than any other white man. It's a mineral country. The
lower slope of the Funerals is all clay, borax, soda, alkali, salt,
nitre, an' when the weather's hot an' that stuff blows on the hot winds,
my God! it's a horror! But you'll want to go through it all an' you'll go
back again."

"Where do you advise me to go in?"

"Well, I'd follow the Amargosa. It's bad water, but better than none. Go
across an' up into the Panamints, an' come back across again by Furnace
Creek. I'll make you a little map. There's more bad water than good, an'
some of it's arsenic. I found the skeletons of six men near an arsenic
water hole. Reckon they'd come on this water when bad off for thirst an'
didn't know enough to test it. An' they drank their fill an' died in
their tracks. They had gold, too. But I never could find out anythin'
about these men. No one ever heard of them an' I was the only man who
knew of the tragedy. Well, well, it's common enough for me, though I
never before run across so many dead men. Wansfell, I reckon you've found
that common, too, in your wanderings--dried-up mummies, yellow as leather
or bleached bones an' grinnin' skull, white in the sun?"

"Yes, I've buried the remains of more than one poor devil," replied Adam.

"Is it best to bury them? I let them lay as warnin' to other poor devils.
No one but a crazy man would drink at a water hole where there was a
skeleton. Well, to come hack to your goin' to Death Valley. I'd go in by
the Amargosa. It's a windin' stream an' long, but safe. An' there's
firewood an' a little grass. Now when you get across the valley you'll
run into prospectors an' miners an' wanderers at the water holes. An'
like as not you'll meet some of the claim jumpers an' robbers that live
in the Panamints. From what I hear about you, Wansfell, I reckon a
meetin' with them would be a bad hour for them, an' somethin' of good
fortune to honest miners. Hey?"

"Dismukes, I don't run from men of that stripe," replied Adam, grimly.

"Ahuh! I reckon not," said Dismukes, just as grimly. "Well, last time I
was over there--let's see, it was in September, hotter 'n hell, an' I run
across two queer people up in a canyon I'd never prospected before.
Didn't see any sign of any other prospectors ever bein' in there. Two
queer people--a man an' a woman livin' in a shack they'd built right
under the damnedest roughest slope of weathered rock you ever saw in your
life. Why, it was a plain case of suicide, an' so I tried to show them!
Every hour you could hear the crack of a rollin' boulder or the graty
slip of an avalanche, gettin' uneasy an' wantin' to slide. But the woman
was deathly afraid of her husband an' he was a skunk an' a wolf rolled
into a man, if I ever saw one. I couldn't do anythin' for the poor woman,
an' I couldn't learn any more than I'm tellin' you. That's not much. But,
Wansfell, she wasn't a common sort. She'd been beautiful once. She had
the saddest face I ever saw. I got two feelin's, one that she wasn't long
for this earth, an' the other that the man hated her with a terrible
hate. I meet with queer people an' queer situations as I wander over this
desert, but here's the beat of all my experience. An', Wansfell, I'd like
to have you go see that couple. I reckon they'll be there, if alive yet.
He chose a hidden spot, an' he has Shoshone Indians pack his supplies in
from the ranches way on the other side of the Panamints. A queer deal,
horrible for that poor woman, an' I've been haunted by her face ever
since. I'd like you to go there."

"I'll go. But why do you say that, Dismukes?" asked Adam, curiously.

"Well--you ought to know what your name means to desert men," replied
Dismukes, constrainedly, and he looked down at the camp fire, to push
forward a piece of half-burnt wood.

"No, I never heard," said Adam. "I've lived 'most always alone. Of course
I've had to go to freighting posts and camps. I've worked in gold
diggin's. I've guided wagon trains across the Mohave. Naturally, I've been
among men. But I never heard that my name meant anything."

"Wansfell! I remember now that you called yourself Wansfell. I've heard
that name. Some of your doings, Wansfell, have made camp-fire stories.
See here, Wansfell, you won't take offence at me."

"No offence, friend Dismukes," replied Adam, strangely affected. Here was
news that forced him to think of himself as a man somehow related to and
responsible to his kind. He had gone to and fro over the trails of the
desert, and many adventures had befallen him. He had lived them, with the
force the desert seemed to have taught him, and then had gone his way
down the lonely trails, absorbed in his secret. The years seemed less
than the blowing sand. He had been an unfortunate boy burdened with a
crime; he was now a matured man, still young in years, but old with the
silence and loneliness and strife of the desert, grey at the temples,
with that old burden still haunting him. How good to learn that strange
men spoke his name with wonder and respect! He had helped wanderers as
Dismukes had helped him; he had meted out desert violence to evil men who
crossed his trail; he had, doubtless, done many little unremembered deeds
of kindness in a barren world where little deeds might be truly
over-appreciated; but the name Wansfell meant nothing to him, the
reputation hinted by Dismukes amazed him, strangely thrilled him; the
implication of nobility filled him with sadness and remorse. What had he
done with the talents given him?

"Wansfell, you see--you're somethin' of the man I might have been," said
Dismukes, hesitatingly.

"Oh no, Dismukes," protested Adam. "You are a prospector, honest and
industrious, and wealthy now, almost ready to enjoy the fruits of your
long labours. Your life has a great object...But I--I am only a wanderer
of the wasteland."

"Aye, an' therein lies your greatness!" boomed the prospector, his ox
eyes dilating and flaring. "I am a selfish pig--a digger in the dirt for
gold. My passion has made me pass by men, an' women, too, who needed
help. Riches--dreams! But you--you Wansfell--out there in the loneliness
an' silence of the wastelands--you have found God!...I said you would.
I've met other men who had."

"No, no," replied Adam. "You're wrong. I don't think I've found God. Not
yet!...I have no religion, no belief. I can't find any hope out there in
the desert. Nature is pitiless, indifferent. The desert is but one of her
playgrounds. Man has no right there. No. Dismukes, I have not found God."

"You have, but you don't know it," responded Dismukes, with more
composure, and he began to refill a neglected pipe. "Well, I didn't mean
to fetch up such talk as that. You see, when I do fall in with a
prospector once in a month of Sundays I never talk much. An' then it 'd
be to ask him if he'd seen any float lately or panned any colour. But
you're different. You make my mind work. An', Wansfell, sometimes I think
my mind has been crowded with a million thoughts all cryin' to get free.
That's the desert. A man's got to fight the desert with his intelligence
or else become less than a man. An' I always did think a lot, if I didn't
talk."

"I'm that way, too," replied Adam. "But a man should talk when he gets
the chance. I talk to my burros, and to myself, just to hear the sound of
my voice."

"Ah! Ah!" exclaimed Dismukes, with deep breath. He nodded his shaggy
head. Adam's words had struck an answering chord in his heart.

"You've tried for gold here?" queried Adam.

"No. I was here first just after the strike, an' often since. Water's all
that ever drew me. I'd starve before I'd dig for gold among a pack of
beasts. I may be a desert wolf, but I'm a lone one."

"They're coyotes and you're the grey wolf. I liken most every man I meet
to some beast or creature of the desert."

"Aye, you're right. The desert stamps a man. An', Wansfell, it's stamped
you with the look of a desert eagle. Ha-ha! I ain't flatterin' to either
of us, am I? Me a starved grey wolf, huntin' alone, mean an' hard an'
fierce! An' you a long, lean-headed eagle, with that look of you like
you were about to strike--gong!...Well, well, there's no understandin'
the work of the desert. The way it develops the livin' creatures! They
all have to live, an' livin' on the desert is a thousand times harder
than anywhere else. They all have to be perfect machines for destruction.
Each seems so swift that he gets away, yet each is also so fierce an'
sure that he catches his prey. They live on one another, but the species
doesn't die out. That's what stumps me about the desert. Take the human
creatures. They grow fiercer than animals. Maybe that's because nature
did not intend man to live on the desert. An' it is no place for man.
Nature intended these classes of plants an' these species of birds an'
beasts to live, fight, thrive, an' reproduce their kind on the desert.
But men can't thrive nor reproduce their kind here."

"How about the Indians who lived in the desert for hundreds of years?"
asked Adam.

"What's a handful of Indians? An' what's a few years out of the millions
of years that the desert's been here, just as it is now? Nothin'--nothin'
at all! Wansfell, there will be men come into the desert, down there
below the Salton Sink, an' in other places where the soil is productive,
an' they'll build dams an' storage places for water. Maybe a lot of fools
will even turn the Colorado River over the desert. They'll make it green
an' rich an', like the Bible says, blossom as a rose. An' these men will
build ditches for water, an' reservoirs an' towns an' cities, an' cross
the desert with railroads. An' they'll grow rich an' proud. They'll think
they've conquered it. But, poor fools! they don't know the desert! Only
a man who has lived with the desert much of his life can ever know. Time
will pass an' men will grow old, an' their sons an' grandsons after them.
A hundred an' a thousand years might pass with fruitfulness still in the
control of man. But all that is only a few grains of time in all the
endless sands of eternity. The desert's work will have been retarded for
a little while. But the desert works ceaselessly an' with infinite
patience. The sun burns, the frost cracks, the avalanche rolls, the rain
weathers. Slowly the earth crust heaves up into mountains an' slowly the
mountains wear down, atom by atom, to be the sands of the desert. An' the
winds--how they blow for ever an' ever! What can avail against the desert
winds? They blow the sand an' sift an' seep an' bury. Men will die an'
the places that knew them will know them no more an' the desert will come
back to its own. That is well, for it is what God intended."

"God and nature, then, with you are one and the same?" queried Adam.

"Yes. Twenty years sleepin' on the sand with the stars in my face has
taught me that. Is it the same with you?"

"No. I grant all that you contend for the desert and for nature. But I
can't reconcile nature and God. Nature is cruel, inevitable, hopeless.
But God must be immortality."

"Wansfell, there's somethin' divine in some men, but not in all, nor in
many. So how can that divinity be God? The immortality you speak of--that
is only your life projected into another life."

"You mean if I do not have a child I will not have immortality?"

"Exactly."

"But what of my soul?" demanded Adam, solemnly.

Dismukes dropped his shaggy head. "I don't know. I don't know. I've gone
so deep, but I can't go any deeper. That always stumps me. I've never
found my soul! Maybe findin' my soul would be findin' God. I don't know.
An' you, Wansfell--once I said you had the spirit an' mind to find God on
the desert. Did you?"

Adam shook his head. "I'm no farther than you, Dismukes, though I think
differently about life and death...I've fought to live on this wasteland,
but I've fought hardest to think. It seems that always nature strikes me
with its terrible mace! I have endless hours to look at the desert and I
see what you see--the strange ferocity of it all--the fierce purpose. No
wonder you say the desert stamps a man!"

"Aye! An' woman, too! Take this she-devil who runs a place here in
Tecopah--Mohave Jo is the name she bears. Have you seen her?"

"No, but I've heard of her. At Needles I met the wife of a miner, Clark,
who'd been killed here at Tecopah."

"Never heard of Clark. But I don't doubt the story. It's common
enough--miners bein' killed an' robbed. There's a gang over in the
Panamints who live on miners."

"I'm curious to see Mohave Jo," said Adam.

"Well, speakin' of this one-eyed harridan reminds me of a man I met last
trip across the Salton flats, down on the Colorado. Met him at Walters--a
post on the stage line. He had only one eye too. There was a terrible
scar where his eye, the right one, had been. He was one of these Texans
lookin' for a man. There seems to be possibilities of a railroad openin'
up that part of the desert. An' this fellow quizzed me about water holes.
Of course, if anyone gets hold of water in that country he'll strike it
rich as gold, if the country ever opens up. It's likely to happen, too.
Well, this man had an awful face. He'd been a sheriff in Texas, some one
said, an' later at Ehrenberg. Hell on hanging men! Of course I never
asked him how he lost his eye. But he told me--spoke of it more than
once. The deformity had affected his mind. You meet men like that--sort
of crazy on somethin'. He was always lookin' for the fellow who'd knocked
out his eye. To kill him!"

"Do you--recall his--name?" asked Adam, his voice halting with a thick
sensation in his throat. The past seemed as yesterday.

"Never was much on rememberin' names," responded Dismukes, scratching his
shaggy head. "Let's see--why, yes, he called himself Collis--Collis--haw.
That's it--Collishaw. Hard name to remember. But as a man he struck me
easy to remember...Well, friend Wansfell, I've had enough talkin' to do
me for a spell. I'm goin' to bed."

While Adam sat beside the fire, motionless, pondering with slow, painful
amaze over what he had just heard, Dismukes prepared for his night's
rest. He unrolled a pack, spread a ragged old canvas, folded a blanket
upon it, and arranged another blanket to pull up over him, together with
the end of the canvas. For a pillow he utilised an old coat that lay on
his pack. His sole concession to man's custom of undressing for bed was
the removal of his old slouch hat. Then with slow, laboured movement he
lay down to stretch his huge body and pull the coverlets over him. From
his cavernous breast heaved a long, deep sigh. His big eyes, dark and
staring, gazed up at the brightening stars, and then they closed.

Adam felt tempted to pack and move on to a quiet and lonely place off in
the desert, where he could think without annoyance. Keen and bitterly
faithful as had been his memory, it had long ceased to revive thoughts of
Collishaw, the relentless sheriff and ally of Guerd. How strange and
poignant had been the shock of recollection! It had been the blow Adam
had dealt--the savage fling of his gun in Collishaw's face--that had
destroyed an eye and caused a hideous disfigurement. And the Texan, with
that fatality characteristic of his kind, was ever on the look-out for
the man who had ruined his eyesight. Perhaps that was only one reason for
this thirst for revenge. Guerd! Had Collishaw not sworn to hang Adam?
"You'll swing for this!" he had yelled in his cold, ringing voice of
passion. And so Adam lived over again the old agony, new and strange in
its bitter mockery, its vain hope of forgetfulness. Vast as the desert
was, it seemed small now to Adam, for there wandered over it a relentless
and bloodthirsty Texan, hunting to kill him. The past was not dead. The
present and the future could not be wholly consecrated to atonement. A
spectre, weird and grotesque as a yucca tree, loomed out there in the
shadows of the desert night. Death stalked on Adam's trail. The hatred of
men was beyond power to understand. Work, fame, use, health, love, home,
life itself, could be sacrificed by some men just to kill a rival or an
enemy. Adam remembered that Collishaw had hated him and loved Guerd.
Moreover, Collishaw had that strange instinct to kill men--a passion
which grew by what it fed on--a morbid mental twist that drove him to rid
himself of the terrible haunting ghost of his last victim by killing a
new one. Added to that was a certain leaning toward the notorious.

"We'll meet some day," soliloquised Adam. "But he would never recognise
me."

The comfort of that fact did not long abide in Adam's troubled mind. He
would recognise Collishaw. And that seemed to hold something fatalistic
and inevitable. "When I meet Collishaw I'll tell him who I am--and I'll
kill him!" That fierce whisper was the desert voice in Adam--the desert
spirit. He could no more help that sudden bursting flash of fire than he
could help breathing. Nature in the desert did not teach men to meet a
threat with forgiveness, nor to wait until they were struck. Instinct had
precedence over intelligence and humanity. In the eternal strife to keep
alive on the desert a man who conquered must have assimilated something
of the terrible nature of the stinging cholla cactus, and the hard,
grasping tenacity of the mesquite roots, and the ferocity of the wild
cat, and the cruelty of the hawk--something of the nature of all that
survived. It was a law. It forced a man to mete out violence in advance
of that meant for him.

"To fight and to think were to be my blessings," soliloquised Adam, and
he shook his head with a long-familiar doubt. Then he had to remember
that no blessings of any kind whatsoever could be his. Stern and terrible
duty to himself!

So he rolled in his blankets and stretched his long body to the composure
of rest. Sleep did not drop with soft swiftness upon his eyes, as it had
upon those of Dismukes. He had walked far, but he was not tired. He never
tired any more. There seemed to be no task of a single day that could
weary his strength. And for long he lay awake, listening to the deep
breathing of his companion, and the howl of the coyotes, and the sounds
of Tecopah, so unnatural in the quiet of the desert. A sadness weighed
heavily upon Adam. At first he was glad to have met Dismukes, but now he
was sorry. A tranquillity, a veil seemed to have been rent. The years had
not really changed the relation of his crime, nor materially the nature
of his sin. But they had gradually, almost imperceptibly, softened his
ceaseless and eternal remorse. By this meeting with Dismukes he found
that time effaced shocks, blows, stains, just as it wore away the face of
the desert rock. That, too, was a law; and in this Adam dived a blessing
that he could not deny. Dismukes had unleashed a spectre out of the dim
glow of the past. Eight years! So many, and yet they were as eight days!
There were the bright stars, pitiless and cold, and the dark bold
mountains that had seemed part of his strength. In the deep blue sky
above and in the black shadow below Adam saw a white face, floating,
fading, reappearing, mournful and accusing and appalling--a face
partaking of the old boyish light and joy and of the godlike beauty of
perfect manhood--the haunting face of his brother Guerd. It haunted Adam,
and the brand of Cain burned into his brain. The old resurging pangs in
his breast, the long sighs, the oppressed heart, the salt tears, the
sleepless hours--these were Adam's again, as keen as in the first days of
his awakening down on the Colorado Desert where from the peaks of the
Chocolate Mountains he had gazed with piercing eyes far south to the
purple peak--Picacho, the monument, towering above his brother's grave.
"Some day I'll go back!" whispered Adam, as if answering to an imperative
and mysterious call.

The long night wore on with the heavens s ar-fired by its golden train,
and the sounds at last yieldin' to the desert silence. Adam could see
Dismukes, a wide, prone figure, with dark face upturned to the sky, a man
seemingly as strange and strong as the wastelands he talked so much
about, yet now helpless in sleep, unguarded, unconscious, wrapped in his
deep dreams of the joy and life his gold was to bring him. Adam felt a
yearning pity for this dreamer. Did he really love gold or was his
passion only a dream? Whatever that was and whatever the man was, there
rested upon his rugged, dark face a shadow of tragedy. Adam wondered what
his own visage would reflect when he lay asleep, no more master of a mind
that never rested? The look of an eagle? So Dismukes had said, and that
was not the first time Adam had heard such comparison. He had seen desert
eagles, dead and alive. He tried to recall how they looked, but the
images were not convincing. The piercing eye, clear as the desert air,
with the power of distance in the grey depths; the lean, long lines; the
wild poise of head, bitter and ruthless and fierce; the look of
loneliness--these characters surely could not be likened to his face.
What a strange coincidence that Dismukes should hit upon the likeness of
an eagle--the winged thunderbolt of the heights--the lonely bird Adam
loved above all desert creatures! And so Adam wandered in mind until at
last he fell asleep.



CHAPTER XIII

When Adam awoke he saw that Dismukes had breakfast steaming on the fire.

"I'm on my way to-day," announced the prospector. "What'll you do?"

"Well, I'll hang around Tecopah as long as I can stand it," replied Adam.

"Humph! That won't be long, unless you got in mind somethin' like you did
at the Donner Placers, down in the Providence Mountains."

"Friend, what do you know about that?" queried Adam.

"Nothin'. I only heard about it. Wansfell, do you pan any gold?"

"Sometimes, when I happen to run across it," replied Adam, "but that
isn't often."

"Do you work?"

"Yes, I've worked a good deal, taking it all together. In the mines, on
the river at Needles, driving mule teams and guiding wagon trains. Never
got paid much, though."

"How do you live?" asked Dismukes, evidently curious.

"Oh, I fare well enough to keep flesh on my bones."

"You've got flesh--or I reckon it's muscle. Wansfell, you're the
best-built man I ever saw on the desert. Most men dry up an' blow away.
Will you let me give you--lend you some money?"

"Money! So that's why you're so curious?" responded Adam. "Thanks, my
friend. I don't need money. I had some, you know, when you ran across me
down in the Chocolates. I used about a thousand dollars while I lived
with the Coahuila Indians. And I've got nine thousand left."

"Say, you don't pack all that money along with you?"

"Yes. Where else would I keep it."

"Wansfell, some of these robbers will murder you."

"Not if I see them first. My friend, don't be concerned. Surely, I don't
look sick."

"Humph! Well, just the same, now that you're headin' up into this
country, I advise you to be careful. Don't let anybody see you with
money. I've been held up an' robbed three times."

"Didn't you make a fight for your gold?"

"No chance. I was waylaid--had to throw up my hands...They tell me you
are ready with a gun, Wansfell?"

"Dismukes, you seem to have heard much about me."

"But you didn't throw a gun on Baldy McKue," said Dismukes, with a dark
flare from his rolling eyes.

"No--I did not." replied Adam.

"You killed McKue with your bare hands," flashed Dismukes. A red stain
appeared to come up under his leathery skin. "Wansfell, will you tell me
about that?"

"I'd rather not, Dismukes. There are some things I forget."

"Well, it meant a good deal to me," replied Dismukes. "McKue did me dirt.
He jumped claims of mine down here near Soda Sink. An' he threatened to
kill me--swore the claims were his--drove me off. I met him in Riverside,
an' there he threatened me with arrest. He was a robber an' a murderer. I
believe he ambushed prospectors. McKue was like most men who stick to the
desert--he went down to the level of the beast. I hated him. This
stranger who told me--he swore there wasn't an uncracked bone left in
McKue's body. Wansfell, if you did that to McKue you've squared accounts.
Is it true?"

"Yes."

Dismukes rubbed his huge hands together and his ox eyes rolled and
dilated. A fierce and savage grimness distorted his hard face for an
instant and passed away.

"What 'd you kill him for?"

"Because he'd have killed me."

"Didn't you look him up on purpose to kill him?"

"No. A year before that time I went to Goffs. Some one took me into an
old tent where a woman lay dying. I could do little for her. She
denounced McKue; she blamed him that she lay there, about to die. She did
die and I buried her. Then I kept an eye open for McKue."

"I wondered--I wondered," said Dismukes. "It struck me deep. Lord knows
fights are common out here. An' death--why, on the desert every way you
turn you see death. It's the life of the desert. But the way this was
told me struck me deep. It was what I'd like to have done myself.
Wansfell, think of the wonderful meetin's of men on the desert--an', aye,
meetin' of men with women, too! They happen different out here. Think of
the first time we met! An' this time! Wansfell, we'll meet again. It's
written in those trails of sand out there, wanderin' to an' fro across
the desert."

"Dismukes, the desert is vast. Sometimes you will not meet a man in
months of travel--and not in years will you meet a woman. But when you do
meet them life seems intensified. The desert magnifies."

"Wansfell, I want you to go across into Death Valley," declared Dismukes,
with the deep boom in his voice. "That woman in the shack! Her eyes haunt
me. Somethin' terrible wrong! That man who keeps her there--if he's not
crazy, he's worse than a gorilla. For a gorilla kills a woman quick.
Wansfell, I'd give a lot to see you handle this man like you handled
McKue!"

"Quien sabe, as you say?" replied Adam. "Draw that map of your trails in
Death Valley. I've got a little book here, and a pencil."

It was singular to see the gold digger labour with his great, stumpy,
calloused fingers. He took long to draw a few lines, and make a few
marks, and write a few names in the little book. But when he came to talk
of distance and direction, of trails and springs, of flat valley and
mountain range--then how swift and fluent he was! All that country lay
clearly in his mind, as if he were a great desert condor gazing down from
the heights upon the wasteland which was his home.

"Now, I'll be goin' down into the Funerals soon," concluded Dismukes.
"You see here's Furnace Creek where it runs into Death Valley. You'll
cross here an' come up Furnace Creek till you strike the yellow clay
hills on the right. It's a hell of a jumble of hills--absolutely bare. I
think there's gold. You'll find me somewhere."

It seemed settled then that Adam and Dismukes were to meet in some vague
place at some vague time. The desert had no limitations. Time, distance,
and place were thought of in relation to their adaptation to desert men.

"Well, it's gettin' late," said Dismukes, looking up at the white flare
of sun. "I'll pack an' go on my way."

While Dismukes strode out to drive in his burros Adam did the camp
chores. In a short time his companion appeared with the burros trotting
ahead of him. And the sight reminded Adam of the difference between
prospectors. Dismukes was not slow, easy, careless, thoughtless. He had
not suffered the strange deterioration so common to his class. He did not
belong to the type who tracked his burros all day so that he might get
started manana. Adam helped him pack.

"Wansfell, may we meet again," said Dismukes, as they shook hands.

"All trails cross on the desert. I hope you strike it rich."

"Some day--some day. Goodbye," returned Dismukes, and with vigorous slaps
he started the burros.

Adam was left to his own devices. After Dismukes passed out of sight in
the universal grey of the benches Adam spent a long while watching a
lizard on a stone. It was a chuckwalla, a long, slim, greenish-bronze
reptile, covered with wonderful spots of vivid colour, and with eyes like
jewels. Adam spent much time watching the living things of the desert, or
listening to the silence. He had discovered that watching anything
brought its reward--sometimes in a strange action or a phenomenon of
nature or a new thought.

Later he walked down to the creek bottom, where the smelter was in
operation. Labourers were at a premium there, and he was offered work. He
said he would consider it. But unless there turned out to be some
definite object to keep him in Tecopah, Adam would not have bartered his
freedom to the dust-clouded mill for all the gold it mined. These
clanging mills and hot shafts and dark holes oppressed him.



CHAPTER XIV

The long-deferred hour at last arrived in which Adam, on a ruddy-gold
dawn in early April, drove his burros out into the lonesome desert toward
the Amargosa. He did not look back. Tecopah would not soon forget
Wansfell! That was his grim thought.

The long, drab reaches of desert, the undulating bronze slopes waving up
to the dark mountains, called to him in a language that he felt. If Adam
Larey--or Wansfell, wanderer of the wasteland, as he had come to believe
himself--had any home, it was out in the vast open, under the great white
flare of sunlight and the star-studded canopy of night.

This was a still morning in April, and the lurid sun, bursting above the
black escarpment to the east, promised a rising temperature. Day by day
the heat had been increasing, and now, at sunrise, the smoky heat veils
were waving up from the desert floor. For Adam the most torrid weather
had no terrors, and the warmth of a morning like this felt pleasant on
his cheek. He had been confined to one place, without action, for so long
that now, as he began to feel the slow sweat burn pleasantly on his body,
there came a loosening of his muscles, a relaxing of tension, a
marshalling, as it were, of his great forces of strength and endurance.
The grey slopes beyond did not daunt him. His stride was that of a
mountaineer, and his burros had to trot to keep ahead of him.

And as Adam's body gradually responded to this readjustment to the desert
and its hard demands, so his mind seemed to slough off, layer by layer,
the morbid, fierce, and ruthless moods that like lichens had fastened
upon it. The dry, sweet desert air seemed to permeate his brain and clear
it of miasmas and shadows. He was free. He was alone. He was
self-sufficient. The desert called. From far beyond that upheaved black
and forbidding range, the Funeral Mountains, something strange, new,
thrilling awaited his coming. The strife of the desert had awakened in
him a craving to find the unattainable. He had surmounted all physical
obstacles. He would conquer Death Valley; he would see it in all its
ghastliness; he would absorb all its mysteries; he would defy to the
limit of endurance its most fatal menaces to life.

In the afternoon Adam rounded a corner of a league-long sloping mesa and
gazed down into the valley of the Amargosa. It looked the bitterness, the
poison, and the acid suggested by its Spanish name. The narrow meandering
stream gleamed like silver in the sunlight. Mesquite and other brush
spotted its gravelly slopes and sandy banks. Adam headed down into the
valley. The sun was already westering, and soon, as he descended, it hung
over the ragged peaks. He reached the creek. The burros drank, but not
with relish. Adam gazed at the water of the Amargosa with interest. It
was not palatable, yet it would save life.

