fortune to
thrill at the chance of a strike. But the other never showed the least
trace of excitement.

One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon. The day had been
exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat from the
rocks persisted. A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy note from a
dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully. The stars shone
white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their whiteness. And on
this night Cameron watched his comrade, and yielded to interest he had
not heretofore voiced.

"Pardner, what drives you into the desert?"

"Do I seem to be a driven man?"

"No. But I feel it. Do you come to forget?"

"Yes."

"Ah!" softly exclaimed Cameron. Always he seemed to have known that.
He said no more. He watched the old man rise and begin his nightly
pace to and fro, up and down. With slow, soft tread, forward and back,
tirelessly and ceaselessly, he paced that beat. He did not look up at
the stars or follow the radiant track of the moon along the canyon
ramparts. He hung his head. He was lost in another world. It was a
world which the lonely desert made real. He looked a dark, sad,
plodding figure, and somehow impressed Cameron with the helplessness of
men.

Cameron grew acutely conscious of the pang in his own breast, of the
fire in his heart, the strife and torment of his passion-driven soul.
He had come into the desert to remember a woman. She appeared to him
then as she had looked when first she entered his life--a golden-haired
girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, tall and slender and
beautiful. He had never forgotten, and an old, sickening remorse
knocked at his heart. He rose and climbed out of the canyon and to the
top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro and looked down into the weird
and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on
down the moon track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the
cold, blue horizon. The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars
shone serene. The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine. The
desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of
rock and sand, silent, austere, ancient, always waiting. It spoke to
Cameron. It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul. In that wild
solitude the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly.
They had shone upon a desert that might once have been alive and was
now dead, and might again