ed afar down the vast reaches and
smoky shingles to the line of dim mountains. Some impelling desire, not
all the lure of gold, took them to the top of mesas and escarpments;
and here, when they had dug and picked, they rested and gazed out at
the wide prospect. Then, as the sun lost its heat and sank lowering to
dent its red disk behind far-distant spurs, they halted in a shady
canyon or likely spot in a dry wash and tried for water. When they
found it they unpacked, gave drink to the tired burros, and turned them
loose. Dead mesquite served for the campfire. While the strange
twilight deepened into weird night they sat propped against stones,
with eyes on the dying embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the
sand with the light of white stars on their dark faces.

Each succeeding day and night Cameron felt himself more and more drawn
to this strange man. He found that after hours of burning toil he had
insensibly grown nearer to his comrade. He reflected that after a few
weeks in the desert he had always become a different man. In
civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest
and gloom. But once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely
world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness. Did not
the desert magnify men? Cameron believed that wild men in wild places,
fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the
elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the
savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere brutes. Likewise he
believed that men wandering or lost in the wilderness often reversed
that brutal order of life and became noble, wonderful, super-human. So
now he did not marvel at a slow stir stealing warmer along his veins,
and at the premonition that perhaps he and this man, alone on the
desert, driven there by life's mysterious and remorseless motive, were
to see each other through God's eyes.

His companion was one who thought of himself last. It humiliated
Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him from
doing more than an equal share of the day's work. The man was mild,
gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness he seemed to
be made of the fiber of steel. Cameron could not thwart him.
Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron, not for
himself. Cameron's hands always trembled at the turning of rock that
promised gold; he had enough of the prospector's passion for