Adam set about the camp tasks long grown second nature with him, and
which were always congenial and pleasant. He built a fire of dead
mesquite. Then he scoured his oven with sand and greased it. He had a
heavy pan which did duty as a gold-pan, a dish-pan, and a wash-pan. This
he half-filled with flour, and, adding water, began to mix the two. He
had gotten the dough to about the proper consistency when a rustling in
the brush attracted his attention. He thought he caught a glimpse of a
rabbit. Such opportunity for fresh meat was rare on the desert. Hastily
wiping his hands, he caught up his gun and stole out into the aisle
between the mesquites. As luck would have it, he did espy a young
cottontail, and was fortunate enough to make a good shot. Returning to
camp, he made sudden discovery of a catastrophe.

Jinny had come out of her nap, if, indeed, she had not been shamming
sleep, and she had her nose in the dish-pan. She was eating the dough.

"Hyar, you camp robber!" yelled Adam, making for her. Jinny jerked up her
head. The dough stuck to her nose and the pan stuck to the dough. She
eluded Adam, for she was a quick and nimble burro. The pan fell off, but
the ball of dough adhered to her mouth and nose, and as she ran around
camp in a circle it was certain that she worked her jaws, eating dough as
fast as she could. Manifestly for Jinny, here was opportunity of a
lifetime. When finally Adam did catch her the dough was mostly eaten. He
gave her a cuff and a kick which she accepted meekly, and, drooping her
ears, she apparently fell asleep again.

While Adam was at his simple meal the sun set, filling the valley with
red haze and tipping with gold the peaks in the distance. The heat had
gone with the sun. He walked to and fro in the lonely twilight. Jinny had
given up hope of any more opportunity to pilfer, and had gone to grazing
somewhere down the stream. There was absolutely no sound. An infinite
silence enfolded the solitude. It was such solitude as only men of Adam's
life could bear. To him it was both a blessing and a curse. But to-night
he had an all-pervading and all-satisfying power. He seemed to be growing
at one with the desert and its elements. After a while the twilight
shadows shaded into the blackness of night, and the stars blazed. Adam
had been conscious all day of the gradual relaxing of strain, and now in
the lonely solitude there fell away from him the feelings and thoughts
engendered at Tecopah.

"Loneliness and silence and time!" he soliloquised, as he paced his sandy
beat. "These will cure any trouble--any disease of mind--any agony of
soul. Ah! I know. I never forget. But how different now to remember! That
must be the secret of the power of the desert over men. It is the abode
of solitude and silence. It is like the beginning of creation. It is like
an eternity of time."

By the slow healing of the long-raw wound in his heart Adam had come to
think of time's relation to change. Memory was still as poignant as ever.
But a change had begun in him--a change he divined only after long months
of strife. Dismukes brought a regurgitation of the old pain; yet it was
not quite the same. Eight years! How impossible to realise that, until
confronted by physical proofs of the passing of time! Adam saw no clear
and serene haven for his wandering spirit, but there seemed to be a
nameless and divine promise in the future. His steps had not taken hold
of hell. He had been driven down the naked shingles of the desert,
through the storms of sand, under the infernal heat and bitter cold, like
a man scourged naked, with screaming furies to whip the air at his ears.
And, lo! time had begun to ease his burden, soften the pain, dim the
past, change his soul.

The moment was one of uplift. "I have my task," he cried, looking high to
the stars. "Oh, stars--so serene and pitiless and inspiring--teach me to
perform that task as you perform yours!"

He would go on as he had begun, fighting the desert and its barrenness,
its blasting heat, its evil influences, wandering over these wastelands
that must be his home; and he would take the physical prowess of him to
yet harder, fiercer tasks of toil, driving his spirit to an intenser,
whiter flame. If the desert could develop invincible energy of strength
in a man, he would earn it. If there were a divinity in man, infinitely
beyond the beasts of the desert and the apes of the past, a something in
mysterious affinity with that mighty being he sensed out there in the
darkness, then he would learn it with a magnified and all-embracing
consciousness.

Adam went to his bed on the warm sands complete in two characters--a
sensing, watching, listening man like the savage in harmony with the
nature of the elements around him, and a feeling, absorbed, and
meditating priest who had begun to divine the secrets beyond the
dark-shadowed, starlit desert waste.

Adam's first sight of Death Valley came at an early morning hour, as he
turned a last curve in the yawning canyon he had descended.

He stood in awe.

"Oh, desolation!" he cried. And it seemed that, as the shock of the
ghastliness beneath him passed, he remembered with flashing vividness all
that had come to him in his long desert wanderings, which seemed now to
cumulate its terrible silence, desolation, death, and decay in this
forbidding valley.

He remembered the origin of that name--Death Valley. In 1849, when the
California gold frenzy had the world in its grip, seventy Mormon gold
seekers had wandered into this red-walled, white-floored valley, where
sixty-eight of them perished. The two that escaped gave this narrow sink
so many hundred feet below sea level the name Death Valley! Many and many
another emigrant and prospector and wanderer, by his death from horrible
thirst and blasting heat and poison-dusted wind and destroying avalanche
and blood-freezing cold, had added to the significance of that name and
its dreadful fame. On one side the valley was shadowed by the ragged
Funeral range; on the other by the red and gloomy Panamints. Furnace
Creek, the hot stream that came down from the burning slopes; and Ash
Meadow, the valley floor, grey and dead, like the bed of a Dead Sea; and
the Devil's Chair, a huge seat worn by the elements in the red mountain
wall, where the death king of the valley watched over his fiends--these
names were vivid in Adam's mind along with others given by prospectors in
uncouth or eloquent speech. "She's a hummer in July," said one; and
another, "Salty lid of hell," and still another, "Valley of the white
shadow of death."

Death Valley was more than sixty miles long and from seven to twelve
wide. No two prospectors had ever agreed on these dimensions, although
all had been in perfect harmony as to its hellish qualities. Death was
the guardian of the valley and the spectre that patrolled its beat.
Mineral wealth was the irresistible allurement which dared men to defy
its terrors. Gold! Dismukes himself had claimed there were ledges of gold
quartz, and Dismukes was practical and accurate. Many fabulous stories of
gold hung on the lips of wandering prospectors. The forbidding red rocks
held jewels in their hard confines--garnets, opals, turquoises; there
were cliffs of marble and walls of onyx. The valley floor was a white
crust where for miles and miles there was nothing but salt and borax.
Beds of soda, of gypsum, of nitre, of sulphur, abounded in the vaster
fields of other minerals. It was a valley where nature had been prodigal
of her treasures and terrible in her hold upon them. But few springs and
streams flowed down into this scoriac sink, and of these all were heavily
impregnated with minerals, all unpalatable, many sour and sulphuric, some
hot, a few of them deadly poison. In the summer months the heat sometimes
went to one hundred and forty-five degrees. The furnace winds of midnight
were withering to flesh and blood. And sometimes the air carried
invisible death in shape of poison gas or dust. In winter, sudden
changes of temperature, whirling icy winds down upon a prospector who had
gone to sleep, in warmth, would freeze him to death. Avalanches rolled
down the ragged slopes and cloud-bursts carried destruction.

Adam got his bearings, according to the map made by Dismukes, and set out
from the mouth of the canyon to cross the valley. A long sandy slope
dotted by dwarfed mesquites extended down to the hard, crinkly floor of
the valley, from which the descent to a lower level was scarcely
perceptible. When Adam's burros early in the day manifested uneasiness
and weariness there was indeed rough going. The sand had given way to a
hard crust of salt or borax, and little dimples and cones made it
difficult to place a foot on a level. Some places the crust was fairly
hard; in others it cracked and crunched under foot. The colour was a
mixture of a dirty white and yellow. Far ahead Adam could see a dazzling
white plain that resembled frost on a frozen river.

Adam proceeded cautiously behind the burros. They did not like the
travel, and, wary little beasts that they were, they stepped gingerly in
places, as if trying their weight before trusting it upon the
treacherous-looking crust. Adam felt the beat of the sun upon him, and
the reflection of heat from the valley floor. He had been less oppressed
upon hotter days than this. The sensations he began to have here were
similar to those he had experienced in the Salton Sink where he had gone
below sea level. The oppression seemed to be a blood pressure, as if the
density of the air closed tighter and heavier around his body.

At last the burros halted. Adam looked up from the careful task of
placing his feet to see that he had reached a perfectly smooth bed of
salt, glistening as if it were powdered ice. This was the margin of the
place that from afar had looked like a frozen stream. Stepping down upon
it, Adam found that it trembled and heaved with his weight, but upheld
him. There was absolutely no sign to tell whether the next yard of
surface would hold him or not. Still, from what he had gone over he
believed he could trust the rest. As he turned to retrace his steps he
saw his tracks just as plainly in the salt as if they had been imprinted
in snow. He led Jinny out, and found that, though her hoofs sank a
little, she could make it by stepping quickly. She understood as well as
he, and when released went on of her own accord, anxious to get the
serious job over. Adam had to drive the other burro. The substance grew
softer as Adam progressed, and in the middle of that glistening stream it
became wet and sticky. The burros laboured through this lowest level of
the valley, which fortunately was narrow.

On the other side of it extended a wide flat of salt and mud, very rough,
upheaved as if it had boiled and baked to a crust, then cracked and sunk
in places. Full of holes and pitfalls, and rising in hummocks gnarled and
whorled like huge sea shells, it was an exceedingly toilsome and
dangerous place to travel. The crust continually crumpled under the hoofs
of the burros, and gave forth hollow sounds, as if a bottomless cavern
ran under the valley floor. As Adam neared the other side he encountered
thin streams of water that resembled acid. It was necessary to find
narrow places in these and leap across. Beyond these ruts in the crust
began an almost imperceptible rise of the valley floor, which in the
course of a couple of miles led out of the broken, choppy sea of salt to
a sand-and-gravel level. How relieved Adam was to reach that! He had been
more concerned for the safety of the burros than for his own.

It was now hot enough for Adam to imagine something of what a formidable
place this valley would be in July or August. On all sides the mountains
stood up dim and obscure and distant in a strange haze. Low down, the
heat veils lifted in ripples, and any object at a distance seemed
elusive. The last hour taxed Adam's endurance, though he could have gone
perhaps as far again across the lavalike crust. When he reached the slope
that led up to the base of the red mountains he halted the burros for a
rest. The drink he took then was significant, for it was the fullest he
had taken in years. He was hot and wet; his eyes smarted and his feet
burned.

When Adam had rested he consulted the map, and found that he must travel
up the slope and to the west to gain the black buttress of rock that was
his objective point. And considering how dim it looked through the haze,
he concluded he had better be starting. One moment, however, he gave to a
look at the Funeral range which he had come through, and which now loomed
above the valley, a magnificent and awe-inspiring upheaval of the earth.
The lower and nearer heights were marked on Dismukes' map as the Calico
Mountains, and indeed their many colours justified the name. Beyond and
above them towered the Funerals, spiked and peaked, ragged as the edge of
a saw, piercing the blue sky, a gloomy and black-zigzagged and
drab-belted range of desolation and grandeur. Adam's gaze slowly shifted
westward to the gulf, a hazy void, a vast valley with streaked and ridged
and canyoned slopes inclosing the abyss into which veils of rain seemed
dropping. Broken clouds had appeared in the west, pierced by gold and red
rays, somewhat dulled by the haze. Adam was amazed to realise the day was
far spent. That scene up the valley of death was confounding. He gazed
spellbound, and every second saw more and different aspects. How
immense, unreal, weird!

He got up from the stone seat that had almost burned through his clothes,
and bent his steps westward, driving the wearying burros ahead of him.
Three miles toward the black buttressed corner he wanted to gain before
dark--his experienced desert eyes calculated the distance. But this
was Death Valley. No traveller of the desert had ever correctly measured
distance in this valley of shadows and hazes and illusions. He was making
three miles an hour. Yet at the end of an hour he seemed just as far away
as ever. Another hour was full of deceits and misjudgments. But at the
end of the third he reached the black wall, and the line that had seemed a
corner was the mouth of a canyon.

Adam halted, as if at the gateway of the unknown. The sun was setting
behind the mountains that now overhung him, massive, and mighty, a sheer,
insurmountable world of rock which seemed to reach to the ruddy sky.
Wonderful shadows were falling, purple and blue low down, rosy and gold
above; and the canyon smoked with sunset haze.

The map of Dismukes marked the canyon, and a spring of water just beyond
its threshold, and also the shack where the strange man and woman lived
under the long slant of weathered rock. Adam decided not to try to find
the location that night, so he made dry camp.

Darkness found him weary and oppressed. The day had seemed short, but the
distance long. Tired and sleepy as he was, when he lay down in his bed he
felt a striking dissimilarity of this place to any other he had known on
the desert. How profound the silence! Had any sound ever pervaded it? All
was gloom and shadow below, with black walls rising to star-fretted sky
as blue as indigo. The valley seemed to be alive. It breathed, yet
invisibly and silently. Indeed, there was a mighty being awake out there
in the black void. Adam could not believe any man and woman lived up this
canyon. Dismukes had dreamed. Had not Adam heard from many prospectors
how no white woman could live in Death Valley? He had been there only a
day, yet he felt that he could understand why it must be fatal to women.
But it was not so because of heat and poison wind and cataclysms of
nature, for women could endure those as well as men. But no woman could
stand the alternations of terror and sublimity, of beauty and horror.
That which was feminine in Adam shuddered at a solitude that seemed
fitting to a burned-out world. He was the last of his race, at the end of
its existence, the strongest finally brought to his doom, and to-morrow
the earth would be sterile--thus Adam's weary thoughts passed into
dreams.

He awakened somewhat later than usual. Over the Funeral range the sun was
rising, a coalescing globule of molten fire, enormous and red, surrounded
by a sky-broad yellow flare. This sunrise seemed strangely closer to the
earth and to him than any sunrise he had ever watched. The valley was
clear, still, empty, a void that made all objects therein look small and
far away. After breakfast Adam set out to find his burros.

This high-walled opening did not appear to be a canyon, but a space made
by two mountain slopes running down to a wash where water flowed at some
seasons. Beyond the corners there opened what seemed to be a gradually
widening and sloping field, grey with rocks and sand and stunted brush,
through the centre of which straggled a line of gnarled mesquites,
following the course of the wash. Adam found his burros here, Jinny
asleep as usual, and Jack contentedly grazing.

The cracking of a rock rolling down a rough slope thrilled Adam. He
remembered what Dismukes had said about the perilous location of the
shack where the man and woman lived under the shadow of a weathering
mountain. Adam turned to look across the space in the direction whence
the sound had come.

There loomed a mighty mountain slope, absolutely destitute of plants, a
grey, drab million-faceted ascent of rocks. Adam strode toward it,
gradually getting higher and nearer through the rock-strewn field. It
looked so close as to seem magnified. But it was a goodly distance.
Presently he espied a rude shack. He halted. That could not be what he
was searching for. Still, it must be. Adam had not expected the place to
be so close to Death Valley. It was not a quarter of a mile distant from
the valley and not a hundred feet higher than the lowest sink hole, which
was to say that this crude, small structure lay in Death Valley and below
sea level.

Adam walked on, growing more curious and doubtful. Surely this hut had
been built and abandoned by some prospector. Yet any prospector could
have built a better abode than this. None but a fool or a knave would have
selected that perilous location. The ground began to slope a little and
become bare of brush, and was dotted here and there with huge boulders
that looked as if they had rolled down there recently. No sign of smoke,
no sign of life, no sign of labour--absence of these strengthened Adam's
doubt of people living there. Suddenly he espied the deep track of a
man's foot in the sand. Adam knelt to study it. "Made yesterday," he
said.

He rose with certainty. Dismukes had been accurate as to direction,
though his distances had been faulty. Adam gazed beyond the shack, to
right, and then left. He espied a patch of green mesquites and hummocks
of grass. There was the water Dismukes had marked. Then Adam looked up.

A broad belt of huge boulders lay beyond the shack, the edge of the
talus, the beginning of the base of a mountainside, wearing down,
weathering away, cracking into millions of pieces, every one of which had
both smooth and sharp surfaces. This belt was steep and fan shaped,
spreading at the bottom. As it sloped up it grew steeper, and the rocks
grew smaller. It had the flow of a glacier. It was an avalanche, perhaps
sliding inch by inch and foot by foot, all the time. The curved base of
the fan extended for a couple of miles, in the distance growing rounded
and symmetrical in its lines. It led up to a stupendous mountain
abutment, dull red in colour, and so seamed and cracked and fissured that
it had the crisscross appearance of a rock of net, or numberless stones
of myriad shapes pieced together by some colossal hand, and now split and
broken, ready to fall. Yet this rugged, bold, uneven surface of mountain
wall shone in the sunlight. It looked as if it had been a solid mass of
granite shattered by some cataclysm of nature. Above this perpendicular
splintered ruin heaved up another slope of broken rocks, hanging there as
if by magic, every one of the endless heaps of stones leaning ready to
roll. Frost and heat had disintegrated this red mountain. What history of
age was written there! How sinister that dull hue of red! No beauty shone
here, though the sun gleamed on the millions of facets. The mountain of
unstable rock towered dark and terrible and forbidding even in the broad
light of day. What held that seamed and lined and sundered mass of rock
together! For what was it waiting? Only time, and the law of the desert!
Even as Adam gazed a weathered fragment loosened from the heights, rolled
off the upper wall, pitched clear into the air, and cracked ringingly
below, to bound and hurtle down the lower slope, clapping less and less
until it ceased with a little hollow report. That was the story of the
mountain. By atom and by mass it was in motion, working down to a level.
Boulders twice as large as the shack, weighing thousands of tons, had
rolled down and far out on the field. Any moment another might topple off
the rampart and come hurtling down to find the shack in its path. Some
day the whole slope of loose rock, standing almost on end, would slide
down in avalanche.

"Well," muttered Adam, darkly, "any man who made a woman live there was
either crazy or meant her to have an awful death."

Adam strode on to the shack. It might afford shelter from sun, but not
from rain or dust. Packsaddles and boxes were stacked on one side; empty
cans lay scattered everywhere; a pile of mesquite, recently cut, stood in
front of the aperture that evidently was a door; and on the sand lay
blackened stones and blackened utensils, near the remains of a still
smouldering fire.

"Hello, inside," called Adam, as he halted at the door. No sound
answered. He stooped to look in, and saw bare sand floor, a rude, low
table made of box boards, flat stones for seats, utensils and dishes,
shelves littered with cans and bags. A flimsy partition of poles and
canvas, with a door, separated this room from another and larger one.
Adam saw a narrow bed of blankets raised on poles, an old valise on the
sandy floor, woman's garments hanging on the brush walls. He called
again, louder this time. He saw a flash of something grey through the
torn canvas, then heard a low cry--a woman's voice. Adam raised his head
and stepped back.

"Elliot! You've come back!" came the voice, quick, low, and tremulous,
betokening relief from dread.

"No. It's a stranger," replied Adam.

"Oh!" The hurried exclamation was followed by soft footfalls. A woman in
grey appeared in the doorway--a woman whose proportions were noble, but
frail. She had a white face and large, deep eyes, strained and sad.
"Oh--who are you?"

"Ma'am, my name's Wansfell. I'm a friend of Dismukes, the prospector who
was here. I'm crossing Death Valley and I thought I'd call on you."

"Dismukes? The little miner, huge, like a frog?" she queried, quickly,
with dilating eyes. "I remember. He was kind, but--And you're his
friend?"

"Yes, at your service, ma'am."

"Thank--God!" she cried, brokenly, and she leaned back against the door.
"I'm in trouble. I've been alone--all--all night. My husband left
yesterday. He took only a canteen. He said he'd be back for
supper...But--he didn't come. Oh, something has happened to him."

"Many things happen in the desert," said Adam. "I'll find your husband. I
saw his tracks out here in the sand."

"Oh, can you find him?"

"Ma'am, I can track a rabbit to its burrow. Don't worry any more. I will
track your husband and find him."

The woman suddenly seemed to be struck with Adam's tone, or the
appearance of him. It was as if she had not particularly noticed him at
first. "Once he got lost--was gone two days. Another time he was overcome
by heat--or something in the air."

"You've been alone before?" queried Adam, quick to read the pain of the
past in her voice.

"Alone? Many--many lonely nights," she said. "He's left me--alone
often--purposely--for me to torture my soul here in the blackness...And
those rolling rocks--cracking in the dead of night--and--" Then the flash
of her died out, as if she had realised she was revealing a shameful
secret to a stranger.

"Ma'am, is your husband just right in his mind?" asked Adam.

She hesitated, giving Adam the impression that she wished to have him
think her husband irrational, but could not truthfully say so.

"Men do strange things in the desert," said Adam. "May I ask, ma'am, have
you food and water?"

"Yes. We've plenty. But Elliot makes me cook--and I never learned how. So
we've fared poorly. But he eats little and I less!"

"Will you tell me how he came to build your hut here where, sooner or
later, it'll be crushed by rolling stones?"

A tragic shadow darkened in the large, dark-blue eyes that Adam now
realised were singularly beautiful.

"I--He--This place was near the water. He cut the brush here--he didn't
see--wouldn't believe the danger," she faltered. She was telling a lie,
and did not do it well. The fine, sensitive, delicate lips, curved and
soft, sad with pain, had not been fashioned for falsehood.

"Perhaps I can make him see," replied Adam. "I'll go find him. Probably
he's lost. The heat is not strong enough to be dangerous. And he's not
been gone long. Don't worry. My camp is just below. I'll fetch him back
to-day--or to-morrow at farthest."

She murmured some incoherent thanks. Adam was again aware of her
penetrating glance, staring, wondering even in her trouble. He strode
away with bowed head, searching the sand for the man's tracks. Presently
he struck them and saw that they led down toward the valley.

To follow such a plain trail was child's play for Adam's desert sight,
that had received its early training in the preservation of his life. He
who had trailed lizards to their holes, and snakes to their rocks, to
find them and eat or die--he was as keen as a wolf on the scent. This
man's trail led straight down to the open valley, out along the western
bulge of slope, to a dry water hole.

From there the footprints led down to the parapet of a wide bench, under
which the white crust began its level monotony toward the other side of
the valley. Different here was it from the place miles below where Adam
had crossed. It was lower--the bottom of the bowl. Adam found difficulty
in breathing, and had sensations like intermittent rushes of blood to his
head. The leaden air weighed down, and, though his keen scent could not
detect any odour, he knew there was impurity of some kind on the slow
wind. It reminded him that this was Death Valley. He considered a moment.
If the man's tracks went on across the valley, Adam would return to camp
for a canteen, then take up the trail again. But the tracks led off
westward once more, straggling and aimless. Adam's stride made three of
one of these steps. He did not care about the heat. That faint hint of
gas, however, caused him concern. For miles he followed the straggling
tracks, westward to a heave of valley slope that, according to the map of
Dismukes, separated Death Valley from its mate adjoining--Lost Valley. On
the left of this ridge the tracks wandered up the slope to the base of
the mountain and followed it in wide scallops. The footmarks now showed
the dragging of boots, and little by little they appeared fresher in the
sand. This wanderer had not rested during the night.

The tracks grew deeper, more dragging, wavering from side to side. Here
the man had fallen. Adam saw the imprints of his hands and a smooth
furrow where evidently he had dragged a canteen across the sand. Then
came the tell-tale signs of where he had again fallen and had begun to
crawl.

"Looks like the old story," muttered Adam. "I'll just about find him
dying or dead...Better so--for that woman who called him husband!...I
wonder--I wonder."

Adam's years of wandering had led him far from the haunts of men, along
the lonely desert trails and roads where only a few solitary humans like
himself dared the elements, or herded in sordid and hard camps; but,
nevertheless, by some virtue growing out of his strife and adversity, he
had come to sense something nameless, to feel the mighty beat of the
heart of the desert, to hear a mourning music over the silent wastes--a
still, sad music of humanity. It was there, even in the grey wastelands.

He strode on with contracted eyes, peering through the hot sunlight. At
last he espied a moving object. A huge land turtle toiling along! No, it
was a man crawling on hands and knees.



CHAPTER XV

Adam ran with the strides of a giant. And he came up to a man, ragged and
dirty, crawling wearily along, dragging a canteen through the sand.

"Say, hold on!" called Adam, loudly.

The man halted, but did not lift his head, Adam bent down to peer at him.

"What ails you?" queried Adam, sharply.

"Huh!" ejaculated the man, stupidly. Adam's repeated question,
accompanied by a shake, brought only a grunt. Adam lifted the man to his
feet and, supporting him, began to lead him over the sand. His
equilibrium had been upset, and, like all men overcome on the desert, he
wanted to plunge off a straight line. Adam persevered, but the labour of
holding him was greater than that of supporting him.

At length Adam released the straining fellow, as much out of curiosity to
see what he would do as from a realisation that time would not be wasted
in this manner. He did not fall, but swayed and staggered around in a
circle, like an animal that had been struck on the head. The texture of
his ragged garments, the cut of them, the look of the man, despite his
soiled and unkempt appearance, marked him as one not commonly met with in
the desert.

The coppery sun stood straight overhead and poured down a strong and
leaden heat. Adam calculated that they were miles from the camp and would
never reach it at this rate. He pondered. He must carry the man. Suiting
action to thought, he picked him up and, throwing him over his shoulder,
started to plod on. The weight was little to one of Adam's strength, but
the squirming and wrestling of the fellow to get down made Adam flounder
in the sand.

"You poor devil!" muttered Adam, at last brought to a standstill. "Maybe
I can't save your life, anyway."

With that he set the man down and, swinging a powerful blow, laid him
stunned upon the sand. Whereupon it was easy to lift him and throw him
over a shoulder like an empty sack. Not for a long distance over the sand
did that task become prodigious. But at length the burden of a heavy
weight and the dragging sand and the hot sun brought Adam to a pass where
rest was imperative. He laid the unconscious man down while he recovered
breath and strength. Then he picked him up and went on.

After that he plodded slower, rested oftener, weakened more perceptibly.
Meanwhile the hours passed, and when he reached the huge gateway in the
red iron mountain wall the sun was gone and purple shadows were mustering
in the valley. When he reached the more level field where the
thick-strewn boulders lay, all before his eyes seemed red. A million
needles were stinging his nerves, running like spears of light into his
darkened sight.

The limit that he had put upon his endurance was to reach the shack. He
did so, and he was nearly blind when the woman's poignant call thrilled
his throbbing ears. He saw her--a white shape through ruddy haze. Then he
deposited his burden on the sand.

"Oh!" the woman moaned. "He's dead!"

Adam shook his head. Pity, fear, and even terror rang in her poignant
cry, but not love.

"Ah!...You've saved him, then...He's injured--there's a great bruise--he
breathes so heavily."

While Adam sat panting, unable to speak, the woman wiped her husband's
face and worked over him.

"He came back once--and fell into a stupor like this, but not so deep.
What can it be?"

"Poison--air," choked Adam.

"Oh, this terrible Death Valley!" she cried.

Adam's sight cleared and he saw the woman, clad in a white robe over her
grey dress, a garment clean and rich, falling in thick folds--strange to
Adam's sight, recalling the past. The afterglow of sunset shone down into
the valley, lighting her face. Once she must have been beautiful. The
perfect lines, the noble brow, the curved lips, were there, but her face
was thin, strained, tragic. Only the eyes held beauty still.

"You saved him?" she queried, with quick-drawn breath.

"Found him--miles and miles--up the--valley--crawling on--his hands and
knees," panted Adam. "I had--to carry him."

