pe, boundless and splendid in its
extravagant promises. Drunk with the wine of dreams, he knew himself to
be a monarch, a monarch uncrowned and unattended, yet always with his
feet upon the wide threshold of his kingdom.

Then would come the biting chill of night, the manifold rays of stars
and silence, silence reft of winds, yet alive with the tense immobility
of the crouching beast, waiting ... waiting....

The desert, impassively withering him to the shell of a man, or wracking
him terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day and
night with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the perfume of
a woman's hair.

Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-house
and gave royally like a courtesan of kings.

The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakening
bitter on his lips. He counted his years of toil and cursed as he viewed
his shrunken hands, claw-like, scarred, crippled.

He felt the weight of his years and dreaded their accumulated burdens.
He realized that the dream was all--its fulfillment nothing. He knew
himself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound of
human voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness of
his child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whispered
to him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed from
afar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment. He
found Success, as it ever shall be, a veritable desert, grudging man
foothold, yet luring him from one aspiration to another, only to consume
his years in dust.

A narrow canon held his secret. He had wandered into it, panned a little
black sand, and found color. Finally he discovered the fountainhead of
the hoarded yellow particles that spell Power. There in the fastness of
those steep, purgatorial walls was the hermitage of the two
voices--voices that no longer whispered of hope, but left him in the
utter loneliness of possession and its birthright, Fear.

He cried aloud for the companionship of men--and glanced fearfully round
lest man had heard him call.

He again journeyed to the town beside the railroad, bought supplies and
vanished, a ragged wraith, on the horizon.

Back in the canon he set about his labors, finding a numbing solace in
toil.

But at night he would think of the child's face. He had said to those
with whom he had left the child that he would return with a fortune.
They