Jinny was persistent, however, in her determination to travel eastward, and although her companion, had he been allowed a preference, would have elected to go toward the west, he had learned enough about his small gray friend to be willing to trust her judgment in the matter.
“Though I must say, Jinny,” he remarked, reproachfully, as he gave her her head, “that it’s spoiling the making of a good saddle-burro.”
It was well toward the end of Gard’s second year in the desert. In all this time he had but once encountered his own kind.
On that occasion, too, he had been after salt, and he had met a desert Indian afar on the plain. They had talked together, after a fashion, by the aid of signs, and Gard had learned that the railroad lay three days distant, toward the north-west. This was a matter about which he had often speculated, and he was glad of the information. Because of it, he proffered the Indian the deputy’s pipe, which he had with him, happening, on that day, to be wearing Arnold’s coat. The brave took it, the gift only serving to strengthen his already formed opinion that the gaunt white man with the great beard was loco.
It was a year since the discovery in the cañon. Gard had worked the vein, in a primitive way, making for the purpose a rough mattock, from his useful wagon-spring. It was by far the best tool he had constructed, and he regarded it with even more pride and pleasure than he took in the two heavy little buckskin bags for which he had made a hiding-place in the chimney of the rehabilitated cabin.
He had arrived in these days at a strange content. He loved the vast reaches of his large place; the problems of his elemental environment. The luminous blue sky, the colorful air, the immensity of the waste plain, gave him pleasure. Even the weird desert growths no longer oppressed him.
“After all, Jinny,” he said, as they threaded their way gingerly past a great patch of cholla, with its vicious, hooked spines, “there’s as much life here as there is death. I never sensed it before; but everything’s got a claw to hang onto life with.”
The thought of returning to civilization was put away with ever increasing ease. He had not abandoned the idea, but it came as a more and more remote possibility. Even his dream of vengeance had long been put aside. He had learned the futility of hate in the nights when he watched the great stars wheel by, marking the march of the year.
“There’s nothing in it,” he had finally said to himself.
“It ain’t a man’s job to be staking out claims in hell for another fellow.”