"You carried him!" she exclaimed, incredulously. Then the large eyes
blazed. "So that's why you were so livid--why you fell? Oh, you splendid
man! You giant!...He'd have died out there--alone. I thank you with all
my heart."

She reached a white worn hand to touch Adam's with an exquisite eloquence
of gratitude.

"Get water--bathe him," said Adam. "Have you ammonia or whisky?" And
while he laboriously got to his knees the woman ran into the shack. He
rose, feeling giddy and weak. All his muscles seemed beaten and bruised,
and his heart pained. Soon the woman came hurrying out, with basin and
towel and a little black satchel that evidently contained medicines. Adam
helped her work over her husband, but, though they revived him, they
could not bring him back to intelligent consciousness.

"Help me carry him in," said Adam.

Inside the little shack it was almost too dark to see plainly. "Have you
a light?" he added.

"No," she replied.

"I'll fetch a candle. You watch over him while I move my camp up here.
You might change his shirt, if he's got another. I'll be back right away,
and I'll start a fire--get some supper for us."

By the time Adam had packed and moved his effects darkness had settled
down between the slopes of the mountains. After he had unpacked near the
shack, his first move was to light a candle and take it to the door.

"Here's a light, ma'am," he called.

She glided silently out of the gloom, her garments gleaming ghostlike and
her white face with its luminous eyes, dark and strange as midnight,
looking like a woman's face in tragic dreams. As she took the candle her
hand touched Adam's.

"Thank you," she said. "Please don't call me ma'am. My name is Magdalene
Virey."

"I'll try to remember...Has your husband come to yet?"

"No. He seems to have fallen into a stupor. Won't you look at him?"

Adam followed her inside and saw that she marked his lofty height. The
shack had not been built for anyone of his stature.

"How tall you are!" she murmured.

The candle did not throw a bright light, yet by its aid Adam made out the
features of the man whose life he had saved. It seemed to Adam to be the
face of a Lucifer whose fiendish passions were now restrained by sleep.
Whoever this man was, he had suffered a broken heart and ruined life.

"He's asleep," said Adam. "That's not a trance or stupor. He's worn out.
I believe it 'd be better not to wake him."

"You think so?" she replied with quick relief.

"I'm not sure. Perhaps if you watch him awhile you can tell...I'll get
some supper and call you."

Adam's habitual dexterity over camp tasks failed him this evening.
Presently, however, the supper was ready, and he threw brush on the fire
to make a light.

"Mrs. Virey," he called at the door, "come and eat now."

When had the camp fire of his greeted such a vision, except in his vague
dreams? Tall, white-gowned, slender, and graceful, with the poise of a
woman aloof and proud and the sad face of a Madonna--what a woman to sit
at Adam's camp fire in Death Valley! The shadowed and thick light hid the
ravages that had by day impaired her beauty. Adam placed a canvas pack
for her to sit upon, and then he served her, with something that was not
wholly unconscious satisfaction. Of all men, he of the desert could tell
the signs of hunger; and the impression had come to him that she was half
starved. The way she ate brought home to Adam with a pang the memorable
days when he was starving. This woman sitting in the warm, enhancing glow
of the camp fire had an exquisitely spiritual face. She had seemed all
spirit. But self-preservation was the first instinct and the first law of
human nature, or any nature.

"When have I eaten so heartily!" she exclaimed at last. "But, oh! it all
tasted so good...Sir, you are a capital cook."

"Thank you," replied Adam, much gratified.

"Do you always fare so well?"

"No. I'm bound to confess I somewhat outdid myself to-night. You see, I
seldom have such opportunity to serve a woman."

She rested her elbows on her knees, with her hands under her chin, and
looked at him with intense interest. In the night her eyes seemed very
full and large, supernaturally bright and tragic. They were the eyes of a
woman who still preserved in her something of inherent faith in mankind.
Adam divined that she had scarcely looked at him before as an individual
with a personality, and that some accent or word of his had struck her
singularly.

"It was that miner, Dis--Dis--"

"Dismukes," added Adam.

"Yes. It was he who sent you here. Are you a miner, too?"

"No. I, care little for gold."

"Ah!...What are you, then?"

"Just a wanderer. Wansfell, the Wanderer, they call me."

"They? Who are they?"

"Why, I suppose they are the other wanderers. Men who tramp over the
desert--men who seek gold or forgetfulness or peace or solitude--men who
are driven--or who hide. These are few, but, taken by the years, they
seem many."

"Men of the desert have passed by here, but none like you." she replied,
with gravity, and her eyes pierced him. "Why did you come?"

"Years ago my life was ruined," said Adam, slowly. "I chose to fight the
desert. And in all the years the thing that helped me most was not to
pass by anyone in trouble. The desert sees strange visitors. Life is
naked here, like those stark mountain-sides...Dismukes is my friend--he
saved me from death once. He is a man who knows this wasteland. He told
me about your being here. He said no white woman could live in Death
Valley...I wondered--if I might--at least advise you, turn you back--and
so I came."

His earnestness deeply affected her.

"Sir, your kind words warm a cold and forlorn heart," she said. "But I
cannot be turned back. It's too late."

"No hour is ever too late...Mrs. Virey, I'll not distress you with advice
or importunities. I know too well the need and the meaning of peace. But
the fact of your being here--a woman of your evident quality--a woman of
your sensitiveness and delicate health--why, it is a terrible thing! This
is Death Valley. The month is April. Soon it will be May--then June. When
midsummer comes you cannot survive here. I know nothing of why you are
here--I don't seek to know. But you cannot stay. It would be a miracle
for your husband to find gold here, if that is what he seeks. Surely he
has discovered that."

"Virey does not seek gold," the woman said.

"Does he know that a white woman absolutely cannot live here in Death
Valley? Even the Indians abandon it in summer."

"He knows. There are Shoshone Indians up on the mountains now. They pack
supplies to us. They have warned him."

Adam could ask no more, yet how impossible not to feel an absorbing
interest in this woman's fate. As he sat with bowed head, watching the
glowing and paling of the red embers, he felt her gaze upon him.

"Wansfell, you must have a great heart--like your body," she said,
presently. "It is blessed to meet such a man. Your kindness, your
interest, soften my harsh and bitter doubt of men. We are utter
strangers. But there's something in this desert that bridges time--that
bids me open my lips to you...a man who travelled this ghastly valley to
serve me!...My husband, Virey, knows that Death Valley is a hell on
earth. So do I. That is why he brought me...that is why I came!"

"My God!" breathed Adam, staring incredulously at her. Dismukes had
prepared him for tragedy; the desert had shown him many dark and terrible
calamities, misfortunes, mysteries; he had imagined he could no longer be
thrown off his balance by amaze. But that a sad-eyed, sweet-voiced woman,
whose every tone and gesture and look spoke of refinement and education,
of a life infinitely removed from the wild ruggedness of the desert
West--that she could intimate what seemed in one breath both murder and
suicide--this staggered Adam's credulity.

Yet, as he stared at her, realising the tremendous passion of will, of
spirit, of something more that emanated from her, divining how in her
case intellect and culture had been added to the eternal feminine of her
nature, he knew she spoke the truth. Adam had met women on the desert,
and all of them were riddles. Yet what a vast range between Margarita
Arallanes and Magdalene Virey!

"Won't your husband leave--take you away from here?" asked Adam, slowly.

"No."

"Well--I have a way of forcing men to see things. I suppose I--"

"Useless! We have travelled three thousand miles to get to Death Valley.
Years ago Elliot Virey read about this awful place. He was always
interested. He learned that it was the most arid, ghastly, desolate, and
terrible place of death in all the world...Then, when he got me to
Sacramento--and to Placerville--he would talk with miners, prospectors,
Indians--anyone who could tell him about Death Valley...Virey had a
reason for finding a hell on earth. We crossed the mountains, range after
range--and here we are...Sir, the hell of which we read--even in its
bottommost pit--cannot be worse than Death Valley."

"You will let me take you home--at least out of the desert?" queried
Adam, with passionate sharpness.

"Sir, I thank you again," she replied, her voice thrilling richly. "But
no--no! You do not understand--you cannot--and it's impossible to
explain."

"Ah! Yes, some things are...Suppose you let me move your camp higher up,
out of this thick, dead air and heat--where there are trees and good
water?"

"But it is not a beautiful and a comfortable camp that Virey--that we
want," she said, bitterly.

"Then let me move your shack across the wash out of danger. This spot is
the most forbidding I ever saw. That mountain above us is on the move.
The whole cracked slope is sliding like a glacier. It is an avalanche
waiting for a jar--a slip--something to start it. The rocks are rolling
down all the time."

"Have I not heard the rocks--cracking, ringing--in the dead of night!"
she cried, shuddering. Her slender form seemed to draw within itself and
the white, slim hands clenched her gown. "Rocks! How I've learned to hate
them! These rolling rocks are livings things. I've heard them slide and
crack, roll and ring--hit the sand with a thump, and then with whistle
and thud go by where I lay in the dark...People who live as I have lived
know nothing of the elements. I had no fear of the desert--nor of Death
Valley. I dared it. I laughed to scorn the idea that any barren wild
valley, any maelstrom of the sea, any Sodom of a city could be worse than
the chaos of my soul...But I didn't know. I am human. I'm a woman. A
woman is meant to bear children. Nothing else!...I learned that I was
afraid of the dark--that such fear had been born in me. These rolling
rocks got on my nerves. I wait--I listen for them. And I pray...Then the
silence--that became so dreadful. It is insupportable. Worse than all is
the loneliness...Oh, this God-forsaken, lonely Death Valley! It will
drive me mad."

As Adam had anticipated, no matter what strength of will, what sense of
secrecy bound this woman's lips, she had been victim to the sound of her
own voice, which, liberated by his sympathy, had spoken, and a word, as
it were, had led to a full, deep, passionate utterance.

"True. All too terribly true," replied Adam. "And for a woman--for
you--these feelings will grow more intense...I beg of you, at least let
me move your camp back out of danger."

"No! Not a single foot!" she blazed, as if confronted with something
beyond his words. After that she hid her face in her hands. A long
silence ensued. Adam, watching her, saw when the tremble and heave of her
breast subsided. At length she looked up again, apparently composed.
"Perhaps I talked more than I should have. But no matter. It was
necessary to tell you something. For you came here to help an unknown
woman. Not to anyone else have I breathed a word of the true state of my
feelings. My husband watches me like a hawk, but not yet does he know my
fears. I'll thank you, when you speak to him, if you stay here so long,
not to tell him anything I've said."

"Mrs. Virey, I'll stay as long as you are here," said Adam, simply.

The simplicity of his speech, coupled with the tremendous suggestion in
the fact of his physical presence, his strength and knowledge to serve
her despite her bitter repudiation, seemed again to knock at the heart of
her femininity. In the beginning of human life on the earth, and through
its primal development, there was always a man to protect a woman. But
subtly and inevitably there had been in Adam's words an intimation that
Magdalene Virey stood absolutely alone. More, for with spirit, if not
with body, she was fighting Death Valley, and also some terrible relation
her husband bore to her.

"Sir--you would stay here--on a possible chance of serving me?" she
whispered.

"Yes," replied Adam.

"Virey will not like that."

"I'm not sure, but I suspect it'll not make any difference to me what he
likes."

"If you are kind to me he will drive you away," she went on, with
agitation.

"Well, as he's your husband he may prevent me from being kind, but he
can't drive me away."

"But suppose I ask you to go?"

"If that's the greatest kindness I can do you--well, I'll go...But do you
ask me?"

"I--I don't know. I may be forced to--not by him, but by my pride," she
said, desperately. "Oh, I'm unstrung! I don't know what to say...After
all, just the sound of a kind voice makes me a coward. O God! if people
in the world only knew the value of kindness I never did know. This
desert of horrors teaches the truth of life. Once I had the world at my
feet!...Now I break and bow at the sympathy of a stranger!"

"Never mind your pride," said Adam, in his slow, cool way. "I understand.
I've a good deal of a woman in me. Whatever brought you to Death Valley,
whatever nails you here, is nothing to me. Even if I learn it, what need
that be to you? If you do not want me to stay to work for you, watch over
your husband--why, let me stay for my own sake."

She rose and faced him, with soul-searching eyes. She could not escape
her nature. Emotion governed her.

"Sir, you speak nobly," she replied, with lips that trembled. "But I don't
understand you. Stay here--where I am--for your sake! Explain please."

"I have my burden. Once it was even more terrible than yours. Through
that I can feel as you feel now. I have lived the loneliness--the
insupportable loneliness--of the desert--the silence, the heat, the hell.
But my burden still weighs on my soul. If I might somehow help your
husband, who is going wrong, blindly following some road of
passion--change him or stop him, why that would ease my burden. If I
might save you weariness, or physical pain, or hunger, or thirst, or
terror--it would be doing more for myself than for you. We are in Death
Valley. You refuse to leave. We are, right here, two hundred feet below
sea level. When the furnace heat comes--when the blasting midnight wind
comes--it means either madness or death."

"Stay--Sir Knight," she said, with a hollow, ringing gaiety. "Who shall
say that chivalry is dead?...Stay and know this. I fear no man. I scorn
death...But, ah, the woman of me! I hate dirt and vermin. I'm afraid of
pain. I suffer agonies even before I'm hurt. I miss so unforgetably the
luxuries of life. And lastly, I have a mortal terror of going mad. Spare
me that and you will have my prayers in this world--and
beyond...Good-night."

"Good-night," replied Adam.

She left him to the deepening gloom and the dying camp fire. Adam soon
grew conscious of extreme fatigue in mind and body. Spreading his
blankets on the sands, he stretched his weary, aching body without even
an upward glance at the stars, and fell asleep.

Daylight again, as if by the opening of eyelids! The rose colour was
vying with the blue of the sky and a noble gold crowned the line of
eastern range which Adam could see through the V-shaped split that opened
into the valley.

He pulled on his boots, and gave his face an unusual and detrimental
luxury in the desert. Water was bad for exposed flesh in arid country.
The usual spring and buoyancy of his physical being was lacking this day.
Such overstrain as yesterday's would require time to be remedied. So Adam
moved slowly and with caution.

First Adam went to the spring. He found a bubbling gush of velvet-looking
water pouring out of a hole and running a few rods to sink into the sand.
The colour of it seemed inviting--so clear and soft and somehow rich.
The music of its murmur, too, was melodious. Adam was a connoisseur of
waters. What desert wanderer of years was not? Before he tasted this
water, despite its promise, he knew it was not good. Yet it did not have
exactly an unpleasant taste. Dismukes had said this water was all right,
yet he seldom stayed long enough in one locality to learn the ill-effects
of the water. Adam knew he too could live on this water. But he was
thinking of the delicate woman lost here in Death Valley with an idiot or
a knave of a husband.

The spring was located some two hundred yards or more from the shack and
just out of line of the rock-strewn slope. Spreading like a fan, this
weathered slant of stones extended its long, curved length in the
opposite direction. Adam decided to pitch his permanent camp, or at least
sleeping place, here on the grass. Here he erected a brush and canvas
shelter to make shade, and deposited his effects under it. That done, he
returned to the shack to cook breakfast.

There appeared to be no life in the rude little misshapen hut. Had the
man who built it ever been a boy? There were men so utterly helpless and
useless out in the wilds, where existence depended upon labour of hands,
that they seemed foreign to the descendants of Americans. Adam could not
but wonder about the man lying in there, though he tried hard to confine
his reflections to the woman. He did not like the situation. Of what
avail the strong arm, the desert-taught fierceness to survive? If this
man and woman had ever possessed instincts to live, to fight, to
reproduce their kind, to be of use in the world, they had subverted them
to the debasements of sophisticated and selfish existence. The woman
loomed big to Adam, and he believed she had been dragged down by a weak
and vicious man.

Leisurely, Adam attended to the preparation of breakfast, prolonging
tasks that always passed swiftly through his hands.

"Good morning, Sir Wansfell," called a voice with something of mockery in
it, yet rich and wistful--a low-pitched contralto voice full of music and
pathos and a pervading bitterness.

It stirred Adam's blood, so sluggish this morning. It seemed to carry an
echo from his distant past. Turning, he saw the woman, clad in grey, with
girdle of cord twisted around her slender waist. Soft and clean and
fleecy, that grey garment, so out of place there, so utterly incongruous
against the background of crude shack and wild slope, somehow fitted her
voice as it did her fragile shape, somehow set her infinitely apart from
the women Adam had met in his desert wanderings. She came from the great
world outside, a delicate spark from the solid flint of class, a
thoroughbred whom years before the desert might have saved.

"Good morning, Mrs. Virey," returned Adam. "How are you--and did your
husband awake?"

"I slept better than for long," she replied, "and I think I know
why...Yes, Virey came to. He's conscious, and asked for water. But he's
weak--strange. I'd like you to look at him presently."

"Yes, I will."

"And how are you after your tremendous exertions of yesterday?" she
inquired.

"Not so spry," said Adam, with a smile. "But I'll be myself in a day or
so. I believe the air down in the valley affected me a little. My lungs
are sore...I think it would be more comfortable for you if we had
breakfast in your kitchen. The sun is hot."

"Indeed yes. So you mean to--to do this--this camp work for me--in spite
of--"

"Yes. I always oppose women," he said. "And that is about once every two
or three years. You see, women are scarce on the desert."

"Last night I was upset. I am sorry that I was ungracious. I thank you,
and I am only too glad to accept your kind service," she said, earnestly.

"That is well. Now, will you help me carry in the breakfast?"

Unreality was not unusual to Adam. The desert had as many unrealities,
illusions, and spectres as it had natural and tangible things. But while
he sat opposite to this fascinating woman, whose garments exuded some
subtle fragrance of perfume, whose shadowed, beautiful face shone like a
cameo against the drab wall of the brush shack, he was hard put to it to
convince himself of actuality. She ate daintily, but she was hungry. The
grey gown fell in graceful folds around the low stone seat. The rude
table between them was a box, narrow and uneven.

"Shall I try to get Virey to eat?" she asked, presently.

"That depends. On the desert, after a collapse, we are careful with food
and water."

"Will you look at him?"

Adam followed her as she swept aside a flap of the canvas partition. This
room was larger and lighter. It had an aperture for a window. Adam's
quick glance took this in, and then the two narrow beds of blankets raised
on brush cots. Virey lay on the one farther from the door. His pallid
brow and unshaven face appeared drawn into terrible lines, which, of
course, Adam could not be sure were permanent or the result of the
collapse in the valley. He inclined, however, to the conviction that
Virey's face was the distorted reflection of a tortured soul. Surely he
had been handsome once. He had deep-set black eyes, a straight nose, and
a mouth that betrayed him, despite its being half hidden under a
moustache. Adam, keen and strung in that moment as he received his
impressions of Virey, felt the woman's intensity as if he had been
studying her instead of her husband. How singular women were! How could
it matter to her what opinion he formed of her husband? Adam knew he had
been powerfully prejudiced against this man, but he had held in stern
abeyance all judgment until he could look at him. For long years Adam had
gazed into the face of the desert. Outward appearance could not deceive
him. As the cactus revealed its ruthless nature, as the tiny inch-high
flower bloomed in its perishable but imperative proof of beauty as well
as life, as the long flowing sands of the desert betrayed the destructive
design of the universe--so the face of any man was the image of his soul.
And Adam recoiled instinctively, if not outwardly, at what he read in
Virey's face.

"You're in pain?" queried Adam.

"Yes," came the husky whisper, and Virey put a hand on his breast.

"It's sore here," said Adam, feeling Virey. "You've breathed poisoned air
down in the valley. It acts like ether...You just lie quiet for a while.
I'll do the work around camp."

"Thank you," whispered Virey.

The woman followed Adam outside and gazed earnestly up at him,
unconscious of herself, with her face closer than it had ever been to him
and full in the sunlight. It struck Adam that the difference between
desert flowers and the faces of beautiful women was one of emotion. How
much better to have the brief hour of an unconscious flower, wasting its
fragrance on the desert air!

"He's ill, don't you think?" queried the woman.

"No. But he recovers slowly. A man must have a perfect heart and powerful
lungs to battle against the many perils in this country. But Virey will
get over this all right.

"You never give up, do you?" she inquired.

"Come to think of that, I guess I never do," replied Adam.

"Such a spirit is worthy of a better cause. You are doomed here to
failure."

"Well, I'm not infallible, that's certain. But you can never tell. The
fact of my standing here is proof of the overcoming of almost impossible
things. I can't make Death Valley habitable for you, but I can lessen the
hardships. How long have you been here?"

"Several months. But it's years to me."

"Who brought you down? How did you get here?"

"We've had different guides. The last were Shoshone Indians, who
accompanied us across a range of mountains, then a valley, and last over
the Panamints. They left us here. I rode a horse. Virey walked the last
stages of this journey to Death Valley--from which there will be no
return. We turned horse and burros loose. I have not seen them since."

"Are these Shoshones supposed to visit you occasionally?"

"Yes. Virey made a deal with them to come every full moon. We've had more
supplies than we need. The trouble is that Virey has the inclination to
eat, but I have not the skill to prepare food wholesomely under these
rough conditions. So we almost starved."

"Well, let me take charge of camp duties. You nurse your husband and
don't neglect yourself. It's the least you can do. You'll have hardship
and suffering enough, even at best. You've suffered, I can see, but not
physically. And you never knew what hardship meant until you got into the
desert. If you live, these things will cure you of any trouble. They'll
hardly cure Virey, for he has retrograded. Most men in the desert follow
the line of least resistance. They sink. But you will not...And let me
tell you. There are elemental pangs of hunger, of thirst, of pain that
are blessings in disguise. You'll learn what rest is and sleep and
loneliness. People who live as you have lived are lopsided. What do they
know of life close to the earth? Any other life is false. Cities, swarms
of men and women, riches, luxury, poverty--these were not in nature's
scheme of life...Mrs. Virey, if anything can change your soul it will be
the desert."

"Ah, Sir Wansfell, so you have philosophy as well as chivalry," she
replied, with the faint accent that seemed to be mockery of herself.
"Change my soul if you can, wanderer of the desert! I am a woman, and a
woman is symbolical of change. Teach me to cook, to work, to grow strong,
to endure, to fight, to look up at those dark hills whence cometh your
strength...I am here in Death Valley. I will never leave it in body. My
bones will mingle with the sands and moulder to dust...But my soul--ah!
that black gulf of doubt, of agony, of terror, of hate--change that if
you can!"

These tragic, eloquent words chained Adam to Death Valley as if they had
been links of steel; and thus began his long sojourn there.

Work or action was always necessary to Adam. They had become second
nature. He planned a brush shelter from the sun, a sort of outside room
adjoining the shack, a stone fireplace and table and seats, a low stone
wall to keep out blowing sand, and a thick, heavy stone fence between
shack and the slope of sliding rocks. When these tasks were finished
there would be others, and always there would be the slopes to climb, the
valley to explore. Idleness in Death Valley was a forerunner of madness.
There must be a reserve fund of long work and exercise, so that when the
blazing, leaden-hazed middays of August came, with idleness imperative,
there would be both physical force and unclouded mind to endure them. The
men who succumbed to madness in this valley were those who had not
understood how to combat it.

That day passed swiftly, and the twilight hour seemed to have less of
gloom and forbidding intimations. That might well have been due to his
eternal hope. Mrs. Virey showed less gravity and melancholy, and not once
did she speak with bitterness or passion. She informed Adam that Virey
had improved.

Two more days slipped by, and on the third Virey got up and came forth
into the sunlight. Adam happened to be at work near by. He saw Virey gaze
around at the improvements that had been made and say something about
them to his wife. He looked a man who should have been in the prime of
life. Approaching with slow gait and haggard face, he addressed Adam.

"You expect pay for this puttering around?"

"No," replied Adam, shortly.

"How's that?"

"Well, when men are used to the desert, as I am, they lend a hand where
it is needed. That's not often."

"But I didn't want any such work done round my camp."

"I know, and I excuse you because you're ignorant of desert ways and
needs."

"The question of excuse for me is offensive."

Adam, rising abreast of the stone wall he was building, fixed his
piercing eyes upon this man. Mrs. Virey stood a little to one side, but
not out of range of Adam's gaze. Did a mocking light show in her shadowy
eyes? The doubt, the curiosity in her expression must have related to
Adam. That slight, subtle something about her revealed to Adam the
inevitableness of disappointment in store for him if he still entertained
any hopes of amenable relations with Virey.

"We all have to be excused sometimes," said Adam, deliberately. "Now I
had to excuse you on the score of ignorance of the desert. You chose this
place as a camp. It happens to be the most dangerous spot I ever saw. Any
moment a stone may roll down that slope to kill you. Any moment the whole
avalanche may start. That slope is an avalanche."

"It's my business where I camp," rejoined Virey.

"Were you aware of the danger here?"

"I am indifferent to danger."

"But you are not alone. You have a woman with you."

Manifestly, Virey had been speaking without weighing words and looking at
Adam without really seeing him. The brooding shade passed out of his
eyes, and in its place grew a light of interest that leaped to the
crystal-cold clearness of a lens.

"You're a prospector," he asserted.

"No. I pan a little gold dust once in a while for fun because I happen
across it."

"You're no miner then--nor hunter, nor teamster."

"I've been a little of all you name, but I can't be called any one of
them."

"You might be one of the robbers that infest these hills."

"I might be, only I'm not," declared Adam, dryly. The fire in his depths
stirred restlessly, but he kept a cool, smothering control over it. He
felt disposed to be lenient and kind toward this unfortunate man. If only
the woman had not stood there with that half-veiled mocking shadow of
doubt in her eyes!

"You're an educated man!" ejaculated Virey, incredulously.

"I might claim to be specially educated in the ways of the desert."

"And the ways of women, are they mysteries to you?" queried Virey, with
scorn. His interrogation seemed like a bitter doubt flung out of an
immeasurable depth of passion.

"I confess that they are," replied Adam. "I've lived a lonely life. Few
women have crossed my trail."

"You don't realise your good fortune--if you tell the truth."

"I would not lie to any man," returned Adam, bluntly.

"Bah! Men are all liars, and women make them so. You're hanging around
my camp, making a bluff of work."

"I deny that. Heaving these stones is work. You lift a few of them in
this hot sun...And my packing you on my back for ten miles over the floor
of Death Valley--was that a bluff?"

"You saved my life!" exclaimed the man, stung to passion. There seemed to
be contending tides within him--a fight of old habits of thought,
fineness of feeling, against an all-absorbing and dominating malignancy.
"Man, I can't thank you for that...You've done me no service."

"I don't want or expect thanks. I was thinking of the effort it cost me."

"As a man who was once a gentleman, I do thank you--which is a courtesy
due my past. But now that you have put me in debt for a service I didn't
want, why do you linger here?"

"I wish to help your wife."

"Ah! that's frank of you. That frankness is something for which I really
thank you. But you'll pardon me if I'm inclined to doubt the idealistic
nature of your motive to help her."

Adam pondered over this speech without reply. Words always came fluently
when he was ready to speak. And he seemed more concerned over Virey's
caustic bitterness than over his meaning. Then, as he met the magnificent
flash in Magdalene Virey's eyes, he was inspired into revelation of
Virey's veiled hint and into a serenity he divined would be kindest to
her pride.

"Go ahead and help her," Virey went on. "You have my sincere
felicitations. My charming wife is helpless enough. I never knew how
helpless till we were thrown upon our own resources. She cannot even cook
a potato. And as for baking bread in one of those miserable black ovens,
stranger, if you eat some of it I will not be long annoyed by your
attentions to her."

"Well, I'll teach her," said Adam.

His practical response irritated Virey excessively. It was as if he
wished to insult and inflame, and had not considered a literal
application to his words.

"Who are you? What's your name?" he queried, yielding to a roused
curiosity.

