sand-dune, beautifully ribbed and scalloped and lined
by the wind, and from its knife-sharp crest a thin wavering sheet of
sand blew, almost like smoke. Shefford wondered why the sand looked red
at a distance, for here it seemed almost white. It rippled everywhere,
clean and glistening, always leading down.

Suddenly Shefford became aware of a house looming out of the bareness
of the slope. It dominated that long white incline. Grim, lonely,
forbidding, how strangely it harmonized with the surroundings! The
structure was octagon-shaped, built of uncut stone, and resembled a
fort. There was no door on the sides exposed to Shefford's gaze, but
small apertures two-thirds the way up probably served as windows and
port-holes. The roof appeared to be made of poles covered with red
earth.

Like a huge cold rock on a wide plain this house stood there on the
windy slope. It was an outpost of the trader Presbrey, of whom Shefford
had heard at Flagstaff and Tuba. No living thing appeared in the
limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed shudderingly at the unwelcoming
habitation, at the dark eyelike windows, at the sweep of barren slope
merging into the vast red valley, at the bold, bleak bluffs. Could any
one live here? The nature of that sinister valley forbade a home there,
and the spirit of the place hovered in the silence and space. Shefford
thought irresistibly of how his enemies would have consigned him to
just such a hell. He thought bitterly and mockingly of the narrow
congregation that had proved him a failure in the ministry, that had
repudiated his ideas of religion and immortality and God, that had
driven him, at the age of twenty-four, from the calling forced upon him
by his people. As a boy he had yearned to make himself an artist; his
family had made him a clergyman; fate had made him a failure. A failure
only so far in his life, something urged him to add--for in the lonely
days and silent nights of the desert he had experienced a strange birth
of hope. Adventure had called him, but it was a vague and spiritual
hope, a dream of promise, a nameless attainment that fortified his
wilder impulse.

As he rode around a corner of the stone house his horse snorted and
stopped. A lean, shaggy pony jumped at sight of him, almost displacing
a red long-haired blanket that covered an Indian saddle. Quick thuds
of hoofs in sand drew Shefford's attention to a corral made of peeled
poles, and here he saw another pony.

Shefford h