There was a station at the wells where desert travelers were housed and fed, and Bill dragged himself to a hard couch in the loft that night. Next morning he was undecided, but, having come so far, he determined to keep on. Surely he would meet up with Sweet that day. But noon overtook him before he had ridden to Seven Palms, another station, and he had not seen Sweet.
Here, however, he learned that in all likelihood Sweet had gone into the mountains with such cows as had been rounded up in that locality. It was possible, he was told, for Sweet to drive the stragglers along the ridges to the vicinity of Ragtown without coming down to the desert. This, it was suggested, was what he might do, in the hope of picking up on his way any drifting stock that had already sought the green meadows of the highlands. And Bill was advised to retrace his course rather than try the mountains over trails with which he was not familiar.
With the morose feeling that he had once more failed to aid his friend and protégé, the old freighter, saddle-weary and disappointed, rode back. He rode hard, for fear that Sweet would reach Ragtown over the mountain route ahead of him, get drunk, and worry Joshua at what Bill firmly believed to be the biggest moment in the young astronomer’s life. He reached Box-R Ranch in the course of time, and, not daring to rest, set out that same night for the summit.
So stiff he could scarce climb from the saddle, he drew rein before The Silver Dollar near midnight, to find the regular revel in full swing. A little questioning soon brought to light the information that Lee Sweet had reached Ragtown early in the afternoon with three of his vaqueros, had got gloriously drunk, and had ridden off, whooping and firing into the air, not twenty minutes before Bill’s arrival. Bill changed horses and dragged his tired body into the saddle again. And fearing the worst—for it was the eighteenth of June—he raced around the lake to Joshua’s homestead and clattered into the trail that led to the summit of Spyglass Mountain.
The eighteenth of June—with Mars riding the heavens only forty-two million miles away! Only forty-two million!—yet by the end of August the distance would be increased to sixty-six million miles!
Midnight—with Cole of Spyglass Mountain seated high up on his ladder, his far-seeing blue-gray eye glued to the powerful five-hundred-diameter eye-piece of his telescope. Unnoticeably the refractor followed the planet in its endless flight. The driving clock purred softly, the only sound on Spyglass Mountain, for the night was still as death itself—cold and still and fraught with an uncanny tensity.
Shanty Madge was forgotten. John Cole and Lester Cole and the legacy left by Peter Henry Florence were forgotten. Lee Sweet and his boisterous vaqueros were forgotten. For Cole of Spyglass Mountain nothing existed in the universe save romantic Mars, riding the sky on his mysterious rounds.
For hours he had watched, but there came no sign. The glowing planet looked as it had always looked when close to the earth. Once he imagined he saw a threadlike tracery, but it instantly was gone, and a heavy sigh escaped him. The strain was stultifying, and few observers could have withstood the ordeal that Cole withstood that night.
With another heavy sigh he withdrew his eye from the eye-piece to rest it, and glanced at the little alarm clock on the opposite wall. He could barely see its yellow face in the dim light cast by the coal-oil lamp, but he blinked his eyes several times, closed them tightly, opened them again, and noted that it was ten minutes after twelve.