"Wansfell," replied Adam.

"Wansfell?" echoed Virey. The name struck a chord of memory--a discordant
one. He bent forward a little, at a point between curiosity and
excitement. "Wansfell? I know that name. Are you the man who in this
desert country is called Wansfell the Wanderer?"

"Yes, I'm that Wansfell."

"I heard a prospector tell about you," went on Virey, his haggard face
now quickened by thought. "It was at a camp near a gold mine over here
somewhere--I forget where. But the prospector said he had seen you kill a
man named Mc something--McKin--no, McKue. That's the name...Did he tell
the truth?"

"Yes, I'm sorry to say. I killed Baldy McKue--or rather, to speak as I
feel, I was the means by which the desert dealt McKue the death justly
due him."

Virey now glowed with excitement, changing the man.

"Somehow that story haunted me," he said. "I never heard one like
it...This prospector told how you confronted McKue in the street of a
mining camp. In front of a gambling hell, or maybe it was a hotel. You
yelled like a demon at McKue. He turned white as a sheet. He jerked his
gun, began to shoot. But you bore a charmed life. His bullets did not hit
you, or, if they did, to no purpose. You leaped upon him. His gun flew
one way, his hat another...Then--then you killed him with your
hands!...Is that true?"

Adam nodded gloomily. The tale, told vividly by this seemingly galvanised
Virey, was not pleasant. And the woman stood there, transfixed, with
white face and tragic eyes.

"My God! You killed McKue by sheer strength--with your bare hands!...I
had not looked at your hands. I see them now...So McKue was your enemy?"

"No. I never saw him before that day," replied Adam.

Virey slowly drew back wonderingly, yet with instinctive shrinking.
Certain it was that his lips stiffened.

"Then why did you kill him?"

"He ill-treated a woman."

Adam turned away as he replied. He did not choose then to show in his
eyes the leaping thought that had been born of the memory and of Virey's
strange reaction. But he heard him draw a quick, sharp breath and step
back. Then a silence ensued. Adam gazed up at the endless slope, at the
millions of rocks, all apparently resting lightly in their pockets, ready
to plunge down.

"So--so that was it," spoke up Virey, evidently with effort. "I always
wondered. Wild West sort of story, you know. Strange I should meet
you...Thanks for telling me. I gather it wasn't pleasant for you."

"It's sickening to recall, but I have no regrets," replied Adam.

"Quite so. I understand. Man of the desert--ruthless--inhuman sort of
thing."

"Inhuman?" queried Adam, and he looked at Virey, at last stung. Behind
Virey's pale, working face and averted eyes Adam read a conscience in
tumult, a spirit for the moment terrorised. "Virey, you and I'd never
agree on meaning of words...I broke McKue's arms and ribs and legs, and
while I cracked them I told him what an inhuman dastard he had been--to
ruin a girl, to beat her, to abandon her and her baby--to leave them to
die. I told him how I had watched them die...then I broke his
neck!...McKue was the inhuman man--not I."

Virey turned away, swaying a little, and his white hand, like a woman's,
sought the stone wall for support, until he reached the shack, which he
entered.

"I'm sorry, Mrs. Virey, that story had to come up," said Adam,
confronting her with reluctance. But she surprised him again. He expected
to find her sickened, shrinking from him as a bloody monster, perhaps
half fainting; he found, however, that she seemed serene, controlling
deep emotions which manifested themselves only in the marble whiteness of
her cheek, the strained darkness of her eye.

"The story was beautiful. I had not heard it," she said, and the rich
tremor of her voice thrilled Adam. "What woman would not revel in such a
story?...Wansfell the Wanderer. It should be Sir Wansfell, Knight of the
Desert!...Don't look at me so. Have you not learned that the grandest act
on earth is when a man fights for the honour or love or happiness or life
of a woman?...I am a woman. Many men have loved me. Virey's love is so
strong that it is hate. But no man ever yet thought of me--no man ever
yet heard the little songs that echoed through my soul--no man ever
fought to save me!...My friend, I dare speak as you speak, with the
nakedness of the desert. And so I tell you that just now I watched my
husband--I listened to the words which told his nature, as if that was
new to me. I watched you stand there--I listened to you. And so I dare to
tell you--if you come to fight my battles I shall have added to my life
of shocks and woes a trouble that will dwarf all the others...the
awakening of a woman who has been blind!...The facing of my soul--perhaps
its salvation! A crowning agony--a glory come too late!"



CHAPTER XVI

At sunset Adam cooked supper for the Vireys, satisfying his own needs
after they had finished. Virey talked lightly, even joked about the first
good meal he had sat down to on the desert. His wife, too, talked
serenely, sometimes with the faintly subtle mockery, as if she had never
intimated that a dividing spear threatened her heart. That was their
way to hide the truth and emotion when they willed. But Adam was silent.

Alone, out under the shadow of the towering gate to the valley, he strode
to and fro, absorbed in a maze of thoughts that gradually cleared, as if
by the light of the solemn stars and virtue of the speaking silence. He
had chanced upon the strangest and most fatal situation in all his desert
years. Yes, but was it by chance? Straight as an arrow he had come across
the barrens to meet a wonderful woman who was going to love him, and a
despicable man whom he was going to kill. That seemed the fatality which
rang in his ears, shone in the accusing stars, hid in the heavy shadows.
It was a matter of feeling. His intelligence could not grasp it. Had he
been in Death Valley four days or four months? Was he walking in his
sleep, victim of a nightmare? The desert, faithful always, answered him.
This was nothing but the flux and reflux of human passion, contending
tides between man and woman, the littleness, the curse, the terror, and
yet the joy of life. Death Valley yawned at his feet, changeless and
shadowy, awful in its locked solemnity of solitude, its voicelessness,
its desolation that had been desolation in past ages. He could doubt
nothing there. His thought seemed almost above human error. A spirit
spoke for him.

Virey had dragged his wife to this lonely and dismal hellhole on earth to
share his misery, to isolate her from men, to hide her glory of charm, to
gloat over her loneliness, to revenge himself for a wrong, to feed his
need of possession, his terrible love that had become hate, to watch the
slow torture of her fading, wilting, drooping in this ghastly valley, to
curse her living, to burn endlessly in torment because her soul would
elude him for ever, to drive her to death and die with her.

Death Valley seemed a harmonious setting for this tragedy and a fitting
grave for its actors. The worst in nature calling to the darkest in
mankind! What a pity Virey could not divine his littleness--that he had
been a crawling maggot in the peopled ulcer of the world--that in the
great spaces where the sun beat down was a fiery cleansing.

But Magdalene Virey was a riddle beyond solving. Nevertheless, Adam
pondered every thought that would stay before his consciousness. Any
woman was a riddle. Did not the image of Margarita Arrallanes flash up
before him--that dusky-eyed, mindless, soulless little animal, victim of
nature born in her? Adam's thought halted with the seeming sacrilege of
associating Magdalene Virey with memory of the Mexican girl. This Virey
woman had complexity--she had mind, passion nobility, soul. What had she
done to earn her husband's hate? She had never loved him--that was as
fixed in Adam's sight as the North Star. Nor had she loved another man,
at least not with the passion and spirit of her wonderful womanhood. Adam
divined that with the intensity of feeling which the desert loneliness
and solitude had taught him. He could have felt the current of any
woman's great passion, whether it was in torrent, full charged and
devastating, or at its lowering ebb. But, as inevitable as was life
itself, there was the mysterious certainty that Magdalene Virey had
terribly wronged her husband. How? Adam had repudiated any interest in
what had driven them here; not until this moment had he permitted his
doubt to insult the woman. Yet how helpless he was! His heart was full
of unutterable pity. He could never have loved Magdalene Virey as a man,
but as a brother he was yearning to change her, save her. What else in
life was worth living for, except only the dreams on the heights, the
walks along the lonely trails? By his own agony he had a strange affinity
for anyone in trouble, especially a woman, and how terribly he saw the
tragedy of Magdalene Virey! And it was not only her death that he saw.
Death in a land where death reigned was nothing. For her he hated the
certainty of physical pain, the turgid pulse, the red-hot iron band at
the temples, the bearing down of weighted air, the drying up of flesh and
blood. More than all he hated the thought of death of her spirit while
her body lived. There would be a bloodless murder long before her blood
stained Virey's hands.

But this thought gave Adam pause. Was he not dealing with a personality
beyond his power to divine? What did he know of this strange woman? He
knew naught, but felt all. She was beautiful, compelling, secretive,
aloof, and proud, magnificent as a living flame. She was mocking because
knowledge of the world, of the frailty of women and falsity of men, had
been as an open page. She had lived in sight of the crowded mart, the
show places where men and women passed, knowing no more of earth than
that it was a place for graves. She was bitter because she had drunk
bitterness to the dregs. But the sudden up-flashing warmth of her, forced
out of her reserve, came from a heart of golden fire. Adam constituted
himself an omniscient judge, answerable only to his conscience. By all
the gods he would be true to the truth of this woman!

Never had she been forced into this desert of desolation. That thought of
Adam's seemed far back in the past. She had dared to come. Had Death
Valley and the death it was famed for any terrors for her? By the side of
her husband she had willingly come, unutterably despising him, infinitely
brave where he was cowardly, scornfully and magnificently prepared to
meet any punishment that might satisfy him. Adam saw how, in this,
Magdalene Virey was answering to some strange need in itself. Let the
blind, weak, egoist Virey demand the tortures of the damned! She would
pay. But she was paying also a debt to herself. Adam's final conception
of Magdalene Virey was that she had been hideously wronged by life, by
men; that in younger days of passionate revolt she had transgressed the
selfish law of husbands; that in maturer years, with the storm and defeat
and disillusion of womanhood, she had risen to the heights, she had been
true to herself; and with mockery of the man who could so underestimate
her, who dared believe he could make her a craven, whimpering, guilty
wretch, she had faced the desert with him. She had seen the great love
that was not love change to terrible hate. She had divined the hidden
motive. She let him revel in his hellish secret joy. She welcomed Death
Valley.

Adam marvelled at this unquenchable spirit, this sublime effrontery of a
woman. And he hesitated to dare to turn that spirit from its superb
indifference. But this vacillation in him was weak. What a wonderful
experience it would be to embody in Magdalene Virey the instinct, the
strife, the nature of the desert! With her mind, if he had the power to
teach, she would grasp the lesson in a single day.

And lastly, her unforgettable implication, "the crowning agony," of what
he might bring upon her. There could be only one interpretation of
that--love. The idea thrilled him, but only with wonder and pity. It took
possession of Adam's imagination. Well, such love might come to pass!
The desert storms bridged canyons with sand in one day. It was a place of
violence. The elements waited not upon time or circumstance. The few
women Adam had come in contact with on the desert had loved him. Even the
one-eyed Mohave Jo, that hideous, unsexed, monstrous deformity of a
woman, whom he had left grovelling in the sand at his feet, shamed at
last before a crowd of idle, gaping, vile men--even she had awakened to
this strange madness of love. But Adam had not wanted that of any woman,
since the poignant moment of his youth on the desert, when the dusky-eyed
Margarita had murmured of love so fresh and sweet to him, "Ah, so long
ago and far away!"

Least of all did Adam want the love of Magdalene Virey.

"If she were young and I were young! Or if she had never...!" Ah! even
possibilities, like might-have-beens, were useless dreams. But the die was
cast. Serve Magdalene Virey he would, and teach her the secret of the
strength of the sand wastes and the lonely hills, and that the victory of
life was not to yield. Fight for her, too, he would. In all the
multiplicity of ways he had learned, he would fight the solitude and
loneliness of Death Valley, the ghastliness so inimical to the creative
life of a woman, the heat, the thirst, the starvation, the poison air,
the furnace wind, storm and flood and avalanche. Just as naturally, if
need be, if it fatefully fell out so, he would lay his slaying hands in
all their ruthless might upon the man who had made her dare her doom.

When, next morning at sunrise hour, Adam presented himself at the Virey
camp, he was greeted by Mrs. Virey, seemingly a transformed woman. She
wore a riding suit, the worn condition of which attested to the rough
ride across the mountain. What remarkable difference it made in her
appearance! It detracted from her height. And the slenderness of her,
revealed rather than suggested by her gowns, showed much of grace and
symmetry. She had braided her hair and let it hang. When the sun had
tanned her white face and hands Magdalene Virey would really be
transformed.

Adam tried not to stare, but his effort was futile.

"Good morning," she said, with a bright smile.

"Why, Mrs. Virey, I--I hardly knew you!" he stammered.

"Thanks. I feel complimented. It is the first time you've looked at me.
Shorn of my dignity--no, my worldliness, do I begin well, desert
man?...No more stuffy dresses clogging my feet! No more veils to protect
my face! Let the sun burn! I want to work. I want to help. I want to
learn. If madness must be mine, let it be a madness to learn what in this
God-forsaken land ever made you the man you are. There, Sir Wansfell, I
have flung down the gage."

"Very well," replied Adam, soberly.

"And now," she continued, "I am eager to work. If I blunder, be patient.
If I am stupid, make me see. And if I faint in the sun or fall beside the
trail, remember, it is my poor body that fails, and not my will."

So, in the light of her keen interest, Adam found the humdrum mixing of
dough and the baking of bread a pleasure and a lesson to him, rather than
a task.

"Ah! how important are the homely things of life!" she said. "A poet said
'we live too much in the world.'...I wonder did he mean just this. We
grow away from or never learn the simple things. I remember my
grandfather's farm--the ploughed fields, the green corn, the yellow
wheat, the chickens in the garden, the mice in the barn, the smell of
hay, the smell of burning leaves, the smell of the rich brown
earth...Wansfell, not for years have I remembered them. Something about
you, the way you worked over that bread, like a nice old country lady,
made me remember...Oh, I wonder what I have missed!"

"We all miss something. It can't be helped. But there are compensations,
and it's never too late."

"You are a child, with all your bigness. You have the mind of a child."

"That's one of my few blessings...Now you try your hand at mixing the
second batch of dough."

She made a picture on her knees, with her sleeves rolled up, her
beautiful hands white with flour, her face beginning to flush. Adam
wanted to laugh at her absolute failure to mix dough, and at the same
moment he had it in him to weep over the earnestness, the sadness, the
pathetic meaning of her.

Eventually they prepared the meal, and she carried Virey's breakfast in
to him. Then she returned to eat with Adam.

"I shall wash the dishes," she announced.

"No," he protested.

Then came a clash. It ended with a compromise. And from that clash Adam
realised he might dominate her in little things, but in a great conflict
of wills she would be the stronger. It was a step in his own slow
education. There was a constitutional difference between men and women.

Upon Adam's resumption of the work around the shack Mrs. Virey helped him
as much as he would permit, which by midday was somewhat beyond her
strength. Her face sunburned rosily and her hands showed the contact with
dirt and her boots were dusty.

"You mustn't overdo it," he advised. "Rest and sleep during the noon
hours."

She retired within the shack and did not reappear till the middle of the
afternoon. Meanwhile, Adam had worked at his tasks, trying at the same
time to keep an eye on Virey who wandered around aimlessly over the
rock-strewn field, idling here and plodding there. Adam saw how Virey
watched the shack; and when Magdalene came out again he saw her and grew
as motionless as the stone where he leaned. Every thought of Virey's must
have been dominated by this woman's presence, the meaning of her, the
possibilities of her, the tragedy of her.

"Oh, how I slept!" she exclaimed. "Is it work that makes you sleep?"

"Indeed yes."

"Ah! I see my noble husband standing like Mephistopheles, smiling at
grief...What's he doing over there?"

"I don't know, unless it's watching for you. He's been around like that
for hours."

"Poor man!" she said, with both compassion and mockery. "Watching me?
What loss of precious time--and so futile! It is a habit he contracted
some years ago...Wansfell, take me down to the opening in the mountain
there, so that I can look into Death Valley."

"Shall I ask Virey?" queried Adam, in slight uncertainty.

"No. Let him watch or follow or do as he likes. I am here in Death
Valley. It was his cherished plan to bury me here. I shall not leave
until he takes me--which will be never. For the rest, he is nothing to
me. We are as far apart as the poles."

On the way down the gentle slope Adam halted amid sun-blasted shrubs,
scarcely recognisable as greasewood. Here he knelt in the gravel to pluck
some flowers so tiny that only a trained eye could ever have espied them.
One was a little pink flower with sage colour and sage odour; another a
white daisy, very frail, and without any visible leaves; and a third was
a purple-red flower, half the size of the tiniest buttercup, and this had
small dark-green leaves.

"Flowers in Death Valley!" exclaimed Mrs. Virey, in utter amaze.

"Yes. Flowers of a day! They sprang up yesterday; to-day they bloom,
to-morrow they will die. I don't know their names. To me their blossoming
is one of the wonders of the desert. I think sometimes that it is a
promise. A whole year the tiny seeds lie in the hot sands. Then comes a
mysterious call and the green plant shoots its inch-long stalk to the
sun. Another day beauty unfolds and there is fragrance on the desert air.
Another day sees them wither and die."

"Beauty and fragrance indeed they have," mused the woman. "Such tiny
flowers to look and smell so sweet! I never saw their like. Flowers of a
day!...They indeed give rise to thoughts too deep for tears!"

Adam led his companion to the base of the mountain wall, and around the
corner of the opening, so that they came suddenly and unexpectedly into
full view of Death Valley. He did not look at her. He wanted to wait a
little before doing that. The soft gasp which escaped her lips and the
quick grasping of his hand were significant of the shock she sustained.

Their position faced mostly down the valley. It seemed a vast level,
gently sloping up to the borders where specks of mesquites dotted the
sand. Dull grey and flat, these league-wide wastes of speckled sand
bordered a dazzling-white sunlit belt, the winding bottom of the long
bowl, the salty dead stream of Death Valley. Miles and miles below, two
mountain ranges blended in a purple blaze, and endless slanting lines of
slopes ran down to merge in the valley floor. The ranges sent down
offshoots of mountains that slanted and lengthened into the valley. One
bright-green oasis, that, lost in the vastness, was comparable to one of
the tiny flowers Adam had plucked out of the sand, shone wonderfully and
illusively out of the glare of grey and white. A dim, mystic scene!

"O God!...It is my grave!" cried Magdalene Virey.

"We are all destined for graves," replied Adam, solemnly. "Could any
grave elsewhere be so grand--so lonely--so peaceful?...Now let us walk
out a little way, to the edge of that ridge, and sit there while the sun
sets."

On this vantage point they were out some distance in the valley, so that
they could see even the western end of the Panamint range, where a
glaring sun had begun to change its colour over the bold black peaks. A
broad shadow lengthened across the valley and crept up the yellow
foothills to the red Funeral Mountains. This shadow marvellously changed
to purple, and as the radiance of light continued to shade, the purple
deepened. Over all the valley at the western end appeared a haze the
colour of which was nameless. Adam felt the lessening heat of the sinking
sun. Half that blaze was gone. It had been gold and was now silver. He
swept his gaze around jealously, not to miss the transformations; and his
companion, silent and absorbed, instinctively turned with him. Across the
valley the Funerals towered, ragged and sharp, with rosy crowns; and one,
the only dome-shaped peak, showed its strata of grey and drab through the
rose. Another peak, farther back, lifted a pink shaft into the blue sky.
What a contrast to the lower hills and slopes, so beautifully pearl grey
in tint! And now, almost the instant Adam had marked the exquisite
colours, they began to fade. On that illimitable horizon line there were
soon no bright tones left. Far to the south, peaks that had been dim now
stood out clear and sharp against the sky. One, gold capped and radiant,
shadowed as if a cloud had come between it and the sun. Adam turned again
to the west, in time to see the last vestige of silver fire vanish.
Sunset!

A sombre smoky sunset it was now, as if this Death Valley was the gateway
of hell and its sinister shades were upflung from fire. Adam saw a
vulture sail across the clear space of sky, breasting the wind. It lent
life to the desolation.

The desert day was done and the desert shades began to descend. The
moment was tranquil and sad. It had little to do with the destiny of
man--nothing except that by some inscrutable design of God or an accident
of evolution man happened to be imprisoned where nature never intended
man to be. Death Valley was only a ragged rent of the old earth, where
men wandered wild, brooding, lost, or where others sought with folly and
passion to dig forth golden treasure. The mysterious lights changed. A
long pale radiance appeared over the western range and lengthened along
its bold horizon. The only red colour left was way to the south, and that
shone dim. The air held a solemn stillness.

"Magdalene Virey," said Adam, "what you see there resembles death--it
may be death--but it is peace. Does it not rest your troubled soul? A
woman must be herself here."

She, whose words could pour out in such torrent of eloquence, was silent
now. Adam looked at her then, into the shadowed eyes. What he saw there
awed him. The abyss seen through those beautiful, unguarded windows of
her soul was like the grey scored valley beneath, but lighting,
quickening with thought, with hope, with life. Death Valley was a part of
the earth dying, and it would become like a canyon on the burned-out
moon; but this woman's spirit seemed everlasting. If her soul had been a
whited sepulchre, it was in the way of transfiguration. Adam experienced
a singular exaltation in the moment, a gladness beyond his comprehension,
a sense that the present strange communion there between this woman's
awakening and the terrible lessons of his life was creating for him a
far-distant interest, baffling, but great in its inspiration.

In the gathering twilight he led her back to camp, content that it seemed
still impossible for her to speak. But the touch of her hand at parting
was more eloquent than any words.

Then alone, in his blankets, with gaze up at the inscrutable, promising
stars, Adam gave himself over to insistent and crowding thoughts, back of
which throbbed a dominating, divine hope in his power to save this
woman's life and soul, and perhaps even her happiness.

Next day Adam's natural aggressiveness asserted itself, controlled now by
an imperturbable spirit that nothing could daunt. He approached Virey
relentlessly, though with kindness, even good nature, and he began to
talk about Death Valley, the perilous nature of the camping spot, the
blasting heat of midsummer and the horror of the midnight furnace winds,
the possibility of the water drying up. Virey was cold, then impatient,
then intolerant, and finally furious. First he was deaf to Adam's
persuasion, then he tried to get out of listening, then he repudiated all
Adam had said, and finally he raved and cursed. Adam persisted in his
arguments until Virey strode off.

Mrs. Virey heard some of this clash. Apparently Adam's idea of changing
her husband amused her. But when Virey returned for supper he was glad
enough to eat, and when Adam again launched his argument it appeared that
Mrs. Virey lost the last little trace of mockery. She listened intently
while Adam told her husband why he would have to take his wife away from
Death Valley before midsummer. Virey might as well have been stone deaf.
It was not Virey, however, who interested the woman, but something about
Adam that made her look and listen thoughtfully.

Thus began a singular time for Adam, unmatched in all his desert
experience. He gave his whole heart to the task of teaching Magdalene
Virey and to the wearing down of Virey's will. All the lighter tasks that
his hands had learned he taught her. Then to climb to the heights, to
pick the ledges for signs of gold or pan the sandy washes, to know the
rocks and the few species of vegetation, to recognise the illusion of
distance and colour, to watch the sunsets and the stars became daily
experiences. Hard as work was for her delicate hands and muscles, he
urged her to their limit. During the first days she suffered sunburn,
scalds, skinned fingers, bruised knees, and extreme fatigue. When she
grew tanned and stronger he led her out on walks and climbs so hard that
he had to help her back to camp. She learned the meaning of physical
pain, and to endure it. She learned the blessing it was to eat when she
was famished, to rest when she was utterly weary, to sleep when sleep was
peace.

Through these brief, full days Adam attacked Virey at every opportunity,
which time came to be, at length, only during meals. Virey would leave
camp, often to go up the slope of weathered rocks, a dangerous climb that
manifestly fascinated him. Reaching a large rock that became his
favourite place, he would perch there for long hours, watching, gazing
down like a vulture waiting for time to strike its prey. All about him
seemed to suggest a brooding wait. He slept during the midday hours and
through the long nights. At dusk, which was usually bedtime for all, Adam
often heard him, talking to Mrs. Virey in a low, hard, passionate voice.
Sometimes her melodious tones, with the mockery always present when she
spoke to her husband, thrilled Adam, while at the same moment it filled
him with despair. But Adam never despaired of driving Virey to leave the
valley. The man was weak in all ways except that side which pertained to
revenge. Notwithstanding the real and growing obstacle of this passion,
Adam clung to his conviction that in the end Virey would collapse. When,
however, one day the Indians came, and Virey sent them away with a large
order for supplies, Adam gave vent to a grim thought, "Well, I can always
kill him."

All the disgust and loathing Adam felt for this waster of life vanished
in the presence of Magdalene Virey. If that long-passed sunset hour over
Death Valley had awakened the woman, what had been the transformation of
the weeks? Adam had no thoughts that adequately expressed his feeling for
the change in her. It gave him further reverence for desert sun and heat
and thirst and violence and solitude. It gave him strange new insight
into the mystery of life. Was any healing of disease or agony
impossible--any change of spirit--any renewal of life? Nothing in
relation to human life was impossible. Magnificently the desert magnified
and multiplied time, thought, effort, pain, health, hope--all that could
be felt.

It seemed to Adam that through the physical relation to the desert he was
changing Magdalene Virey's body and heart and soul. Brown her face and
hands had grown; and slowly the graceful, thin lines of her slender body
had begun to round out. She was gaining. If it had not been for her
shadowed eyes, and the permanent sadness and mockery in the beautiful
lips, she would have been like a girl of eighteen. Her voice, too, with
its contralto richness, its mellow depth, its subtle shades of tone,
proclaimed the woman. Adam at first had imagined her to be about thirty
years old, but as time passed by, and she grew younger with renewed
strength, he changed his mind. Looking at her to guess her age was like
looking at the desert illusions. Absolute certainty he had, however, of
the reward and result of her inflexible will, of splendid spirit, of
sincere gladness. She had endured physical toil and pain to the limit of
her frail strength, until she was no longer frail. This spirit revived
what had probably been early childish love of natural things; and action
and knowledge developed it until her heart was wholly absorbed in all
that it was possible to do there in that lonesome fastness. With the
genius and intuition of a woman she had grasped at the one solace left
her--the possibility of learning Adam's lesson of the desert. What had
taken him years to acquire she learned from him or divined in days. She
had a wonderful mind.

Once, while they were resting upon a promontory that overhung the valley,
Adam spoke to her. She did not hear him. Her eyes reflected the wonder
and immensity of the waste beneath her. Indeed, she did not appear to be
brooding or thinking. And when he spoke again, breaking in upon her
abstraction, she was startled. He forgot what he had intended to say,
substituting a query as to her thoughts.

"How strange!" she murmured. "I didn't have a thought. I forgot where I
was. Your voice seemed to come from far off."

"I spoke to you before, but you didn't hear," said Adam. "You looked sort
of, well--watchful, I'd call it."

"Watchful? Yes, I was. I feel I was, but I don't remember. This is indeed
a strange state for Magdalene Virey. It behoves her to cultivate it. But
what kind of a state was it?...Wansfell, could it have been happiness?"

She asked that in a whisper, serious, and with pathos, yet with a smile.

"It's always happiness for me to watch from the heights. Surely you are
finding happy moments?"

"Yes, many thanks to you, my friend. But they are conscious happy
moments, just sheer joy of movement, or sight of beauty, or a thrill of
hope, or perhaps a vague dream of old, far-off, unhappy things. And it is
happiness to remember them...But this was different. It was unconscious.
I tell you, Wansfell, I did not have a thought in my mind! I saw--I
watched. Oh, how illusive it is!"

"Try to recall it," he suggested, much interested.

"I try--I try," she said, presently, "but the spell is broken."

