My passenger was out first, divested of his safety harness. He acted like one distraught. Our brief stop near Cheyenne had vexed him—he had wished to spend either more time there, or less time. Now this impromptu stop enraged him.
“What a place, what a place!” he stormed. “There’s nothing here; there can be nothing here. We must get on. I’m wasting time. I paid to get on, to San Francisco; even Salt Lake. Then I can work back. But what am I to do here? And I’m growing old. How long will you be?”
“Not long. And meanwhile,” I retorted, “you’ll not be bothered with women. You can be thankful for that.”
He snorted.
“Women! No women here; yes. A spot without woman: man and God. We’ve got to get on. I’ll pay you well to get me on. Do you hear? To San Francisco—to Salt Lake; some center where I can look, look, and then work back. I must look again.”
He strode frenziedly. A glance about as I stripped myself of incumbrances showed me that we were isolated. The mesa dropped abruptly on all sides; by a running start we might soar from an edge like a seaplane from the platform of a battleship. And I noted also that without doubt we should have to depend upon our own resources, for if this was a country God forgot it moreover seemed to be a country by man forgotten, granted that man ever before had known it. All furrowed and washed and castlemented, it was a region where we might remain pancaked and unremarked, as insignificant as a beetle.
I was hunting our engine trouble, when on a sudden he called, and beckoned.
“Here, you! What’s this?”
I went over. Something quickened me, electric and prickling as when one’s flesh crawls in contact with a presence unseen. Skull and skeleton lay eery and mysterious, whitely gleaming, bleached by many weathers. He stooped——