ck and
pieces of broken ledge, and they showed gold.

"Warren! Look! See it! Feel it! Gold!"

But Warren had never cared, and now he was too blind to see.

"Go--go!" he whispered.

Cameron gazed down the gray reaches of the forlorn valley, and
something within him that was neither intelligence nor
emotion--something inscrutably strange--impelled him to promise.

Then Cameron built up stone monuments to mark his gold strike. That
done, he tarried beside the unconscious Warren. Moments passed--grew
into hours. Cameron still had strength left to make an effort to get
out of the desert. But that same inscrutable something which had
ordered his strange involuntary promise to Warren held him beside his
fallen comrade. He watched the white sun turn to gold, and then to red
and sink behind mountains in the west. Twilight stole into the arroyo.
It lingered, slowly turning to gloom. The vault of blue black lightened
to the blinking of stars. Then fell the serene, silent, luminous desert
night.

Cameron kept his vigil. As the long hours wore on he felt creep over
him the comforting sense that he need not forever fight sleep. A wan
glow flared behind the dark, uneven horizon, and a melancholy misshapen
moon rose to make the white night one of shadows. Absolute silence
claimed the desert. It was mute. Then that inscrutable something
breathed to him, telling him when he was alone. He need not have
looked at the dark, still face beside him.

Another face haunted Cameron's--a woman's face. It was there in the
white moonlit shadows; it drifted in the darkness beyond; it softened,
changed to that of a young girl, sweet, with the same dark, haunting
eyes of her mother. Cameron prayed to that nameless thing within him,
the spirit of something deep and mystical as life. He prayed to that
nameless thing outside, of which the rocks and the sand, the spiked
cactus and the ragged lava, the endless waste, with its vast star-fired
mantle, were but atoms. He prayed for mercy to a woman--for happiness
to her child. Both mother and daughter were close to him then. Time
and distance were annihilated. He had faith--he saw into the future.
The fateful threads of the past, so inextricably woven with his error,
wound out their tragic length here in this forlorn desert.

Cameron then took a little tin box from his pocket, and, opening it,
removed a folded certificate. He had kept a pen, and now he wrote
something upon the p