"Well, then, let me put a thought into your mind," went on Adam.
"Dismukes and I once had a long talk about the desert. Why does it
fascinate all men? What is the secret? Dismukes didn't rate himself high
as a thinker. But he is a thinker. He knows the desert. To me he's great.
And he and I agreed that the commonly accepted idea of the desert's lure
is wrong. Men seek gold, solitude, forgetfulness. Some wander for the
love of wandering. Others seek to hide from the world. Criminals are
driven to the desert. Besides these, all travellers crossing the desert
talk of its enchantments. They all have different reasons. Loneliness,
peace, silence, beauty, wonder, sublimity--a thousand reasons! Indeed,
they are all proofs of the strange call of the desert. But these men do
not go deep enough."

"Have you solved the secret?" she asked, wonderingly.

"No, not yet," he replied, a little sadly. "It eludes me. It's like
finding the water of the mirage."

"It's like the secret of a woman's heart, Wansfell."

"Then if that is so--tell me."

"Ah! no woman ever tells that secret."

"Have you come to love the desert?"

"You ask me that often," she replied, in perplexity. "I don't know. I--I
reverence--I fear--I thrill. But love--I can't say that I love the desert.
Not yet. Love comes slowly and seldom to me. I loved my mother...Once I
loved a horse."

"Have you loved men?" he queried.

"No!" she flashed, in sudden passion, and her eyes burned dark on his.
"Do you imagine that of me?...I was eighteen when I--when they married me
to Virey. I despised him. I learned to loathe him...Wansfell, I never
really loved any man. Once I was mad--driven!"

How easily could Adam strike the chords of her emotion and rouse her to
impassioned speech! His power to do this haunted him, and sometimes he
could not resist it until wistfulness or trouble in her eyes made him
ashamed.

"Some day I'll tell you how I was driven once--ruined," he said.

"Ruined! You? Why, Wansfell, you are a man! Sometimes I think you're a
god of the desert!...But tell me--what ruined you, as you mean it?"

"No, not now. I'm interested in your--what is it?--your lack of power to
love."

"Lack! How little you know me! I am all power to love. I am a quivering
mass of exquisitely delicate, sensitive nerves. I am a seething torrent
of hot blood. I am an empty heart, deep and terrible as this valley,
hungry for love as it is hungry for precious rain or dew. I am an
illimitable emotion, heaving like the tides of the sea. I am all love."

"And I--only a stupid blunderer," said Adam.

"You use a knife, relentlessly, sometimes. Wansfell, listen... I have a
child--a lovely girl. She is fourteen years old--the sweetest...Ah!
Before she was born I did not love her--I did not want her. But
afterward! Wansfell, a mother's love is divine. But I had more than that.
All--all my heart went out to Ruth...Love! Oh, my God! does any man know
the torture of love?...Oh, I know! I had to leave her--I had to give her
up and I'll never--never see--her--again!"

The woman bowed with hands to her face and all her slender body shook.

"Forgive me!" whispered Adam, huskily, in distress. It was all he could
say for a moment. She had stunned him. Never had he imagined her as a
mother. "Yet--yet I'm glad I know now. You should have told me. I am your
friend. I've tried to be a--a brother. Tell me, Magdalene. You'll be
the--the less troubled. I will help you. I think I understand--just a
little. You seemed to me only a very young woman--and you're a mother!
Always I say I'll never be surprised again. Why, the future is all
surprise! And your little girl's name is Ruth? Ruth Virey. What a pretty
name!"

Adam had rambled on, full of contrition, hating himself, trying somehow
to convey sympathy. Perhaps his words, his touch on her bowed shoulder,
helped her somewhat, for presently she sat up, flung back her hair, and
turned a tear-stained face to him. How changed, how softened, how
beautiful! Slowly her eyes were veiling an emotion, a glimpse of which
uplifted him.

"Wansfell, I'm thirty-eight years old," she said.

"No! I can't believe that!" he ejaculated.

"It's true."

"Well, well! I guess I'll go back to figuring the desert. But speaking of
age--you guess mine. I'll bet you can't come any nearer to mine."

Gravely she studied him, and in the look and action once more grew
composed.

"You're a masculine Sphinx. Those terrible lines from cheek to jaw--they
speak of agony, but not of age. But you're grey at the temples. Wansfell,
you are thirty-seven--perhaps forty."

"Magdalene Virey!" cried Adam, aghast. "Do I look so old? Alas for
vanished youth!...I am only twenty-six."

It was her turn to be amazed. "We had better confine ourselves to other
riddles than love and age. They are treacherous...Come, let us be going."



CHAPTER XVII

The hour came when Magdalene Virey stirred Adam to his depths.

"Wansfell," she said, with a rare and wonderful tremor in her voice, "I
love the silence, the loneliness, the serenity--even the tragedy of this
valley of shadows. Ah! It is one place that will never be popular with
men--where few women will ever come. Nature has set it apart for
wanderers of the wastelands, men like you, unquenchable souls who endure,
as you said, to fight, to strive, to seek, to find...And surely for lost
souls like me! Most men and all women must find death here, if they stay.
But there is death in life. I've faced my soul here, in the black, lonely
watches of the desert nights. And I would endure any agony to change that
soul, to make it as high and clear and noble as the white cone of the
mountain yonder."

Mysterious and inscrutable, the desert influence had worked upon
Magdalene Virey. On the other hand, forces destructive to her physical
being had attacked her. It was as if an invisible withering wind had
blown upon a flower in the night. Adam saw this with distress. But she
laughed at the truth of it--laughed without mockery. Something triumphant
rang like a bell in her laugh. Always, in the subtlety of character she
had brought with her and the mystery she had absorbed from the desert,
she stayed beyond Adam's understanding. It seemed that she liked to
listen to his ceaseless importunities; but merciless to herself and aloof
from Virey, she refused to leave Death Valley.

"Suppose I pack the burros and tuck you under my arm and take you,
anyway?" he queried, stubbornly.

"I fancy I'd like you to tuck me under your arm," she replied, with the
low laugh that came readily now, "but if you did--it would be as far as
you'd get."

"How so?" he demanded, curiously.

"Why, I'd exercise the prerogative of the eternal feminine and command
that time should stand still right there."

A sweetness and charm, perhaps of other days, a memory of power, haunted
face and voice then.

"Time--stand still?" echoed Adam, ponderingly. "Magdalene, you are
beyond me."

"So it seems. I'm a little beyond myself sometimes. You will never see in
me the woman who has been courted, loved, spoiled by men."

"Well, I grasp that, I guess. But I don't care to see you as such a
woman. I might not----"

"Ah! you might not respect me," she interrupted. "Alas!...But, Wansfell,
if I had met you when I was eighteen I would never have been courted and
loved and ruined by men...You don't grasp that, either."

Adam had long ceased to curse his density. The simplicity of him
antagonised her complexity. His had been the blessed victory over her
bitterness, her mockery, her consciousness of despair. His had been the
gladness of seeing her grow brown and strong and well, until these early
June days had begun to weaken her. That fact had augmented his
earnestness to get her to leave the valley. But she was adamant. And all
his importunities and arguments and threats she parried with some subtle
femininity of action or look or speech that left him bewildered.

The time came when only early in the mornings or late in the afternoons
could they walk to their accustomed seat near the gateway of the valley
and climb to the promontories. Nature moved on remorselessly with her
seasons, and the sun had begun to assume its fiery authority during most
of the daylight hours.

One morning before sunrise they climbed, much against Adam's advice, to a
high point where Mrs. Virey loved to face east at that hour. It was a
hard climb, too hard for her to attempt in the heat and oppression that
had come of late. Nevertheless, she prevailed upon Adam to take her, and
she had just about strength enough to get there.

They saw the east luminous and rosy, ethereal and beautiful, momentarily
brightening with a rayed effulgence that spread from a golden centre
behind the dark bold domes of the Funeral Mountains. They saw the sun
rise and change the luminous dawn to lurid day. One moment, and the
beauty the glory, the promise were as if they had never been. The light
over Death Valley at that height was too fierce for the gaze of man.

On the way down, at a narrow ledge, where loose stones made precarious
footing, Adam cautioned his companion and offered to help her. Waving him
on, she followed him with her lithe free step. Then she slipped off the
more solid trail to a little declivity of loose rocks that began to slide
with her toward a slope, where, if she went over it, she must meet
serious injury. She did not scream. Adam plunged after her and, reaching
her with a long arm just as she was about to fall, he swung her up as if
she had only the weight of a child. Then, holding her in his arms, he
essayed to wade out of the little stream of sliding rocks. It was
difficult only because he feared he might slip and fall with her.
Presently he reached the solid ledge and was about to set her upon her
feet.

"Time--stand still here!" she exclaimed, her voice full of the old
mockery of herself, with an added regret for what might have been, but
could never be, with pathos, with the eternal charm of woman who could
never separate her personality, her consciousness of her sex, from their
old relation to man.

Adam halted his action as if suddenly chained, and he gazed down upon
her, where she rested with her head on the bend of his left elbow. There
was a smile on the brown face that had once been so pale. Her large eyes,
wide open, exposed to the sky, seemed to reflect its dark blue colour and
something of its mystery of light. Adam saw wonder there, and reverence
that must have been for him, but seemed incredible, and the shading of
unutterable thoughts.

"Put me down," she said.

"Why did you say, 'Time--stand still here'?" he asked as he placed her
upon her feet.

"Do you remember the time when I told you how words and lines and verses
of the poets I used to love come to mind so vividly out here? Sometimes I
speak them, that is all."

"I understand. All I ever read has come back to me here on the desert,
as clear as the print on the page seen so many years ago. I used to hate
Sunday School when I was a boy. But now, often, words of the Bible come
before my mind...But are you telling me the whole truth? Why did you say,
'Time--stand still here,' when I held you in my arms?"

"What a boy you are!" she murmured, and her eyes held a gladness for the
sight of him. "Confess, now, wouldn't that moment have been a beautiful
one for time to stop--for life to stand still--for the world to be
naught--for thought and memory to cease?"

"Yes, it would," he replied, "but no more beautiful than this moment
while you stand there so. When you look like that you make me hope."

"For what?" she queried, softly.

"For you."

"Wansfell, you are the only man I've ever known who could have held me in
his arms and have been blind and dead to the nature of a woman...Listen.
You've done me the honour to say I have splendid thoughts and noble
emotions. I hope I have. I know you have inspired many. I know this
valley of death has changed my soul. But, Wansfell, I am a woman, and a
woman is more than her high and lofty thoughts--her wandering
inspirations. A woman is a creature of feeling, somehow doomed...When I
said, 'Time--stand still here,' I was false to the woman in me that you
idealise. A thousand thoughts, emotions, memories, desires, sorrows,
vanities prompted the words of which you have made me ashamed. But to
spare myself a little, let me say that it would indeed be beautiful for
me to have you take me up into your arms--and then for time to stand
still forever."

"Do you mean that--so--you'd feel safe, protected, at rest?" he asked,
with emotion.

"Yes, and infinitely more. Wansfell, it is a woman's fate that the only
safe and happy and desired place for her this side of the grave is in the
arms of the man she loves. A real man--with strength and gentleness--for
her and her alone!...It is a terrible thing in women, the need to be
loved. As a baby I had that need--as a girl--and as a woman it became a
passion. Looking back now, through the revelation that has come to me
here in this valley of silence--when thought is clairvoyant and
all-pervading--I can see how the need of love, the passion to be loved,
is the strongest instinct in any woman. It is an instinct. She can no
more change it than she can change the shape of her hand. Poor fated
women! Education, freedom, career may blind them to their real nature.
But it is a man, the right man, that means life to a woman. Otherwise the
best in her dies...That instinct in me--for which I confess shame--has
been unsatisfied despite all the men who have loved me. When you have
saved me--perhaps from injury--and took me into your arms, the instinct
over which I have no control flashed up. While it lasted, until you
looked at me, I wanted that moment to last forever. I wanted to be held
that way--in your great, strong arms--until the last trumpet sounded. I
wanted you to see only me, feel only me, hold only me, live for only me,
love me beyond all else on earth and in heaven!"

As she paused, her slender brown hands at her heaving breast, her eyes
strained as if peering through obscurity at a distant light. Adam could
only stare at her in helpless fascination. In such moods as this she
taught him as much of the mystery of life as he had taught her of the
nature of the desert.

"Now the instinct is gone," she continued. "Chilled by your aloofness! I
am looking at it with intelligence. And, Wansfell, I'm filled with pity
for women. I pity myself, despite the fact that my mind is free. I can
control my acts, if not my instincts and emotions. I am bound. I am a
woman. I am a she-creature. I am little different from the fierce
she-cats, the she-lions--any of the she-animals that you've told me fight
to survive down on your wild Colorado Desert...That seems to me the sex,
the fate, the doom of women. Ah! no wonder they fight for men--spit and
hiss and squall and scratch and rend! It's a sad thing, seen from a
woman's mind. That great mass of women who cannot reason about their
instincts, or understand the springs of their emotions--they are the
happier. Too much knowledge is bad for my sex. Perhaps we are wrongly
educated. I am the happier for what you have taught me. I can see myself
now with pity instead of loathing. I am not to blame for what life has
made me. There are no wicked women. They must be loved or they are
lost... My friend, the divinity in human life is seen best in some lost
woman like me."

"Magdalene Virey," protested Adam, "I can't follow you...But to say you
are a lost woman--that I won't listen to."

"I was a lost woman," interrupted Mrs. Virey, her voice rising out of the
strong, sweet melody. "I had my pride and I defied the husband whose
heart I broke and whose life I ruined. I scorned the punishment, the
exile he meted out to me. That was because I was thoroughbred. But all
the same I was lost. Lost to happiness, to hope, to effort, to
repentance, to spiritual uplift. Death Valley will be my tomb, but there
will be resurrection for me...It is you, Wansfell, you have been my
salvation...You have the power. It has come from your strife and agony on
the desert. It is beyond riches, beyond honour. It is the divine in you
that seeks and finds the divine in unfortunates who cross your wandering
trail."

Adam, rendered mute, could only offer his hand; and in silence he led her
down the slope.

That afternoon, near the close of the hot hours, Adam lay in the shade of
the brush shelter he had erected near the Virey shack. He was absorbed in
watching a tribe of red ants, and his posture was so unusual that it gave
pause to Virey, who had come down from the slope. The man approached and
curiously gazed at Adam, to see what he was doing.

"Looking for grains of gold?" inquired Virey, with sarcasm. "I'll lend
you my magnifying glass."

"I'm watching these red ants," replied Adam, without looking up.

Virey bent over and, having seen, he slowly straightened up.

"Go to the ant, thou sluggard!" he ejaculated, and this time without
sarcasm.

"Virey, I'm no sluggard," returned Adam. "It's you who are that. I'm a
worker."

"Wansfell, I was not meaning you," said Virey. "There are things I hate
you for, but laziness is certainly not included in them...I never worked
in my life. I had money left me. It was a curse. I thought I could buy
everything. I bought a wife--the big-eyed woman to whom you devote your
services--and your attentions...And I bought for myself the sweetness of
the deadly nightshade flower--a statue of marble, chiselled in the
beautiful curves of mocking love--a woman of chain lightning and
hate...If I had lived by industry, as live those red ants you're
watching, I might not now have one foot in my grave in Death Valley."

Thus there were rare instances when Virey appeared a man with the human
virtues of regret, of comprehension, of intolerance, but never a word
issued from his lips that was not tinged with bitterness. Had the
divinity in him been blasted forever? Or was it a submerged spark that
could quicken only to a touch of the woman lost to him? Adam wondered.
Sometimes a feeling of pity for Virey stole over him, but it never lasted
long. Adam had more respect for these red ants than for some men, despite
the alleged divinity. He abhorred the drones of life. The desert taught
how useless were the idlers--how nature ruthlessly cut them off.

The red ants had a hill some few paces from the shelter where Adam lay.
One train of ants, empty handed, as it were, travelled rapidly from the
ant hill toward the camp litter; and another train staggered under
tremendous burdens in the other direction. At first Adam thought these
last were carrying bits of bread, then he thought they were carrying
grains of gravel, and then he discovered, by moving closer to watch, that
they were carrying round black-and-white globules, several times as large
as their own bodies. Presently he concluded that these round objects were
ant eggs which the tribe was moving from one hill to another. It was
exceedingly interesting to watch them. He recognised them as the species
of desert ant that could bite almost as fiercely as a scorpion. Their
labour was prodigious. The great difficulty appeared to be in keeping the
eggs in their jaws, These burdens were continually falling out and
rolling away. Some ants tried many times and in many ways to grasp the
hard little globules. Then, when this was accomplished, came the work
compared with which the labour of man seemed insignificant. After getting
a start the loaded ants, made fair progress over smooth, hard ground, but
when they ran into a crust of earth or a pebble or a chip they began the
toil of a giant. The ant never essayed to go round the obstacle. He
surmounted it.. He pushed and lifted and heaved, and sometimes backed
over, dragging his precious burden behind him. Others would meet a little
pitfall and, instead of circling it to get to the ant hill, they would
roll down, over and over, with their eggs, until they reached the bottom.
Then it was uphill work on the other side, indefatigable, ceaseless,
patient, wonderful.

Adam presently had to forego his little sentiment about the toil of the
ants over their eggs. The black-and-white globules were seeds of maize.
On the night before, Adam's burro Jinny had persisted around camp until
he gave her the last of some maize left in one of his packs. Jinny had
spilled generous quantities of the maize in the sand, and the ants were
carrying home the seeds.

How powerful they were! How endowed with tireless endurance and a
persistence beyond human understanding! The thing that struck Adam so
singularly was that these ants did not recognise defeat. They could not
give up. Failure was a state unknown to their instincts. And so they
performed marvellous feats. What was the spirit that actuated them? The
mighty life of nature was infinitely strong in them. It was the same as
the tenacity of the lichen that lived on the desert rocks, or the
eyesight of the condor that could see its prey from the invisible heights
of the sky, or the age-long destructive movements of the mountain tops
wearing down to the valleys.

When Adam got up from his pleasant task and meditation he was surprised
to find Mrs. Virey standing near with eyes intent on him. Then it became
incumbent upon him to show her the toils of the red ants. She watched
them attentively for a while.

"Wonderful little creatures!" she exclaimed. "So this watching is one of
the secrets of your desert knowledge, Wansfell, I can't compare these
ants to men. They are far superior. They have order, purpose. They are
passionless, perfect organisations to carry on their lives. They will
work and live--the descendants of this very tribe of ants--long after the
race of men has disappeared off the face of the earth...But wonderful as
they are, and interesting as are their labours, I'd prefer to watch you
chop wood, or, better, to climb the slope with your giant stride."

That night, sometime late, Adam was awakened by a gale that swooped up
through the gateway from the valley. It blew away the cool mountain air
which had settled down from the heights. It was a warmer wind than any
Adam had ever before experienced at night. It worried him. Forerunner, it
must be, of the midnight furnace winds that had added to the fame of
Death Valley! It brought a strange, low, hollow roar, unlike any other
sound in nature. It was a voice. Adam harkened to the warning. On the
morrow he would again talk to Virey. Soon it might be too late to save
Magdalene Virey. She had obstructed his will. She would not leave without
her husband. She had bidden Adam stay there in Death Valley to serve her,
but she seemed to have placed her husband beyond Adam's reach. The
ferocity in Adam had never found itself in relation to Virey. Adam had
persuaded and argued with the persistence of the toiling ant, but to work
his way with Virey seemed to demand the swoop of the desert hawk.

This strange warm wind, on its first occurrence during Adam's stay in the
valley, rose to a gale and then gradually subsided until it moaned away
mournfully. Its advent had robbed Adam of sleep; its going seemed to
leave a deader silence, fraught with the meaning of its visit.

Adam could sleep no more. This silence belied the blinking of the stars.
It disproved the solidarity of the universe. Nothing lived, except his
soul, that seemingly had departed from his body in a dream, and now with
his vague thoughts and vaguer feelings wandered over the wastelands, a
phantom in the night. Silence of utter solitude--most intense, dead,
dreaming, waiting, sepulchre-like, awful! Where was the rustle of the
wings of the bats? The air moved soundlessly, and it seemed to have the
substance of shadows. A dead solitude--a terrible silence! A man and the
earth! The wide spaces, the wild places of the earth as it was in the
beginning! Here could be the last lesson to a thinking man--the last
development of a man into savage or god.

There! Was that a throb of his heart or a ring in his ear? Crack of a
stone, faint, far away, high on the heights, a lonely sound making real
the lonely night. It relieved Adam. The tension of him relaxed. And he
listened, hopefully, longing to hear another break in the silence that
would be so insupportable.

As he listened, the desert moon, oval in shape, orange hued and weird,
sailed over the black brow of the mountain and illumined the valley in a
radiance that did not seem of land or sea. The darkness of midnight gave
way to orange shadows, mustering and shading, stranger than the fantastic
shapes of dreams.

Another ring of rock on rock, and sharp rattle, and roll on roll, assured
Adam that the weathering gods of the mountain were not daunted by the
silence and the loneliness of Death Valley. They were working as ever.
Their task was to level the mountain down to the level of the sea. The
stern, immutable purpose seemed to vibrate in the ringing cracks and in
the hollow reports. These sounds in their evenness and perfect rhythm and
lonely tone established once more in Adam's disturbed consciousness the
nature of the place. Death Valley! The rolling of rocks dispelled
phantasms.

Then came a low, grating roar. The avalanche of endless broken rocks had
slipped an inch. It left an ominous silence. Adam stirred restlessly in
his blankets. There was a woman in the lee of that tremendous sliding
slope a woman of delicate frame, of magnificent spirit, of a heart of
living flame. Every hour she slept or lay wide-eyed in the path of that
impending cataclysm was one of exceeding peril. Adam chafed under the
invisible bonds of her will. Because she chose to lie there, fearless,
beyond the mind of man to comprehend, was that any reason why he should
let her perish? Adam vowed that he would end this dread situation before
another nightfall. Yet when he thought of Magdalene Virey his heart
contracted. Only through the fierce spirit of the desert could he defy
her and beat down the jailer who chained her there. But that fierce
spirit of his seemed obstructed by hers, an aloof thing, greater than
ferocity, beyond physical life.

And so Adam lay sleepless, listening to the lonely fall of sliding rocks,
the rattle and clash, and then the hollow settling. Then he listened to
the silence.

It was broken by a different note, louder, harsher--the rattle and bang
of a stone displaced and falling from a momentum other than its own. It
did not settle. Heavy and large, it cracked down to thud into the sand
and bump out through the brush. Scarcely had it quieted when another was
set in motion, and it brought a low, sliding crash of many small rocks.
Adam sat up, turning his ear toward the slope. Another large stone banged
down to the sands. Adam heard the whiz of it, evidently hurtling through
the air between his camp and the Vireys'. If that stone had struck their
shack!

Adam got up and, pulling on his boots, walked out a little way from the
camp. What an opaque orange gloom! Nevertheless, it had radiance. He
could see almost as well as when the full moon soared in silver
effulgence. More cracking and rolling of little rocks, and then the
dislodgment of a heavy one, convinced Adam that a burro was climbing the
slope or a panther had come down to prowl around camp. At any rate the
displacement of stones jarred unnaturally on Adam's sensitive ear.

Hurrying across to the Virey shack, he approached the side farther from
the slope and called through the brush wall, "Mrs. Virey!"

"Yes. What do you want, Wansfell?" she replied, instantly. She had been
wide awake.

"Have you heard the sliding rocks?"

"Indeed I have! All through that strange roar of wind--and later."

"You and Virey better get up and take your blankets out a ways, where you
will not be in danger. I think there's a burro or a panther up on the
slope. You know how loose the stones are--how at the slightest touch they
come sliding and rolling. I'll go up and scare the beast away."

"Wansfell, you're wrong," came the reply, with that old mockery which
always hurt Adam. "You should not insult a burro--not to speak of a
panther."

"What?" queried Adam, blankly.

"It is another kind of an animal."

But for that subtle mockery of voice Adam would have been persuaded the
woman was out of her head, or at least answering him in her sleep.

"Mrs. Virey, please----"

"Wansfell, it's a sneaking coyote," she called, piercingly, and then she
actually uttered a low laugh.

Adam was absolutely dumbfounded. "Coyote!" he ejaculated.

"Yes. It's my husband. It's Virey. He found out the rolling rocks
frightened me at night. So he climbs up there and rolls them...Sees how
close he can come to hitting the shack!...Oh, he's done that often!"

An instant Adam leaned there with his head bent to the brush wall, as if
turned to stone. Then like a man stung he leaped up and bounded round the
shack toward the slope.

In the orange radiance on that strange, moon-blanched slope he dimly saw
a moving object. It stood upright. Indeed, no burro or panther! Adam drew
a deep and mighty breath for the yell that must jar the very stones from
their sockets.

"HYAR!" he yelled in stentorian roar. Like thunder the great sound pealed
up the slope. "COME DOWN OR I'LL WRING YOUR NECK!"

Only the clapping, rolling, immeasurable echoes answered him. The last
hollow clap and roll died away leaving the silence deader than before.

Adam spent the remainder of that night pacing to and fro in the
orange-hued shadows, fighting the fierce, grim violence that at last had
burst its barrier. Adam could have wrung the life out of this Virey with
less compunction than he would have in stamping on the head of a venomous
reptile. Yet it was as if a spirit kept in the shadow of his form, as he
strode the bare shingle gazing up at the solemn black mountains and at
the wan stars.

Adam went down to the gateway between the huge walls. A light was
kindling over the far-away Funeral range, and soon a glorious star swept
up, as if by magic, above the dark rim of the world. The morning star
shining down into Death Valley! No dream--no illusion--no desert mirage!
Like the Star of Bethlehem beckoning the Wise Men to the East, it seemed
to blaze a radiant path for Adam down across the valley of dim, mystic
shadows. What could be the meaning of such a wonderful light? Was that
blue-white lilac-haloed star only another earth upon which the sun was
shining? Adam lifted his drawn face to its light and wrestled with the
baser side of his nature. He seemed to be dominated by the spirit that
kept close to his side. Magdalene Virey kept vigil with him on that
lonely beat. It was her agony which swayed and wore down his elemental
passion. Would not he fail her if he killed this man? Virey's brutality
seemed not the great question at issue for him.

"I'll not kill him--yet!"

Thus Adam eased the terrible contention within him.

When he returned to camp the sun had risen red and hot, with a thin,
leaden haze dulling its brightness. No wind stirred. Not a sound broke
the stillness. Magdalene Virey sat on the stone bench under the brush
shelter, waiting for him. She rose as he drew near. Never had he seen her
like this, smiling a welcome that was as true as her presence, yet facing
him with darkened eyes and tremulous lips and fear. Adam read her. Not
fear of him, but of what he might do!

"Is Virey back yet?" he asked.

"Yes. He just returned. He's inside--going to sleep."

"I want to see him--to get something off my mind," said Adam.

"Wait--Adam!" she cried, and reached for him as he wheeled to go toward
the shack.

One glance at her brought Adam to a standstill, and then to a slow
settling down upon the stone seat, where he bowed his head. Life had held
few more poignant moments than this, in his pity for others. Yet he
thrilled with admiration for this woman. She came close to him, leaned
against him, and the quiver of her body showed she needed the support.
She put a shaking hand on his shoulder.

"My friend--brother," she whispered, "if you kill him--it will undo--all
the good you've done--for me."

"You told me once that the grandest act of a man was to fight for the
happiness--the life of a woman," he replied.

"True! And haven't you fought for my happiness, and my life, too? I would
have died long ago. As for happiness--it has come out of my fight, my
work, my effort to meet you on your heights--more happiness than I
deserve--than I ever hoped to attain...But if you kill Virey--all will
have been in vain."

