me, that Casey would fall into some other unheard-of experience
such as had been his portion in the past. I felt much more certain that he
would get into some scrape than I did that he would find the Injun Jim,
and I was grinning inside when I went back to town; though there was a bit
of envy in the smile,--one must always envy the man who keeps his dreams
through all the years and banks on them to the end. For myself, I hadn't
chased a rainbow for thirty years, and I could not call myself the better
for it, either.

* * * * *

In September the lower desert does not seem to realize that summer is
going. The wind blows a little harder, perhaps, and frequently a little
hotter; the nights are not quite so sweltering, and the very sheets on
one's bed do not feel so freshly baked. But up on the higher mesas there
is a heady quality to the wind that blows fresh in your face. There is an
Indian-summery haze like a thin veil over the farthest mountain ranges.
Summer is with you yet; but somehow you feel that winter is coming.

In a country all gray and dull yellow and brown, you find strange,
beautiful tints no artist has yet prisoned with his paints. You dream in
spite of yourself, and walk through a world no more than half real, a
world peopled with your thoughts.

Casey did, when the burros left him in peace long enough. They were
misleading, pot-bellied animals that Casey hazed before him toward the
Tippipahs. They never showed more than slits of eyes beneath their
drooping lids, yet they never missed seeing whatever there was to see, and
taking advantage of every absent-minded moment when Casey was thinking of
the Injun Jim, perhaps. They were fast-walking burros when they were
following a beaten trail and Casey was hard upon their heels, but when his
attention wandered they showed a remarkable amount of energy in finding
blind trails and following them into some impracticable wash where Casey
wasted a good deal of time in extricating them. He said he never saw
burros that hated so to turn around and go back into the road, and he
never saw two burros get out of sight as quickly as they could when they
thought he wasn't watching. They would choose different directions and
hide from him separately,--but once was enough for Casey. He lost them
both for an hour in the sand pits twelve miles out of town, and after that
he tied them nose to tail and himself held a rope attached to the
hindmost, and so ma