Wanderer of the Wasteland

by

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 ag