"Why?" he asked.

"Because it is I who ruined him," she replied, in low, deep voice,
significant of the force behind it. "As men go in the world he was a
gentleman, a man of affairs, happy and carefree. When he met me his life
changed. He worshipped me. It was not his fault that I could not love
him. I hated him because they forced me to marry him. For years he
idolised me...Then--then came the shock--his despair, his agony. It made
him mad. There is a very thin line between great love and great hate."

"What--what ruined him?" demanded Adam.

"Adam, it will be harder to confess than any other ordeal of my whole
life. Because--because you are the one man I should have met years
ago...Do you understand? And I--who yearn for your respect--for your--Oh,
spare me!...I who need your faith--your strange incomprehensible faith in
me--I, who hug to my hungry bosom the beautiful hopes you have in me--I
must confess my shame to save my husband's worthless life."

"No. I'll not have you--you humiliating yourself to save him anything. I
give my word. I'll never kill Virey unless he harms you."

"Ah! But he has harmed me. He has struck me...Wansfell! don't leap like
that. Listen. Virey will harm me, sooner or later. He is obsessed with
his one idea--to see me suffer. That is why he has let you and me wander
around together so much. He hoped in his narrow soul to see you come to
love me, and me to love you--so through that I should fall again--to
suffer more anguish--to offer more meat for his hellish revenge...But,
lo! I am uplifted--forever beyond his reach--never to be rent by his
fiendish glee...unless you kill him--which would stain my hands with his
blood--bring back the doom of soul from which you rescued me!"

"Magdalene, I swear I'll never kill Virey unless he kills you," declared
Adam, as if forced beyond endurance.

"Ah, I ask no more!" she whispered, in passionate gratitude. "My God! how
I feared you--yet somehow gloried in your look!...And now listen, friend,
brother--man who should have been my lover--I hurry to my abasement. I
kill the she-thing in me and go on to my atonement. I fight the instincts
of a woman. I sacrifice a possible paradise, for I am young and life is
sweet."

She circled his head with her arm and drew it against her heaving breast.
The throbs of that tortured heart beat, beat, beat all through Adam's
blood, to the core of his body.

"My daughter Ruth was not Virey's child," she went on, her voice low, yet
clear as a bell. "I was only nineteen--a fool--mad--driven. I thought I
was in love, but it was only one of those insane spells that so often
ruin women. For years I kept the secret. Then I could not keep it any
longer. At the height of Virey's goodness to me, and his adoration, and
his wonderful love for Ruth, I told him the truth. I had to tell
it...That killed his soul. He lived only to make me suffer. The sword he
held over my head was the threat to tell my secret to Ruth. I could not
bear that. A thousand deaths would have been preferable to that...So in
the frenzy of our trouble we started west for the desert. My father and
Ruth followed us--caught up with us at Sacramento. Virey hated Ruth as
passionately as he had loved her. I dared not risk him near her in one of
his terrible moods. So I sent Ruth away with my father, somewhere to
southern California. She did not know it was parting forever. But, O God
in heaven--how I knew it!...Then, in my desperation, I dared Virey to his
worst. I had ruined him and I would pay to the last drop of blood in my
bitter heart. We came to Death Valley, as I told you, because the terror
and desolation seemed to Virey to be as close to a hell on earth as he
could find to hide me. Here he began indeed to make me suffer--dirt and
vermin and thirst and hunger and pain! Oh! the horror of it all comes
back to me!...But even Death Valley cheated him. You came, Wansfell, and
now--at last--I believe in God!"

Adam wrapped a long arm around her trembling body and held her close. At
last she had confessed her secret. It called to the unplumbed depths of
him. And the cry in his heart was for the endless agony of woman. And it
was a bitter cry of doubt. If Magdalene Virey had at last found faith in
God, it was more than Adam had found, though she called him the
instrument of her salvation. A fierce and terrible rage flamed in him for
the ruin of her. Like a lion he longed to rise up to slay. Blood and
death were the elements that equalised wrong. Yet through his helpless
fury whispered a still voice into his consciousness--she had been
miserable and now she was at peace; she had been lost and now she was
saved. He could not get around that. His desert passion halted there. He
must go on alone into the waste places and ponder over the wonder of this
woman and what had transformed her. He must remember her soul-moving
words and, away somewhere in the solitude and silence, learn if the love
she intimated was a terrible truth. It could not be true now, yet the
shaking of her slender form communicated itself to his, and there was
inward tumult, strange, new, a convulsive birth of a sensation dead these
many years--dead since that dusky-eyed Margarita Arallanes had tilted her
black head to say, "Ah so long ago and far away!"

Memory surged up in Adam, moving him to speak aloud his own deeply hidden
secret, by the revelation of which he might share the shame and remorse
and agony of Magdalene Virey.

"I will tell you my story," he said, and the words were as cruel blades
at the closed portals of his heart. Huskily he began, halting often,
breathing hard, while the clammy sweat beaded upon his brow. What was
this life--these years that deceived with forgetfulness? His trouble was
there as keen as on the day it culminated. He told Magdalene of his
boyhood, of his love for his brother Guerd, and of their life in the old
home where all, even friendships of the girls, was for Guerd and nothing
for him. As he progressed Magdalene Virey's own agony was forgotten. The
quiver of her body changed to strung intensity, the heaving of her bosom
was no longer the long-drawn breath to relieve oppression. Remorselessly
as she had bared her great secret, Adam confessed his little, tawdry,
miserable romance--his wild response to the lure of a vain Mexican girl,
and his fall, and the words that had disillusioned him.

"Ah, so long ago and far away!" echoed Magdalene Virey, all the richness
of her wonderful voice gathering in a might of woman's fury. "Oh, such a
thing for a girl to say!...And Adam--she, this Margarita, was the only
woman you ever loved--ever knew that way?"

"Yes."

"And she was the cause of your ruin?"

"Indeed she was, poor child!"

"The damned hussy!" cried Magdalene, passionately. "And you--only
eighteen years old? How I hate her! And what of the man who won her
fickle heart?"

Adam bowed as a tree in a storm. "He--he was my brother."

"Oh no!" she burst out. "The boy you loved--the brother! Oh, it can't be
true!"

"It was true...And, Magdalene--I killed him."

Then with a gasp she enveloped him, in a fierce, protective frenzy of
tenderness, arms around him, pressing his face to her breast, hanging
over him as a mother over her child.

"Oh, my God! Oh, my God! How terrible!...Your brother!...And I thought my
secret, my sin, my burden so terrible! Oh, my heart bleeds for you...
Wansfell, poor unhappy wanderer!"



CHAPTER XVIII

July! At last the endlessly long, increasingly hot June days brought the
leaden-hazed month of July, when no sane man ever attempted to cross
Death Valley while the sun was high.

In all hours, even in the darkness, the bold, rugged slopes of the
Panamints reflected sinister shades of red. And the valley was one of
grey swirling shadows and waving veils of heat like transparent smoke.
Beyond that vast, strange, dim valley rose the drab and ochre slopes of
the Funeral Mountains, sweeping up to the bronze battlements and on to
the lilac and purple peaks blurred in the leaden-hued haze that obscured
the sky. The sun was sky-broad, an illimitable flare, with a lurid white
heart into which no man could look.

Adam was compelled to curtail his activities. He did not suffer greatly
from the heat, but he felt its weakening power. Ever his blood seemed at
fever heat. Early in the mornings and late in the evenings he prepared
simple meals, which, as the days dragged on, were less and ever less
partaken of by his companions and himself. During the midday hours,
through the terrible heat, he lay in the shade, sweltering and oppressed,
in a stupor of sleep. The nights were the only relief from the immense
and merciless glare, the bearing down of invisible bars of red-hot iron.
Most of these long hours of darkness Adam lay awake or walked in the
gloom or sat in the awful stillness, waiting for he knew not what. But
that he waited for something he knew with augmenting dread.

When the full blast of this summer heat came, Virey changed physically
and mentally. He grew thin. He walked with bowed shoulders. His tongue
protruded slightly and he always panted. Every day he ate less and slept
less than on the day before. He obeyed no demands from Adam and took no
precautions. His sufferings would have been less and his strength would
have been greater had he refrained from exposing himself to the sun. But
he revelled in proofs of the nature of Death Valley.

And if Virey had ever worn a mask in front of Adam he now dropped it.
Indeed he ignored Adam, no longer with scorn or indifference, but as if
unaware of his presence. Whenever Adam wanted to be heard by Virey, which
desire diminished daily, he had to block his path, confront him
forcefully. Virey was given over wholly to his obsession. His hate
possessed him body and soul. And if it had ever been a primitive hate to
destroy, it had been restrained, and therefore rendered infinitely cruel,
by the slow, measured process of thought, of premeditation.

Often when Adam absented himself from camp, Virey had a trick of climbing
the weathered slope to roll down rocks. He seemed mad to do this. Yet
when Adam returned he would come clambering down, wet and spent, a
haggard sweating wretch not yet quite beyond fear. In vain had Adam
argued, pleaded, talked with him; in vain had been the strident scorn of
a man and the curses of rage. Virey, however, had a dread of Adam's huge
hands. Something about them fascinated him. When one of these, clenched
in an enormous fist, was shoved under his nose with a last threat, then
Virey would retire sullenly to the shack. In every way that was possible
he kept before Magdalene Virey the spectacle of his ruin and the
consciousness that it was her doing. These midsummer days soon made him a
gaunt, unshaven, hollow-eyed wretch. Miserable and unkempt he presented
himself at meals, and sat there, a haggard ghost, to mouth a little food
and to stare at his wife with accusing eyes. He reminded her of cool,
shaded rooms, of exquisite linen and china, of dainty morsels, of
carved-glass pitchers full of refreshing drink and clinking ice. Always
he kept before her the heat, the squalour, the dirt, the horror of Death
Valley. When he could present himself before her with his thin, torn
garments clinging wet to his emaciated body, his nerves gone from useless
exertions, his hands bloody and shaking as if with palsy, his tongue
hanging out--when he could surprise her thus and see her shrink, then he
experienced rapture. He seemed to cry out: Woman! behold the wreck of
Virey!

But if that was rapture for him, to gloat over the doom of her seemed his
glory. Day by day Death Valley wrought by invisible lines and shades a
havoc in Magdalene Virey's beauty. To look at her was to have striking
proof that Death Valley had never been intended for a woman, no matter
how magnificent her spirit. The only spirit that could prevail here was
the one which had lost its earthly habiliments. Like a cat playing with a
mouse, Virey watched his wife. Like Mephistopheles gloating over the soul
of a lost woman, Virey attended to the slow manifestations of his wife's
failing strength. He meant to squeeze every drop of blood out of her
heart and still keep, if possible, life lingering in her. His most
terrible bitterness seemed to consist of his failure to hide her utterly
and forever from the gaze of any man save himself. Here he had hidden her
in the most desolate place in the world, yet another man had come, and,
like all the others, had been ready to lay down his life for her. Virey
writhed under this circumstance over which he had no control. It was
really the only truth about the whole situation that he was able to
grasp. The terrible tragedy of his hate was that it was not hate, but
love. Like a cannibal, he would have eaten his wife raw, not from hunger,
but from his passion to consume her, incorporate her heart and blood and
flesh into his, make her body his forever. Thought of her soul, her mind,
her spirit, never occurred to Virey. So he never realised how she escaped
him, never understood her mocking scorn.

But through his thick and heat-hazed brain there must have pierced some
divination of his failing power to torture her. The time came when he
ceased to confront her like a scarecrow, he ceased accusing her, he
ceased to hold before her the past and its contrast to the present, he
gave up his refinement of cruelty. This marked in Virey a further change,
a greater abasement. He reverted to instinct. He retrograded to a savage
in his hate, and that hate found its outlet altogether in primitive ways.

Adam's keen eye saw all this, and the slow boil in his blood was not all
owing to the torrid heat of Death Valley. His great hands, so efficient
and ruthless, seemed fettered. A thousand times he had muttered to the
silence of the night, to the solemn, hazed daylight, to the rocks that
had souls, and to the invisible presence ever beside him: "How long must
I stand this? How long--how long?"

One afternoon as he awoke late from the sweltering siesta he heard Mrs.
Virey scream. The cry startled him, because she had never done that
before. He ran.

Adam found her lying at the foot of the stone bench in a dead faint. The
brown had left her skin. How white the wasted face! What dark shadows
under the hollow eyes! His heart smote him remorselessly.

As he knelt and was about to lift her head he espied a huge, hairy spider
crawling out of the folds of her grey gown. It was a tarantula, one of
the ugliest of the species. Adam flipped it off with his hand and killed
it under his boot.

Then with basin of water and wetted scarf he essayed to bring Mrs. Virey
back to consciousness. She did not come to quickly, but at last she
stirred, and opened her eyes with a flutter. She seemed to be awakening
from a nightmare of fear, loathing, and horror. For that instant her
sight did not take in Adam, but was a dark, humid, dilated vision of
memory.

"Magdalene, I killed the tarantula," said he. "It can't harm you
now...Wake up! Why, you're stiff and you look like--like I don't know
what!...You fainted and I've had a time bringing you to."

"Oh!" she cried. "It's you." And then she clung to him while he lifted
her, steadying her upon her feet, and placed her on the stone bench. "So
I fainted?...Ugh! That loathsome spider! Where is it?"

"I covered it with sand," he replied.

"Would it have--bitten me?"

"No. Not unless you grasped it."

Slowly she recovered and, letting go of him, leaned back in the seat.
Crystal beads of sweat stood out upon her white brow. Her hair was wet.
Her sensitive lips quivered.

"I've a perfect horror of mice, bugs, snakes, spiders--anything that
crawls," she said. "I can't restrain it. I inherited it from my
mother...And what has mind got to do with most of a woman's feelings?
Virey has finally found that out."

"Virey!...What do you mean?" rejoined Adam.

"I was leaning back here on the bench when suddenly I heard Virey
slipping up behind me. I knew he was up to something. But I wouldn't turn
to see what. Then with two sticks he held the tarantula out over
me--almost in my face. I screamed. I seemed to freeze inside. He dropped
the tarantula in my lap...Then all went black."

"Where--is he now?" asked Adam, finding it difficult to speak.

"He's in the shack."

Adam made a giant stride in that direction, only to be caught and
detained by her clinging hands. Earnestly she gazed up at him, with
melancholy, searching eyes.

He uttered a loud laugh, mirthless, a mere explosion of surcharged
breath. "No!...I can't get angry. I can't be a man any more. This Death
Valley and the sun--and you--have worked on my mind...But I'll tell you
what--nothing can stop me from beating Virey--so he'll never do that
again."

"Ah I...So I've worked on your mind? Then it's the only great deed I ever
did...Wansfell, I told you Virey has threatened to shoot you. He's meant
to more than once, but when you have come he has been afraid. But he
might."

"I wish to heaven he'd try it," responded Adam, and, loosing the woman's
hold upon his hands, he strode toward the shack.

"Virey, come out!" he called, loudly, though without any particular
feeling. There was no reply, and he repeated the call, this time louder.
Still Virey remained silent. Waiting a moment longer, Adam finally spoke
again, with deliberate, cold voice. "Virey, I don't want to mess up that
room with all your wife's belongings in there. So come outside."

At that Adam heard a quick, panting breath. Then Virey appeared--came to
the door of the shack. Adam could not have told what the man's distorted
face resembled. He carried a gun, and his heart was ferocious if his will
was weak.

"Don't you--lay one of your--bloody hands on me," he panted.

Adam took two long strides and halted before Virey, not six feet distant.

"So you've got your little gun, eh?" he queried, without any particular
force. Adam had been compelled to smother all that mighty passion within
him, or he could not have answered for his actions. "What are you going
to do with it?"

"If you make a--move at me--I'll kill you," came the husky, panting
response.

"Virey, I'm going to beat you within an inch of your worthless life,"
declared Adam, monotonously, as if he had learned this speech by rote.
"But I've got to talk first. I'm full of a million things to call you."

"Damn you, I'll not listen," replied Virey, beginning to shake with
excitement. The idea of using the gun had become an intent and was acting
powerfully upon him. "You leave my--camp--you get out--of this valley!"

"Virey, are you crazy?" queried Adam. The use of his voice had changed
that deadlock of his feelings. He must not trust himself to bandy speech
with Virey. The beating must be administered quickly or there would be
something worse. Yet how desperately hard not to try to awaken conscience
or sense in this man!

"No, I'm not crazy," yelled Virey.

"If you're not crazy, then that trick of throwing a tarantula on your
wife was damnable--mean--hellish--monstrous...My God! man, can't you see
what a coward you are? To torture her--as if you were a heathen! That
delicate woman--all quivering nerves! To pick on a weakness, like that of
a child! Virey, if you're not crazy you're the worst brute I've ever met
on the desert. You've sunk lower than men whom the desert has made
beasts. You--"

"Beast I am--thanks to my delicate wife," cried Virey, with exceeding
bitter passion. "Delicate? Ha-ha! The last lover of Magdalene Virey
can't see she's strong as steel--alive as red fire! How she clings to
memory! How she has nine lives of a cat--and hangs on to them--just to
remember!...And you--meddler! You desert rat of a preacher. Get out--or
I'll kill you!"

"Shoot and be damned!" flashed Adam, as with leap as swift as his voice
he reached a sweeping arm.

Virey's face turned ashen. He raised the gun. Adam knocked it up just as
it exploded. The powder burned his forehead, but the bullet sped high.
Another blow sent the gun flying to the sand. Then Adam, fastening a
powerful grip on Virey, clutching shirt and collar and throat at once,
dragged him before the stone bench where Mrs. Virey sat, wide-eyed and
pale. Here Adam tripped the man and threw him heavily upon the sand.
Before he could rise Adam straddled him, bearing him down. Then Adam's
big right hand swept and dug in the sand to uncover the dead tarantula.

"Ah! here's your spider!" he shouted. And he rubbed the hairy,
half-crushed tarantula in Virey's face. The man screamed and wrestled.
"Good! you open your mouth. Now we'll see...Eat it--eat it, damn your
cowardly soul!" Then Adam essayed to thrust the spider between Virey's
open lips. He succeeded only partly. Virey let out a strangling, spitting
yell, then closed his teeth as a vice. Adam smeared what was left of the
crushed tarantula all over Virey's face.

"Now get up," he ordered, and, rising himself, he kicked Virey. Adam, in
the liberation of his emotions by action, was now safe from himself. He
would not kill Virey. He could even hold in his enormous strength. He
could even think of the joy of violence that was rioting inside him, of
the ruthless fierceness with which he could have rent this man limb from
limb.

Virey, hissing and panting in a frenzy, scrambled to his feet. Fight was
in him now. He leaped at Adam, only to meet a blow that laid him on the
sand. It had not stunned him. Up he sprang, bloody, livid, and was at
Adam again. His frenzy lent him strength and in that moment he had no
fear of man or devil. The desert rage was on him. He swung his fists,
beat wildly at Adam, tore and clawed. Adam slapped him with great broad
hands that clapped like boards, and then, when Virey lunged close, he
closed his fist and smashed it into Virey's face. The man of the cities
went ploughing in the sand. Then on his hands and knees he crawled like a
dog, and, finding a stone, he jumped up to fling it. Adam dodged the
missile. Wildly Virey clutched for more, throwing one after another. Adam
caught one and threw it back, to crack hard on his opponent's shin. Virey
yelled no more. His rage took complete possession of him. Grasping up a
large rock, he held it as a mace and rushed upon Adam to brain him. That
action and intent to kill was the only big response he had made to this
wild environment. He beat at Adam. He lunged up to meet his foe's lofty
head. He had no fear. But he was mad. No dawning came to him that he was
being toyed with. Strong and furious at the moment, he might have
succeeded in killing a lesser man. But before Adam he was powerless to do
murder. Then the time came when Adam knocked the rock out of his hand and
began to beat him, blow on blow to face and body, with violence, but with
checked strength, so that Virey staggered here and there, upheld by
fists. At last, whipped out of rage and power to retaliate, Virey fell to
the sands. Adam dragged him into the shack and left him prostrate and
moaning, an abject beaten wretch who realised his condition.

Most difficult of all for Adam then was to face Mrs. Virey. Yet the
instant he did he realised that his ignorance of women was infinite.

"Did the bullet--when he fired--did it hit you?" she queried, her large
eyes, intense and glowing, wonderfully dark with emotion, flashing over
him.

"No--it missed--me," panted Adam, as with heavy breath he sank upon the
stone bench.

"I picked up the gun. I was afraid he'd find it. You'd better keep it
now," she said, and slipped it into his pocket.

"What a--dis--gusting--sight for you--to have--to watch!" exclaimed Adam,
trying to speak and breathe at once.

"It was frightful--terrible at first," she returned. "But after the gun
went flying--and you had stopped trying to make him eat the--the
spider--ugh! how sickening I...After that it got to be--well, Wansfell,
it was the first time in the years I've known my husband that I respected
him. He meant to kill you. It amazed me. I admired him...And as for
you--to see you tower over him--and parry his blows--and hit him when you
liked--and knock him and drag him--oh, that roused a terrible something
in me! I never felt so before in my whole life. I was some other woman. I
watched the blood flow, I heard the thuds and heavy breaths, I actually
smelled the heat of you, I was so close--and it all inflamed me, made me
strung with savage excitement--I had almost said joy...God knows,
Wansfell, we have hidden natures within our breasts."

"If only it's a lesson to him!" sighed Adam.

"Then it were well done," she replied, "but I doubt--I doubt. Virey is
hopeless. Let us forget...And now will you please help me search in the
sand here for something I dropped. It fell from my lap when I fainted, I
suppose. It's a small ivory case with a miniature I think all the world
of. Last and best of my treasures!"

Adam raked in the sand along the base of the bench, and presently found
the lost treasure. How passionately, with what eloquent cry of rapture,
did she clutch it!

"Look!" she exclaimed, with wonderful thrill in her voice, and held the
little case open before Adam's eyes.

He saw a miniature painting of a girl's face, oval, pure as a flower,
with beautiful curls of dark bronze, and magnificent eyes. In these last
Adam recognised the mother of this girl. The look of them, the pride and
fire, if not the colour, were the same as Magdalene Virey's.

"A sweet and lovely face," said Adam.

"Ruth!" she whispered. "My daughter--my only child--my baby that I
abandoned to save her happiness!...Oh, mockery of life that I was given
such a heart to love--that I was given such a perfect child!"

The midsummer midnight furnace winds began to blow.

They did not blow every night or many nights consecutively; otherwise all
life in the valley would soon have become extinct. Adam found the hot
winds heretofore, that he had imagined were those for which the valley
was famed, were really comfortable compared with these terrible furnace
blasts. In trying to understand their nature, Adam concluded they were
caused by a displacement of higher currents of cool air. Sometime during
the middle of the night there began a downward current of cool air from
the mountain heights; and this caused a disturbance of the vast area of
hot air in the burning valley below sea level. The tremendous pressure
drove the hot air to find an outlet so it could rise to let the cool air
down, and thus there came gusts and gales of furnace winds, rushing down
the valley, roaring up the canyons.

The camp of the Vireys, almost in the centre of one of these outlets and
scarcely a quarter of a mile from the main valley, lay open to the full
fury of these winds.

The first of August was a hazy, blistering day in which the valley smoked.
Veils of transparent black heat--shrouds of moving white transparent
heat! The mountains' tops were invisible, as if obscured in thin,
leaden-hued fog; their bases showed dull, sinister red through the haze.
Nothing moved except the strange veils and the terrible heaven-wide sun
that seemed to have burst. It was a day when, if a man touched an
unshaded stone with his naked hand, he would be burned as by a hot iron.
A solemn, silent, sulphurous, smoky, deadly day, inimical to life!

But at last the sunset of red hell ended that day and merciful darkness
intervened. The fore part of the night was hot, yet endurable, and a
relief compared to the sunlit hours. Adam marked, however, or imagined, a
singular, ominous, reddish hue of the dim stars, a vast still veil
between him and the sky, a waiting hush. He walked out into the open,
peering through the dimness, trying to comprehend. The colour of the
stars and heavens, and of the dull black slopes, and of the night itself,
seemed that of a world burned out. Immense, dim, mysterious, empty,
desolate! Had this Death Valley finally unhinged his mind? But he
convinced himself that it was normal. The unreality, the terror, the
forbidding hush of all the elements, the imminence of catastrophe--these
were all actually present. Anything could happen here. Exaggeration of
sense was impossible. This Death Valley was only a niche of the universe
and the universe only a part of the infinite. He felt his intelligence
and emotion, and at the same time the conviction that only a step away
was death. The old wonder arose--was death the end? Not possible! Yet the
cruelty, the impassivity of nature, letting the iron consequences
fall--this seemed to crush him. For the sake of a woman who suffered
agony of body and mind, Adam was at war with nature and the spirit of
creation. Why? The eternal query had no answer. It never would be
answered.

As the hours wore away the air grew hotter, denser. Like a blanket it
seemed to lie heavily on Adam. It was the hottest, stillest, most
oppressive, strangest night of all his desert experience. Sleep was
impossible. Rest was impossible. Inaction was impossible. Every breath
seemed impossible of fulfilment. A pressure constricted Adam's lungs. The
slow, gentle walk that he drove himself to take, which it was impossible
to keep from taking, brought out a hot flood of sweat on his body, and
the drops burned as they trickled down his flesh.

"If the winds blow to-night!" he muttered, in irresistible dread.

Something told him they would blow. To-night they would blow harder and
hotter than ever before. The day of leaden fire had promised that. Nature
had her midnight change to make in the elements. Time would not stand
still. The universe prevailed on its inscrutable course; the planets
burned; the suns blazed upon their earths; and this ball of rock on which
Adam clung, groaning with the other pygmies of his kind, whirled and
hurtled through space, now dark and then light, now hot and then cold
slave to a blazing master ninety million miles away. It was all so
inconceivable, inscrutable, unbelievable.

There came a movement of air fanning his cheek, emphasising the warmth.
He smelled anew the dry alkali dust, the smoky odour, almost like
brimstone. The hour was near midnight and the death-like silence brooded
no more. A low moan, as of a lost soul, moved somewhere on the still air.
Weird, dismal, uncanny, it fitted the spectral shadows and shapes around
him, and the night with its mystery. No human sound, though it resembled
the mourn of humanity! A puff of hot wind struck Adam in the face, rushed
by, rustling the dead and withered brush, passed on to lull and die away.
It seemed to leave a slow movement in the still air, a soft, restless,
uneasy shifting, as of an immense volume becoming unsettled, Adam knew.
Behind that sudden birth of life the dead air pressed the furious blasts
of hell--the midnight furnace wind of Death Valley.

Adam listened. How strange, low, sad the moan! His keen ears, attuned to
all varieties of desert sound, seemed to fill and expand. The moan
swelled to a low roar, lulling now, then rising. Like no sound he had
ever heard before, it had strange affinity with the abyss of shadows.
Suddenly the air around Adam began a steady movement northward. Its
density increased, or else the movement, or pressure behind, made it
appear so. And it grew swift, until it rustled the brush. Down in the
valley the roar swelled like the movement of a mighty storm through a
forest. When the gale reached the gateway below Adam it gave a hollow
bellow.

The last of the warm, still air was pressed beyond Adam, apparently
leaving a vacuum, for there did not appear to be air enough to breathe.
The roar of wind sounded still quite distant, though now loud. Then the
hot blast struck Adam--a burning, withering wind. It was as if he had
suddenly faced an open furnace from which flames and sparks leaped out
upon him. That he could breathe, that he lived a moment, seemed a marvel.
Wind and roar filled the wide space between the slopes and rushed on,
carrying sand and dust and even shadows with it. That blast softened in
volume and had almost died away when another whooped up through the
gateway, louder and stronger and hotter than its predecessor. It blew
down Adam's sun shelter of brush and carried the branches rustling away.
Then stormed contending tides of winds until, what with burning blasts
and whirling dust devils and air thick with powdered salt and alkali,
life became indeed a torment for Adam, man of the desert as he was.

In the face of these furnace winds, tenacity of life had new meaning for
Adam. The struggle to breathe was the struggle of a dying man to live.
But Adam found that he could survive. It took labour, greater even than
toiling through a sandstorm, or across a sun-scorched waste to a distant
water hole. And it was involuntary labour. His great lungs were not a
bellows for him to open when he chose. They were compelled to work. But
the process, in addition to the burn and sting, the incessant thirst, the
dust-laden air, the hot skull-bone like an iron lid that must fly off,
and the strange, dim, red starlight, the sombre red varying shadow, the
weird rush and roar and lull--all these created heroic fortitude if a man
was to endure. Adam understood why no human being could long exist in
Death Valley.

"She will not live through the night," muttered Adam, "But if she does, I
think I'll take her away."

While in the unearthly starlit gloom, so dimly red, Adam slowly plodded
across to the Virey camp, that idea grew in his mind. It had augmented
before this hour, only to faint at the strength of her spirit, but
to-night was different. It marked a climax. If Magdalene Virey showed any
weakening, any change of spirit, Adam knew he would have reached the end
of his endurance.

She would be lying or sitting on the stone bench. It was not possible to
breathe inside the shack. Terrible as were the furnace winds, they had to
be breasted--they had to be fought for the very air of life. She had not
the strength to walk up and down, to and fro, through those endless
hours.

Adam's keen eyes, peering through the red-tinged obscurity, made out the
dark shape of Virey staggering along back and forth like an old man
driven and bewildered, hounded by the death he feared. The sight gave
Adam a moment of fierce satisfaction. Strong as was the influence of
Magdalene Virey, it could not keep down hate for this selfish and fallen
man. Selfish beyond all other frailty of human nature! The narrow mind
obsessed with self--the I and me and mine--the miserable littleness that
could not forgive, that could not understand! Adam had pity even in his
hate.

He found the woman on the bench, lying prone, a white, limp, fragile
shape, motionless as stone. Sitting down, he bent over to look into her
face. Her unfathomable eyes, wide and dark and strained, stirred his
heart as never before. They were eyes to which sleep was a
stranger--haunted eyes, like the strange midnight at which they gazed
out, supernaturally bright, mirroring the dim stars, beautiful as the
waking dreams never to come true--eyes of melancholy, of unutterable
passion, of deathless spirit. They were the eyes of woman and of love.

Adam took her wasted hand and held it while waiting for the wind to lull
so that she could hear him speak. At length the hot blast moved on, like
the receding of a fire.

"Magdalene, I can't stand this any longer," he said.

"You mean--these winds--of hell?" she panted, in a whisper.

"No. I mean your suffering. I might have stood your spiritual ordeal.
Your remorse--your agony of loss of the daughter Ruth--your brave spirit
defying Virey's hate...But I can't stand your physical torment. You're
wasting away. You're withering--burning up. This hand is hot as fire--and
dry as a leaf. You must drink more water...Magdalene, lift your head."

"I--cannot," she whispered, with wan smile. "No--strength left."

Adam lifted her head and gave her water to drink. Then as he laid her
back another blast of wind came roaring through the strange opaque night.
How it moaned and wailed around the huge boulders and through the brush!
It was a dance of wind fiends, hounding the lost spirits of this valley
of horrors. Adam felt the slow, tight tide of his blood called stingingly
to his skin and his extremities, and there it burned. It was not only his
heart and his lungs that were oppressed, but the very life of his body
seemed to be pressing to escape through the pores of his skin--pressed
from inward by the terrible struggle to survive and pressed back from
outside by the tremendous blast of wind! The wind roared by and lulled to
a moan. The wave of invisible fire passed on. Out there in the dim
starlight Virey staggered back and forth under the too great burden of
his fate. He made no sound. He was a spectre. Beyond the grey level of
gloom with its strange shadows rose the immense slope of loose stones,
all shining with dim, pale-red glow, all seemingly alive, waiting for the
slide of the avalanche. And on the instant a rock cracked with faint
ring, rolled with little hollow reports, mockingly, full of terrible and
latent power. It had ominous answer in a slight jar of the earth under
Adam's feet, perhaps an earthquake settling of the crust, and then the
whole vast slope moved with a low, grating sound, neither roar nor crash,
nor rattle. The avalanche had slipped a foot. Adam could have pealed out
a cry of dread for this woman. What a ghastly fantasy the struggle for
life in Death Valley! What mockery of wind and desert and avalanche!

"Wansfell--listen," whispered the woman. "Do you hear--it passing on?"

"Yes," replied Adam, bending lower to see her eyes. Did she mean that the
roar of wind was dying away?

"The stormy blast of hell--with restless fury--drives the spirits
onward!" she said, her voice rising.

"I know--I understand. But you mustn't speak such thoughts. You must not
give up to the wandering of your mind. You must fight," implored Adam.

"My friend--the fight is over--the victory is mine...I shall escape
Virey. He possessed my body--poor weak thing of flesh!...but he wanted my
love--my soul...My soul to kill! He'll never have either...Wansfell, I'll
not live--through the night...I am dying now."

"No--no!" cried Adam, huskily. "You only imagine that. It's only the
oppression of these winds--and the terror of the night--this awful,
unearthly valley of death. You'll live. The winds will wear out soon. If
only you fight you'll live...And to-morrow--Magdalene, so help me
God--I'll take you away!"

He expected the inflexible and magnetic opposition of her will, the
resistless power of her spirit to uplift and transform. And this time he
was adamant. At last the desert force within him had arisen above all
spiritual obstacles. The thing that called was life--life as it had been
in the beginning of time. But no mockery or eloquence of refusal was
forthcoming from Magdalene Virey. Instead, she placed the little ivory
case, containing the miniature painting of her daughter Ruth, in Adam's
hand and softly pressed it there.

"But--if I should die--I want you to have this picture of Ruth," she
said. "I've had to hide it from Virey--to gaze upon it in his absence.
Take it, my friend, and keep it, and look at it until it draws you to
her...Wansfell, I'll not bewilder you by mystic prophecies. But I tell
you solemnly--with the clairvoyant truth given to a woman who feels the
presence of death--that my daughter Ruth will cross your wanderer's
trail--come into your life--and love you...Remember what I tell you. I
see!...You are a young man still. She is a budding girl. You two will
meet, perhaps in your own wastelands. Ruth is all of me--magnified a
thousand times. More--she is as lovely as an unfolding rose at dawn. She
will be a white, living flame...It will be as if I had met you long
ago--when I was a girl--and gave you what by the nature of life was
yours...Wansfell, you wakened my heart--saved my soul--taught me
peace...I wonder how you did it. You were just a man...There's a
falseness of life--the scales fell from my eyes one by one. It is the
heart, the flesh, the bursting stream of red blood that count with
nature. All this strife, this travail, makes toward a perfection never to
be attained. But effort and pain, agony of flesh, and victory over mind
make strength, virility...Nature loves barbarian women who nurse their
children. I--with all my love--could not nurse my baby Ruth. It's a
mystery no longer. Death Valley and a primitive man have opened my eyes.
Nature did not intend people to live in cities, but in forests, as lived
the Aryans of India, or like the savages of Brazilian jungles. Like the
desert beasts, self-sufficient, bringing forth few of their kind, but
better, stronger species. The weak perish. So should the weak among
men...Ah! hear the roar! Another wind of death!...But I've said
all...Wansfell, go find Ruth--find me in her--and--remember!"

The rich voice, growing faint at the last, failed as another furnace
blast came swooping up with its dust and heat. Adam bowed his head and
endured. It passed and another came. The woman lay with closed eyes and
limp body and nerveless hands. Hours passed and the terrible winds
subsided. The shadow of a man that was Virey swaying to and fro, like a
drunken spectre, vanished in the shack. The woman slept. Adam watched by
her side till dawn, and when the grey light came he could no more have
been changed than could the night have been recalled. He would find the
burros and pack them and saddle one for Magdalene Virey to ride; he would
start to climb out of Death Valley and when another night fell he would
have her safe on the cool mountain heights. If Virey tried to prevent
this, it would mean the terrible end he merited. Adam gazed down upon the
sleeping woman. How transparent, how frail a creature! She mystified
Adam. She represented the creative force in life. She possessed that
unintelligible and fatal thing in nature--the greatest, the most
irresistible, the purest expression of truth, of what nature strove so
desperately for--and it was beauty. Her youth, her error, her mocking
acceptance of life, her magnificent spirit, her mother longing, her agony
and her physical pangs, her awakening and repentance and victory--all
were written on the pale face and with the indestructible charm of line
and curve and classic feature constituted its infinite loveliness. She
was a sleeping woman, yet she was close to the angels.

Adam looked from her to the ivory case in his hand.

"Her daughter Ruth--for me!" he said, wonderingly. "How strange if we
met! If--if--But that's impossible. She was wandering in mind."

He carried the little case to his camp, searched in his pack for an old
silk scarf, and, tearing this, he carefully wrapped the gift and
deposited it inside the leather money belt he wore hidden round his
waist.

"Now to get ready to leave Death Valley!" he exclaimed, in grim
exultance.

Adam's burros seldom strayed far from camp. This morning, however, he did
not find them near the spring nor down in the notches of the mountain
wall. So he bent his steps in the other direction. At last, round a
corner of slope, out of sight of camp, he espied them, and soon had them
trotting ahead of him.

He had traversed probably half the distance he had come when the burro
Jinny halted to shoot up her long ears. Something moving had attracted
her attention, but Adam could not see it. He drove her on. Again she
stopped. Adam could now see the shack, and as he peered sharply there
seemed to cross his vision a bounding grey object. He rubbed his eyes and
muttered. Perhaps the heat had affected his sight. Then between him and
the shack flashed a rough object, grey-white in colour, and it had the
bounding motion of a jack-rabbit. But it could not have been a rabbit
because it was too large, and, besides, there were none in the valley. A
wild cat, perhaps? Adam urged Jinny on, and it struck him that she was
acting queerly. This burro never grew contrary without cause. When she
squealed and sheered off to one side Adam knew something was amiss. That
vague shock returned to his consciousness, stronger, more certain and
bewildering. Halting so as to hear better, he held his breath and
listened. Crack and roll of rock--slow sliding rattle--crack! The mystery
of the bounding grey objects was solved. Virey had again taken to rolling
rocks down the slope.

Adam broke into a run. He was quite a distance from the shack, though now
he could see it plainly. No person was in sight. More than once, as he
looked, he saw rocks bound high above the brush and fall to puff up dust.
Virey was industrious this morning, making up for lost time, taking sure
advantage of Adam's absence. Adam ran faster. He reached a point opposite
the fanlike edge of the great slant of loose stones, and here he seemed
to get into a zone of concatenated sounds. The wind, created by his run,
filled his ears. And his sight, too, seemed not to be trusted. Did it not
magnify a bounding rock and puff of dust into many rocks and puffs?
Streaks were running low down in the brush raising little dusty streams.
He saw clumps of brush shake and bend. If something queer, such as had
affected Jinny, did not possess his sight and mind, then it surely
possessed Death Valley. For something was wrong.

Suddenly Adam's ears were deafened by a splitting shock. He plunged in
his giant stride, slowed and halted. He heard the last of a sliding roar.
The avalanche had slipped. But it had stopped. Bounding rocks hurtled in
front of Adam, behind him, the puffs and streaks of dust were everywhere.
He heard the whiz and thud of a rolling rock passing close behind him. As
he gazed a large stone bounded from the ground and seemed to pass right
through the shack. The shack collapsed. Adam's heart leaped to his
throat. He was riveted to the spot. Then, mercifully it seemed, a white
form glided out from the sun shelter. It was the woman, still unharmed.
The sight unclamped Adam's voice and muscle.

"Go across! Hurry!" yelled Adam, with all the power of his lungs. He
measured the distance between him and her. Two hundred yards! Rocks were
hurtling and pounding across that space.

The woman heard him. She waved her white hand and it seemed she was
waving him back out of peril. Then she pointed up the slope. Adam
wheeled. What a thrilling sight! Rocks were streaking down, hurtling into
the air, falling to crack powder from other rocks, that likewise were set
in motion. Far up the long grey slope, with its million facets of stones
shining in the sunlight, appeared Virey, working frantically. No longer
did he seek to frighten his wife. He meant to kill her. His insane genius
had read the secret of the slope, and in an instant he would have the
avalanche in motion. The cracking clamour increased. Adam opened his lips
to yell a terrible threat up at Virey, but a whizzing boulder, large as a
bucket, flashing within a foot of his head, awakened him to his own
peril. He saw other rocks bounding down in line with him, and, changing
his position, stepping, leaping, dodging, he managed to evade them. He
had no fear for himself, but terror for the woman, and for Virey deadly
rage possessed his heart.

Then a piercing split, as of rocks rent asunder, a rattling crash, and
the lower half of the great grey slope was in motion. The avalanche! Adam
leaped at the startling sound, and, bounding a few yards to a huge
boulder, high as his head and higher, he mounted it. There, unmindful of
himself, he wheeled to look for Magdalene Virey. Too late to reach her!
She faced that avalanche, arms spread aloft, every line of her body
instinct with the magnificent spirit which had been her doom.

"Run! Run! Run!" shrieked Adam, wildly.

Lost was his piercing shriek in the swallowing, gathering might of the
crashing roar of the avalanche. A pall of dust, a grey tumbling mass,
moved down ponderously, majestically, to hide from Adam's sight the white
form of Magdalene Virey. It spread to where Adam stood, enveloped him,
and then, in boom and thunder and crash as of falling worlds, the boulder
was lifted and carried along with the avalanche.



CHAPTER XIX

Adam was thrown prostrate. In the thick, smothering dust he all but lost
his senses. Adam felt what seemed a stream of stones rolling over his
feet. The thundering, deafening roar rolled on, spread and thinned to a
rattling crash, deadened and ceased. Then from the hollows of the hills
boomed a mighty echo, a lifting and throwing of measureless sound, that
thumped from battlement to battlement and rumbled away like muttering
thunder.

The silence then was terrible by contrast. As horror relaxed its grim
clutch Adam began to realise that miraculously he had been spared. In the
hot, dusty pall he fought for breath like a drowning man. The heavy dust
settled and the lighter drifted away.

Adam clambered to his feet. The huge boulder that had been his ship of
safety appeared to be surrounded by a sea of small rocks, level with
where he stood. The avalanche had spread a deep layer of rocks all over
and beyond the space adjacent to the camp. Not a vestige of the shack
remained. Magdalene Virey had been buried forever beneath a mass of
stone. Adam's great frame shuddered with the convulsions of his emotion.
He bent and bowed under the inevitable. "Oh, too late! too late!...Yet I
knew all the time!" was the mournful cry he sent out into the silence.
Dazed, sick, horror-stricken, he bowed there above Magdalene Virey's
sepulchre and salt tears burned his eyes and splashed down upon the dusty
stones. He suffered, dully at first, and then acutely, as his stunned
consciousness began to recover. Tragic this situation had been from the
beginning, and it could have had but one end.

Suddenly he remembered Virey. The thought transformed him.

"He must have slid with the avalanche," muttered Adam. "Buried under here
somewhere. One sepulchre for him and wife!...So he wanted it--alive or
dead!"

The lower part of the great slope was now solid rock, dusty and earthy in
places, in others the grey colour of live granite. It led his eye upward,
half a mile, to the wide, riblike ridge that marked the lower margin of
another slope of weathered rocks. It shone in the hot sunlight. Dark
veils of heat rose, resembling smoke against the sky. The very air seemed
trembling, and over that mountain-side hovered the shadow of catastrophe.

A moving white object caught Adam's roving sight. His desert eyes
magnified that white object. A man! He was toiling over the loose stones.

"Virey!" burst out Adam, and with the explosion of the word all of the
desert stormed in him, and his nature was no different from the cataclysm
that had shorn and scarred the slope.

Like a wide-lunged primordial giant, Adam lifted his roar of rage toward
the heights--a yell that clapped fierce echoes from the cliffs. Virey
heard. He began to clamber faster over the rocks and sheered off toward
the right, where, under the beetling, steep slopes, every rod was more
fraught with peril.

Adam bounded like a huge soft-footed cat over and up the hummocky spread
of the avalanche. Virey's only avenue of escape lay upward and to the
left. Once Adam cut him off there, he was in a trap.

To the right over the ridge small stones began to show rolling and
bouncing, then shooting like bullets off the bare slant below. Virey was
out of Adam's sight now, but evidently still headed in the fatal
direction. Like a mountain sheep, surest-footed of beasts, Adam bounded
from loose rock to sharp corner across the wide holes, on and upward.

Another low, vast slope spread out and sheered gradually up before him,
breaking its uniformity far to the right, and waving gracefully to steep
slants of loose rock perilous to behold. Adam heard the faint cracking of
stones. He hurried on, working away from the left, until he was climbing
straight toward the splintered, toppling mass of mountain peak, a mile
above him. All now, in every direction, was broken rock, round, sharp,
flat, octagonal, every shape, but mostly round, showing how in the
process of ages the rolling and grinding had worn off the edges. Here the
heat smoked up. When Adam laid a hurried hand on a stone he did not leave
it there long.

At length he again espied Virey, far to the right and half a mile farther
up, climbing like a weary beast on hands and feet. By choice or by
mistake he had gone upward to the most hazardous zone of all that
treacherous, unstable mountain-side. Even now the little dusty slides
rolled from under him. Adam strode on. He made short cuts. He avoided the
looser slides. He zigzagged the steeper places. He would attend to safe
stepping stones for a few rods, then halt to lift his gaze toward that
white-shirted man toiling up like a crippled ape. The mountain slope,
though huge and wide under the glaring sun, seemed to lose something of
its openness. The red battlements and ramparts of the heights were
frowning down upon it, casting a shadow of menace, if not of shade. The
terrible forces of nature became manifest. Here the thunderbolts boomed
and the storms battled, and in past ages the earthquake and volcanic fire
had fretted the once noble peak. It was ruined. It had disintegrated.
Ready to spread its million cracks and crumble, it lowered gloomily.

Red, sinister, bare, ghastly, this smoky slope under the pitiless sun was
a fitting place for Wansfell to get his hands on Virey--murderer of a
woman. Adam thought of it that way because he remembered how Virey had
been fascinated at the story of Baldy McKue. But mostly Adam's mind
worked like the cunning instinct of a wolf to circumvent its prey.
Thoughts were but flashes. The red tinge in Adam's sight did not all come
from the colour of the rock. And it was when he halted to look or rest
that he thought at all.

But the time came when he halted for more than that. Placing his hands
around his mouth, he expanded his deep lungs and burst into trumpet-like
yell:

"VIREY!" The fugitive heard, turned from his toiling, slid to a seat on
the precarious slope, and waited. "I'LL BREAK YOUR BONES!"

A wild cry pealed down to ring in Adam's ears. He had struck terror to
the heart of the murderer. And Adam beat down his savage eagerness, so as
to lengthen the time till Virey's doom. Not thus did the desert in Adam
speak, but what the desert had made him. Agony, blood, death! They were
almost as old as the rocks. Other animate shapes in another age, had met
in strife there, under the silent, beetling peak. Life was the only
uttermost precious thing. All else, all suffering, all possession, was
nothing. To kill a man was elemental, as to save him was divine.

Virey's progress became a haunting and all-satisfying spectacle to
behold, and Adam's pursuit became studied, calculated, retarded--a thing
as cruel as the poised beak of a vulture.

Virey got halfway up a grey, desolate, weathered slant, immense in its
spread, another fan-shaped, waiting avalanche. The red ragged heights
loomed above; below hung a mountainside as unstable as water, restrained
perhaps, by a mere pebble. Here Virey halted. Farther he could not climb.
Like a spent and cornered rat he meant to show fight.

Adam soon reached a point directly below Virey, some hundreds of yards--a
long, hard climb. He paused to catch his breath.

"Bad slope for me if he begins to roll stones!" muttered Adam, grimly.

But neither rolling stones nor avalanches could stop Adam. The end of
this tragedy was fixed. It had been set for all the years of Virey's life
and back into the past. The very stones cried out. Glaring sun, smoking
heat, shining slope, and the nameless shadow--all were tinged with a hue
inimical to Virey's life. The lonely, solemn, silent desert day, at full
noontide heat, bespoke the culmination of something Virey had long ago
ordained. Far below, over the lower hills of the Panamints, yawned Death
Valley, ghastly grey through the leaden haze, an abyss of ashes, iron
walled and sun blasted, hateful and horrible as the portal of hell. High
up and beyond, faintly red against an obscure space of sky, towered the
Funerals, grand and desolate.

Adam began to climb the weathered slope, taking a zigzag course. Sliding
stones only slightly retarded his ascent. He stepped too quickly.
Usually when a stone slipped his weight had left it.

Virey set loose a boulder. It slid, rolled, leaped, fell with a crack,
and then took to hurtling bounds, starting a multitude of smaller stones.
Adam kept keen eye on the boulder and paid no attention to the others.
Then he stepped aside out of its course. As it whizzed past him Virey
slid another loose upon the slope. Adam climbed even as the rock bounded
down, and a few strides took him to one side. Virey ran over, directly in
line with Adam, and started another huge rock. Thus by keeping on a
zigzag ascent Adam kept climbing most of the time, and managed to avoid
the larger missiles. The smaller ones, however, could not all be avoided.
And their contact was no slight matter. Virey tugged upon a large rock,
deeply embedded, and rolled it down. Huge, bounding, crashing, it started
a rattling slide that would have swept Adam to destruction had it caught
him. But he leaped out of line just in the nick of time. Virey began to
work harder, to set loose smaller stones and more of them, so that soon
he had the slope a perilous ascent for Adam. They cracked and banged
down, and the debris rattled after them. Adam swerved and leaped and ran.
He smelled the brimstone powder and the granite dust. Fortunately, no
cloud of dust collected to obscure his watchful sight. He climbed on,
swiftly when advantage offered, cautiously when he must take time to leap
and dodge. Then a big rock started a multitude of small ones, and all
clattered and spread. Adam dashed forward and backward. The heavier
stones bounced high, and as many came at one time, he could not watch
all. As he dodged one, another waved the hair of his head, and then
another, striking his shoulder, knocked him down. The instant he lay
there, other stones rolled over him. Adam scrambled up. Even pain could
not change his fierce cold implacability, but it accelerated his action.
He played no longer with Virey. He yelled again what he meant to do with
his hands, and he spread them aloft, great, claw-like members, the sight
of which inflamed Virey to desperation. Frantically he ploughed up the
stones and rolled them, until he had a deluge plunging down the slope.
But it was not written that Adam should be disabled. Narrow shaves he
had, and exceeding risks he took, yet closer and closer he climbed. Only
a hundred yards now separated the men. Adam could plainly see Virey's
ragged shirt, flying in shreds, his ashen face, his wet hair matted over
his eyes.

Suddenly above the cracks and rattling clash rose a heavy, penetrating
sound. Mighty rasp of a loose body against one of solidity! Startled to a
halt, Adam gazed down at his feet. The rocks seemed to be heaving. Then a
dreadful yell broke sharply. Virey! Adam flashed his gaze upward in time
to see the whole slope move. And that move was accompanied by a rattling
crash, growing louder and more prolonged. Virey stood stricken by mortal
terror in the midst of an avalanche.

Wheeling swiftly, Adam bounded away and down, his giant strides reaching
farther and faster, his quivering body light and supple, his eye guiding
his flying feet to surfaces that were safe. Behind, beyond, above him the
mountain slope roared until sound no longer meant anything. His ears were
useless. The slope under him heaved and waved. Running for his life, he
was at the same time riding an avalanche. The accelerating motion under
him was strange and terrifying. It endowed him with wings. His feet
scarcely touched the stones and in a few seconds he had bounded off the
moving section of slope.

Then he halted to turn and see, irresistibly called to watch Virey go to
what must soon be a just punishment. The avalanche, waving like swells of
the sea, seemed slowing its motion. Thin dust clouds of powdered rock
hung over it. Adam again became aware of sound--a long-drawn, rattling
roar, decreasing, deadening, dying. Suddenly as the avalanche had started
it halted. But it gave forth grating, ominous warnings. Only an upper
layer of the loose rock had slid down, and the under layer appeared
precisely like what the surface had been--rocks and rocks of all sizes,
just as loose, just as ready to roll.

Adam dared to stride back upon that exposed under layer, the better to
see straight down the steep slope. Grim and grisly it shone beneath the
gloomy sun. Perhaps the powdered dust created an obscurity high in the
air, but low down all was clear.

Virey could be plainly seen, embedded to his hips in the loose stones.
Writhing, squirming, wrestling, he sought to free himself from that grip
of granite. In vain! He was caught in a vice of his own making. Prisoner
of the mountain side that he had used to betray his wife! He had turned
toward Adam, face upward. There seemed a change in him, but in the
racking excitement of that moment Adam could not tell what.

Then that desert instinct, like the bursting of a flood, moved Adam to
the violence of strife, the ruthlessness of nature, the blood-spilling of
men. Madness of hate seized him. The torrid heat of that desert sun
boiled in his blood, the granite of the slope hardened in his heart, the
red veils of smoky shadows coloured his sight. Loneliness and solitude
were terrible forces of nature--primitive as the beginnings of life. For
years the contending strife of the desert had been his. For months
desolation, death, decay of Death Valley!

"MY TURN!" he yelled, in voice of thunder, and, bristling haired, supple,
and long armed, with strength and laugh and face of a savage, he heaved a
huge rock.

It rolled, it cracked, it banged, it hurtled high, to crash and smash,
and then, leaping aloft, instinct as if with mockery, it went over
Virey's head to go on down over the precipice, whence it sent up a
sliding roar. Adam heaved another stone and watched it. Virey grew
motionless as a statue. He could not dance and dodge away from rolling
rocks as Adam had done. How strangely that second rock rolled! Starting
in line with Virey, it swerved to the right, then hit the slope and
swerved back in line, then, hitting again, swerved once more, missing the
miserable victim by a small margin.

"AHA THERE, VIREY!" yelled Adam, waving his hands. "ALL DAY AND ALL NIGHT
I'LL ROLL STONES!"

Virey was mute. He was chained. He was helpless. He could not move or
faint or die. Retribution had overtaken him. The nature of it was to be
the nature of the slow torture and merciless death he had inflicted upon
his wife. As he had chosen the most deadly and lonely and awful spot on
earth to hide her and kill her, so the nature that he had embraced now
chose to turn upon him. There was law here--law of the unknown forces in
life and in the elements. At that very moment a vulture streaked down
from the hazed heights and sailed, a black shadow of widespread wings,
across the slope. What had given this grisly-omened bird sight and scent
illimitable?

Adam braced his brawny shoulder under the bulge of a rock weighing tons.
Purple grew his face. His muscles split his shirt. His bones cracked. But
there was a nameless joy in this exercise of his enormous strength. They
were two men--one was weak, the other was strong, And nature could not
abide both. The huge rock grated, groaned, stirred, moved--and turned
over, slowly to roll, to crunch, to pound, and then, to gather speed,
growing a thing of power, ponderous, active, changing, at last to hurtle
into the air, to plunge down with thunderous crash, then to roll straight
as a bee line at Virey. But a few yards in front of him it rose aloft,
with something of grace, airily, and, sailing over Virey's head, it banged
and boomed out of sight below. Long the echoes clapped, and at last the
silence, the speaking silence of that place closed on the slope. It awoke
again to Adam's rolling of a stone and another and another and then two
together. All these rocks rolled differently. They were playthings of the
god of the mountain. The mover of thunderbolts might have been aiming his
colossal missiles at an invisible target. All these rolling stones seemed
to head straight for Virey, but they were at the last instant deflected
by chance. They hit the slope and passed wide or high. They were in
league with the evil spirit that had dominated Virey. They were
instruments of torture. They were of the nature of the desert. They
belonged to Death Valley.

Adam did not soon tire at his gigantic task. The rolling stones
fascinated him. From dead things they leaped to life. How they hurtled
through space! Some shot aloft a hundred feet. Others split, and rolled,
like wheels, down and down, the halves passing on either side of the
doomed Virey. A multitude of rocks Adam turned loose, and then another
multitude. Into the heaving of every one went his intent to kill. But
Virey bore a charmed life.

A time came when Adam rolled his last stone. Like the very first one, it
sped straight for Virey, and just as it appeared about to crush him it
veered to one side. Adam stared grim and aghast. Could he never kill
Virey as Virey had murdered his wife and tried to kill him?

"She--said I'd--never kill--you!" panted Adam, and the doubt in him was a
strange, struggling thing, soon beaten down by his insatiable rage. Then
he took a stride downward, meaning to descend and finish Virey with his
hands.

As he stepped down the avalanche below grated with strange, harsh sound.
It seemed to warn him. Halting, he gazed with clearer eyes. What was this
change in Virey? Adam bent and peered. Had the man's hair turned snow
white?

Adam made another and a longer stride downward. And that instant the
slope trembled. Virey flung up his arm as if to ward off another rolling
stone. A rending, as of the rock-bound fastness of the slope, yielding
its hold--then the avalanche, with Virey in the centre, moved downward,
slowly heaving like a swell of weighted waves, and started to roll with
angry roar. It gathered a ponderous momentum. It would never stop again on
that slope. A shining, red-tinged dust cloud shrouded Virey. And then the
avalanche, spilling over the declivity below, shocked the whole mountain
slope, and lifted to the heavens a thick-crashing, rolling roar of
thunder. Death Valley engulfed the hollow echo and boomed thunder across
to the battlements of the Funeral Mountains. And when the last rumble wore
away, silence and solitude reigned there, pervasive and peaceful, as they
had in the ages before man, with his passions, had evolved to vex nature.



CHAPTER XX

Adam's return to camp was as vague as one of his desert nightmares. But
as thought gained something of ascendency over agitation he became aware
of blood and dust and sweat caked with his clothes upon his person,
proving the effect of his supreme exertions. He had heaved an endless
number of rocks, he had heaved the mountainside down upon Virey, all to
no avail. A higher power had claimed him. And the spirit of Magdalene
Virey, like her living presence, had inscrutably come between Adam and
revenge.

When Adam had packed his burros, twilight in the clefts of the hills had
deepened to purple. He filled his canteens, and started the burros down
toward the gateway. The place behind him was as silent as a grave. Adam
did not look back. He felt the grey obscurity close over the scene.

Down at the gateway he saw that the valley was still light with the
afterglow of sunset. Diagonally and far across the ashen waste he
descried the little dark patch which he knew to be an oasis, where the
waters of Furnace Creek sank into the sands.

The intense heat, the vast stillness, the strange radiation from the
sand, the peculiar grey light of the valley, told Adam that the midnight
furnace winds would blow long before he reached his destination. But he
welcomed any physical ordeal. He saw how a great strife with the
elements, a strain to the uttermost of his strength and his passion to
fight, would save his faith, his hope, perhaps his mind.

So gradual was the change from twilight to darkness that he would
scarcely have noted it but for the dimming of the notched peak. Out there
in the open valley it was not dark. It was really the colour of moonlight
on marble. Wan, opaque, mystic, it made distance false. The mountains
seemed far away and the stars close. Like the bottom of the Dead Sea,
drained of its bitter waters, was this Death Valley. Action, strong and
steady use of muscle, always had served to drive subjective broodings and
wonderings and imaginings from Adam's mind. But not here, in this sink,
at night! He seemed continually and immensely confronted with the
unreality of a fact--a live man alone on the salt dead waste of Death
Valley. Measureless and unbreakable solitude! The waste hole into which
drained the bitter dregs of the desert!

He plodded on, driving the burros ahead of him. Jinny was contrary. Every
few steps she edged off a straight line, and the angle of her ears and
head showed that she was watching her master. She did not want to cross
the valley. Instinct taught her the wisdom of opposition. Many a burro
had saved its master's life by stubborn refusal to travel the wrong way.
Adam was patient, even kind, but he relentlessly drove her on in the
direction he had chosen.

At length the ashen level plain changed its hue and its surface. The salt
crust became hummocky and a dirty grey. The colour caused false steps on
his part, and the burros groped at fault, weary and discouraged. Adam
would mount a slow heave, only to find it a hollow crust that broke with
his weight. Some months before--or was it years?--when he had crossed the
valley, far below this line, the layer of salt crust had been softer and
under it ran murky waters, heavy as vitriol. Dry now as sunbaked clay! It
made travel more difficult, although less dangerous. Adam broke through
once. It reminded him that Dismukes had said the floor of Death Valley
was "Forty feet from hell!" Not for a long while had he thought of
Dismukes, yet this hazardous direction he was taking now appeared to be
the outcome of long-made plans to meet the old prospector.

Long hours and slow miles passed behind him. When the burros broke
through Adam had a task for all his strength. Once he could not pull
Jinny out of a pitfall without unpacking her. And the time came when he
had the added task of leading the way and dragging the burros with ropes.
Burros did not lead well on good ground, let alone over this scored and
burst salt crust.

The heat and oppressiveness and dense silence increased toward midnight;
and then began a soft and steady movement of air down the valley. Adam
felt a prickling of his skin and a drying of the sweat upon him. An
immense and mournful moan breathed over the wasteland, like that of a
mighty soul in travail. Adam got out of the hummocky zone upon the dry,
crisp, white level of salt, soda, borax, alkali, where thin, pale sheets
of powder moved with the silken rustle of seeping and shifting sands.
Most fortunate was the fact that the rising wind was at his back. He
strode on, again driving the burros ahead, holding straight for the dim
notched peak. The rising wind changed the silence, the night, the stars,
the valley--changed all in some unearthly manner. It seemed to muster all
together, to move all, to insulate even the loneliness, and clothe them
in transforming, drifting shrouds of white, formless bodies impelled by
nameless domination. Phantasmagoria of white winds, weird and wild!
Midnight furnace blasts of Death Valley! Nature's equilibrium--nature's
eternal and perfect balance of the elements!

Out here in the open, the hollow roar that had swelled and lulled through
the canyons was absent. An incessant moaning, now rising, now falling,
attended the winds on their march down the valley. Other difference there
was here, and it was in the more intense heat. And the blowing of white
shrouds into the opaque gloom, the sweeping of sheets of powdery dust
along the level floor, the thick air that bore taste of bitter salt and
odour of poison gas--these indeed seemed not phenomena of normal earth.
The wind increased to a gale. Then suddenly it lulled and died, leaving
the valley to a pale, silent deadness; and again preceded by a mournful
wail, it rose harder and fiercer till it was blowing seventy miles an
hour. These winds were the blasts of fury. They held heated substance.
The power behind them was the illimitable upper air, high as the sky and
wide as the desert, relentlessly bearing down to drive away the day's
torrid heat.

The gales accelerated Adam's progress, so that sometimes he was almost
running. Often he was thrown to his knees. And when the midnight storm
reached its height the light of the stars failed, the outline of
mountains faded in a white, whirling chaos, dim and moaning and terrible.
Adam felt as if blood and flesh were burning up, drying out, shrivelling
and cracking. He lost his direction and clung to the burros, knowing
their instinct to be surer guide than his. There came a time when pain
left him, when sense of physical contacts and motions began to fade, when
his brain seemed to reel. The burros dragged him on, and lower he swayed;
oftener he plunged to his knees, ploughing his big hands in the salt and
lowering his face into the flying sheets of powder. He gasped and coughed
and choked, and fought to breathe through his smothering scarf. And at
last, as he fell exhausted, blind and almost asphyxiated, the hot gales
died away. The change of air saved Adam from unconsciousness. He lay
there, gradually recovering, until he gained feeling enough to know the
burros were pulling on the rope which tied them and him together. They
were squealing. They were trying to drag him, to warn him, to frighten
him into the action that would save his life. Thus goaded, Adam essayed
to get upon his feet, and the effort seemed a vague, interminable lifting
of colossal weights, and a climbing up dragging stairs of sand. But for
the burros he would have plunged in a circle.

Then followed a black and horrible interval in which he seemed hauled
across a pale shingle of naked earth, peopled with spectres, a wandering,
lost man, still alive but half dead, leashed to the spirits of burros he
had driven to their death. Uphill, always uphill they pulled him, with
his feet clogged by the clutching sands. A grey dawn broke, and his
entrance into the light resembled climbing out of sombre depths to the
open world. Another drab wall of iron rock seemed to loom over him. The
valley of the white shadows of death had been crossed. A green patch of
mesquites and cottonwoods gleamed cool and dark out of the grey sands.
The burros ran, with bobbing packs, straight to the water they had
scented. Staggering on after them, Adam managed to remove their burdens;
and that took the remnant of his strength. Yielding to a dead darkness of
sense, he fell under the trees.

When he came to the day had far advanced and the sun, sloping to the
west, was sinking behind the Panamints. Adam stumbled up, his muscles
numb, as if contracted and robbed of their elasticity. His thirst told
the story of that day's heat, which had parched him, even while he lay
asleep in the shade. Hunger did not trouble him. Either he was weak from
exertion or had suffered from breathing poisoned air or had lost
something of his equilibrium. Whatever was wrong, it surely behoved him
to get out of the lower part of the valley, up above sea level to a place
where he could regain his strength. To that end he hunted for his burros.
They were close by, and he soon packed them, though with much less than
his usual dexterity. Then he started, following the course of the running
water.

This Furnace Creek ran down out of a deep-mouthed canyon, with yellow
walls of gravel. The water looked like vinegar, and it was hot and had a
bad taste. Yet it would sustain life of man and beasts. Adam followed the
lines of mesquites that marked its course up the gradually ascending
floor of the canyon. He soon felt a loosening of the weight upon his
lungs, and lessening of air pressure. Twilight caught him a couple of
miles up the canyon where a wide, long thicket of weeds and grass and
mesquites marked the turning of Furnace Creek into the drab hills, and
where springs and little streams trickled down from the arroyos.

Up one of these arroyos, in the midst of some gnarled mesquites, Adam
made camp. Darkness soon set in, and he ate by the light of a camp fire.
After he had partaken of food he discovered that he was hungry. Also, his
eyelids drooped heavily. Despite these healthy reactions and a deeper
interest in his surroundings, Adam knew he was not entirely well. He
endeavoured to sit up awhile, and tried to think. There were intervals
when a deadlock occurred between thoughts. The old pleasure, the old
watchful listening, the old intimate sense of loneliness, had gone from
him. His mind did not seem to be on physical things at hand, or on the
present moment. And when he actually discovered that all the time he
looked down toward Death Valley he exclaimed, aghast: "I'm not here; I'm
down there!"

Gloomy and depressed, he rolled in his blankets. And he slept twelve
hours. Next day he felt better in body, but no different in mind. He set
to work making a comfortable camp in spite of the fact that he did not
seem to want to stay there. Hard work and plenty of food improved his
condition. His strength of limb soon rallied to rest and nourishment. But
the strange state of mind persisted, and began to encroach upon every
moment. It took effort of will to attend to any action. Dismukes must be
in this locality somewhere, according to the little map, but, though Adam
remembered this, and reflected how it accounted for his own presence
there, he could not dwell seriously upon the fact. Dismukes seemed
relegated to the vague future. There was an impondering present
imperative something that haunted Adam, yet eluded his grasp. At night he
walked under the stars and could not shake off the spell; and next day,
when in an idle hour he found himself walking again and again down the
gravel-bedded canyon toward Death Valley, then he divined that what he
had attributed to absentmindedness was a far more serious aberration.

The discovery brought about a shock that quickened his mental processes.
What ailed him? He was well and strong again. What was wrong with his
mind? Where had gone the old dreaming content, the self-sufficient
communion with all visible forms of nature, and the half-conscious
affinity with all the invisible spirit of the wilderness? How strangely
he had been warped out of his orbit! Something nameless and dreadful and
calling had come between him and his consciousness. Why did he face the
west, at dawn, in the solemn white-hot noon, at the red sunset hour, and
in the silent lonely watches of the night? Why did not the stars of the
east lure his dreamy gaze as those in the west? He made the astounding
discovery that there were moments, and moments increasing in number, when
he did not feel alone. Some one walked in his shadow at noontide. At
twilight a spirit seemed in keeping with his wandering westward steps.
The world and natural objects and old habits seemed far off. He found
himself whispering vagrant fancies, the substance of which, once
realised, was baffling and disheartening. And at last he divined that a
longing to return to Death Valley consumed him.

"Ah! So that's it!" he muttered, in consternation.

"But why?"

It came to Adam then--the secret of the mystery. Death Valley called him.
All that it was, all that it contained, all he had lived there, sent out
insidious and enchanting voices of terrible silent power. The long shadow
of that valley of purple shadows still enveloped him. Death, desolation,
and decay; the appalling nudity of the racked bowels of the earth; the
abode of solitude and silence, where shrieked the furies of the midnight
winds; the grave of Magdalene Virey--these haunted Adam and lured him
back with resistless and insupportable claim.

"Death Valley again--for me. I shall go mad," soliloquised Adam.

At last his mind was slowly being unhinged by the forces of the desert.
Some places of the earth were too strong, too inhuman, too old, and too
wasted for any man. Adam realised his peril, and that the worst of his
case consisted in an indifference which he did not want to combat. Unless
something happened--a great, intervening, destructive agent to counteract
the all enfolding, trancelike spell of Death Valley--Adam would return to
the valley of avalanches and there he would go mad.

And the very instant he resigned himself, a cry pierced his dull ear.
Sharply he sat up. The hour was near the middle of the forenoon. The day
was hot and still. Adam's pulses slowly quieted down. He had been
mistaken. The water babbled by his camp, bees flew over with droning hum.
Then as he relaxed he was again startled by a cry, faint and far off. It
appeared to come from up the canyon, round the low yellow corner of wall.
He listened intently, but the sound was not repeated. Was not the desert
full of silent voices? About this cry there was a tangible reality that
stirred Adam out of his dreams, his glooms.

Adam went on, and climbed up the gravel bank on the left side, to a bare
slope, and from that to the top of a ridge. His sluggish blood quickened.
The old exploring instinct awoke. He had heard a distant cry. What next?
There was something in the air.

Then Adam gazed around him to a distance. Adam shuddered and thrilled at
the beetling, rugged, broken walls that marked the gateway where so often
he had stood with Magdalene Virey to watch the transformations of
shadowed dawn and sunset in Death Valley.

He descended to a level, and strode on, looking everywhere, halting now
and then to listen, every moment gaining some hold on his old self. He
went on and on, slow and sure, missing not a rod of ground, as if the
very stones might speak to him. He welcomed his growing intensity of
sensation, because it meant that he had either received a premonition or
had reverted to his old self, or perhaps both.

Adam plodded along this wide gravel wash, with the high bronze
saw-toothed peaks of the Funerals on the left, and some yellow-clay dunes
showing their tips over the bank on the right. At length he came to a
place that suggested a possible sloping of these coloured clay dunes down
into a basin or canyon. Climbing up the bank, he took a few steps across
the narrow top, there to be halted as if he had been struck.

He had been confronted by a tremendous amphitheatre, a yellow gulf, a
labyrinthine maze so astounding that he discredited his sight.

Before him and on each side the earth was as bare as the bareness of
rock--a mystic region of steps and slopes and slants, of channels and
dunes and mounds, of cone-shaped and fan-shaped ridges, all of denuded
crinkly clay with tiny tracery of erosion as graceful as the veins of a
leaf, all merging their marvellous hues in a mosaic of golden amber, of
cream yellow, of mauve, of bronze cinnamon. How bleak and ghastly, yet
how beautiful in their stark purity of denudation! Endless was the number
of smooth, scalloped, and ribbed surfaces, all curving with exquisite
line and grace down into the dry channels under the dunes. At the base of
the lower circle of the amphitheatre the golds and yellows and russets
were strongest, but along the wide wing, moving away toward the abyss
below were more vividly wonderful hues--a dark, beautiful mouse colour on
the left contrasting with a strange pearly cream on the other. These were
striking bands of colour sweeping the eye away as far as they extended,
and jealously drawing it back again. Between these great corners of the
curve, climbed ridges of grey and heliotrope to meet streaks of
green--the mineral green of copper, like the colour of the sea in
sunlight--and snowy traceries of white that were narrow veins of
outcropping borax. High up above the rim of the amphitheatre along the
battlements of the mountain, stood out a zigzag belt of rusty red, from
which the iron stain had run downward to tinge the lower hues. Above all
this wondrous colouration upheaved the bare breast of the mountain,
growing darker with earthy browns until the bold ramparts of the peak,
grey like rock, gleamed pale against the leaden-blue sky. Low down
through the opening of the amphitheatre gleamed a void, a distant bottom
of the bowl, dim and purple and ghastly, with shining white streaks like
silver streams--and this was Death Valley.

And then Adam, with breast oppressed by feelings too deep for utterance,
retracted his far-seeing gaze, once more to look over the whole amazing
spectacle, from the crinkly buff clay under his feet to the dim white
bottom of the valley. And at this keen instant he again heard a cry.
Human it was, or else he had lost his mind, and all which he saw here was
disordered imagination.

Turning back, he ran in the direction whence he believed the sound had
come, passing by some rods the point where he had climbed out of the
wash. And at the apex of the great curve, toward which tended all the
multitude of wrinkles of the denuded slopes, he found a trail coming up
out of the amphitheatre and leading down into the wash. The dust bore
unmistakable signs of fresh moccasin tracks, of hobnailed boots, and of
traces where water had been spilled. The boot impressions led down and
the moccasin tracks up; and, as these latter were the fresher, Adam,
after a pause of astonishment and a keen glance all around, began to
follow them.

The trail led across the wash and turned west toward where the walls
commenced to take on the dignity of a canyon. Bunches of sage and
greasewood began to dot the sand, and beyond showed the thickets of
mesquite. Some prospector was packing water from the creek up the canyon
and down into that amphitheatre. Suddenly Adam thought of Dismukes. He
examined the next hobnailed boot track he descried in the dust with
minute care. The foot that had made it did not belong to Dismukes. Adam
hurried on.

He came upon a spot where the man he was trailing--surely an Indian--had
fallen in the sand. A dark splotch, sticky and wet, had never been made
by spilled water. Adam recognised blood when he touched it, but if he had
not known it by the feel, he surely would have by the smell. Probably at
that instant Adam became fully himself again. He was on the track of
events, he sensed some human being in trouble and the encroaching spell
of Death Valley lost its power.

The trail led into the mesquites, to a wet glade rank with sedge and dank
with the damp odour of soapy water.

A few more hurried strides brought Adam upon the body of an Indian, lying
face down at the edge of the trickling little stream. His lank matted
hair was bloody. A ragged, torn, and stained shirt bore further evidence
of violence. Adam turned him over, seeing at a glance that he had been
terribly beaten about the head with a blunt instrument. He was gasping.
Swiftly Adam scooped up water in his hat. He had heard that kind of a
gasp before. Lifting the Indian's head, Adam poured water into the open
mouth. Then he bathed the bloodstained face.

The Indian was of the tribe that had packed supplies for the Vireys. He
was apparently fatally hurt. It was evident that he wanted to speak. And
from the incoherent mixture of language which these Indians used in
conversation with white men Adam gathered significant details of gold, of
robbers, of something being driven round and round, grinding stone like
maize.

"Arrastra!" queried Adam.

The Indian nodded, and made a weak motion of his hand toward the trail
that led to the yellow wilderness of clay, and then further gestures,
which, with a few more gutturally whispered words, gave Adam the
impression that a man of huge bulk, wide of shoulder, was working the old
Spanish treadmill--arrastra--grinding for gold. Then the Indian uttered,
with a last flash of spirit, the warning he could not speak, and, falling
back, he gasped and faded into unconsciousness.

Adam stood up, thinking hard, muttering aloud some of his thoughts.

"Arrastra!...That was the way of Dismukes--to grind for gold...He's
here--somewhere--down in that yellow hole...Robbers have jumped his
claim--probably are holding him--torturing him to tell of hidden
gold...and they beat this poor Indian to death."

There was necessity for quick thought and quick action. The Indian was
not dead, but he soon would be. Adam could do nothing for him. It was
imperative to decide whether to wait here for the return of the water
carrier or at once follow the trail to the yellow clay slopes. Adam wore
a gun, but it held only two unused shells, and there was no more
ammunition in his pack. The Indian had no weapon. Perhaps the water
carrier would be armed. If Dismukes were dead, there need be no rash
hurry to avenge him; if he lived as prisoner a little time more or less
would not greatly matter. Adam speedily decided to wait a reasonable time
for the man who packed water, and, if he came, to kill him and then hurry
up the trail. There was, in this way, less danger of being discovered,
and, besides, one of the robbers dispatched would render the band just so
much weaker. Adam especially favoured this course because of the
possibility of getting a weapon.

"And more," muttered Adam, "if he happens to be a tall man I can pretend
to be him--packing water back."

Therefore Adam screened himself behind a thick clump of mesquite near the
trail and waited in ambush like a panther ready to spring.

As he crouched there, keen eyes up the canyon, ears like those of a
listening deer, there flashed into Adam's mind one of Magdalene Virey's
unforgettable remarks. "The power of the desert over me lies somewhere
in my strange faculty of forgetting self. I watch, I hear, I feel, I
smell, but I don't think. Just a gleam--a fleeting moment--then the state
of consciousness or lack of consciousness is gone! But in that moment
lies the secret lure of the desert. Its power over men!"

Swiftly as it had come the memory passed, and Adam became for fleeting
moments at a time the embodiment of Magdalene Virey's philosophy, all
unconscious when thought was absent from feeling. The hour was
approaching midday and the wind began to rustle the mesquites and seep
the sand. Adam smelled a dry dust somewhat tangy, and tasted the
bitterness of it as he licked his lips. Flies had began to buzz around
the dead Indian. Instinctively Adam gazed aloft, and, yes, there far
above him circled a vulture, and above that another, sweeping down from
the invisible depths of blue, magically ringing a flight around the
heavens, with never a movement of wings. They sailed round and round,
always down. Where did they come from? What power poised them so surely
in the air?

Adam waited. All at once his whole body vibrated with the leap of his
heart. A tall, hulking man hove in sight, balancing a bar across his
shoulder, from each end of which hung a large bucket. These buckets swung
to and fro with the fellow's steps. Like a lazy man, he advanced
leisurely. Adam saw a little puff of smoke lift from the red, indistinct
patch that was this water carrier's face. He had cigarette or pipe. As he
approached nearer and nearer, Adam received steadily growing and changing
impressions of the man he was about to kill, until they fixed in the
image of a long, loosely jointed body, a soiled shirt open at the neck,
bare brown arms, and cruel red face. Just outside the mesquites the
robber halted to peer at the spot where the Indian had fallen, and then
ahead as if he expected to see a body lying in the trail.

"Ho! Ho! if thet durned Injin I beat didn't crawl way down hyar! An' his
brains oozin' out!" he ejaculated, hoarsely, as he strode between the
scratching mesquites, swinging the crossbar and buckets sidewise. "Takes
a hell of a lot to kill some critters!"

Like a released spring Adam shot up. His big hands flashed to cut off a
startled yell.

"Not so much!" he called, grimly, and next instant his giant frame strung
to the expenditure of mighty effort.

At noon the wind was blowing a gusty gale and the sun shone a deep,
weird, magenta colour through the pall of yellow dust. The sky was not
visible. Down on the ridges and in the washes dust sheets were whipped up
at intervals. Clouds of flying sand rustled through the air, and
sometimes the wind had force enough to carry grains of gravel. These
intermittent blasts resembled the midnight furnace winds, except for the
strange fact that they were not so hot, so withering. Every few minutes
the canyon would be obscured in sweeping, curling streaks and sheets of
dust. Then, as the gale roared away, the dust settled and the air again
cleared. But high up, the dull, yellow pall hung, apparently motionless,
with that weird sun, like a red-orange moon seen through haze, growing
darker.

The fury of the elements seemed to favour Adam. Heat and gale and
obscurity could tend only to relax the vigilance of men. Adam counted
upon surprising the gang. To his regret, he had found no weapon on the
robber he had overcome. Wearing the man's slouch sombrero pulled down,
and carrying the water buckets suspended from the bar across his
shoulders, Adam believed that in the thick of the duststorm he might
approach near the gang, perhaps get right among them.

When he got to the top of the amphitheatre, and found it a weird and
terrible abyss of flying yellow shadows and full of shriek of wind and
moan and roar, he decided he would go down as far as might seem
advisable, then try to slip up on the robbers, wherever they were, and
get a look at them and their surroundings before rushing to the attack.

Down, and yet farther, Adam plodded, amazed at the depth of the pit, the
bottom of which he had not seen. The plainly defined trail led him on,
and in one place huge boot tracks, familiar to him, acted as a spur. The
tracks were not many days old and had been made by Dismukes. Adam now
expected to find his old friend dead or in some terrible situation. The
place, the day, the heat, the wind--all presaged terror, violence, gold,
and blood. No human beings would endure this nude and ghastly and burning
hell hole of flying dust for anything except gold.

At last Adam got so far down, so deep into the yellow depths, that pall
and roar of duststorm appeared above him. He walked in a strange yellow
twilight. And here the sun showed a darker magenta. Fine siftings of dust
floated and fell all around him, dry, choking, and, when they touched his
face, like invisible sparks of fire.

Interminably the yellow-walled wash wound this way and that, widening out
to the dimensions of a canyon. At length Adam smelled smoke. He was close
to a camp of some kind. Depositing the buckets in the trail, he sheered
off and went up an intersecting wash.

When out of sight of the trail, he climbed up a soft clay slope, and,
lying flat at the top, he peeped over. More yellow ridges like the ribs
of a washboard! They seemed to run out on all sides, in a circling maze,
soft and curved and colourful, and shaded by what seemed unnatural
shadows. But they were almost level. Here indeed was the pit of the
amphitheatre. With slow, desert-trained gaze Adam swept the graceful
dunes. All bare! The twilight of changing yellow shadow hindered sure
sight at considerable distance, and the sweeping rush of wind above, and
then a low hollow roar, made listening useless.

At length Adam noticed how all the clay ridges or ends of slopes to his
right ran about a hundred yards and then sheered down abruptly. Here,
then, was the main canyon through which the trail ran. The line of it, a
vague break in the yellow colour, turned toward Adam's left. Adam
deliberated a moment. Would he go on or return to the trail? Then he
arose, crossed the top of the clay ridge, plunged down its soft bank,
leaped the sandy and gravelly wash at the bottom, and started up the next
ridge. This was exactly like the one he had surmounted. Adam kept on,
down and up, down and up, until the yellow twilight in front of him
appeared separated by a lazy column of blue. Adam's nostrils made sure of
that. It was smoke. Cautiously crawling now, down and up, Adam gained the
ridge from behind which rose th