The desert, impassively withering him to the shell of a man, or wracking him terribly in heat or in storm and cold, still cajoled him day and night with promises, whispered, vague and intoxicating as the perfume of a woman's hair.
Finally the desert flung wide the secret portals of her treasure-house and gave royally like a courtesan of kings.
The man, his dream all but fulfilled, found the taste of awakening bitter on his lips. He counted his years of toil and cursed as he viewed his shrunken hands, claw-like, scarred, crippled.
He felt the weight of his years and dreaded their accumulated burdens. He realized that the dream was all—its fulfillment nothing. He knew himself to be a thing to be pointed at; yet he longed for the sound of human voices, for the touch of human hands, for the living sweetness of his child's face. The sirens of the invisible night no longer whispered to him. He was utterly alone. He had entered his kingdom. Viewed from afar it had seemed a vast pleasure-dome of infinite enchantment. He found Success, as it ever shall be, a veritable desert, grudging man foothold, yet luring him from one aspiration to another, only to consume his years in dust.
A narrow cañon held his secret. He had wandered into it, panned a little black sand, and found color. Finally he discovered the fountainhead of the hoarded yellow particles that spell Power. There in the fastness of those steep, purgatorial walls was the hermitage of the two voices—voices that no longer whispered of hope, but left him in the utter loneliness of possession and its birthright, Fear.
He cried aloud for the companionship of men—and glanced fearfully round lest man had heard him call.
He again journeyed to the town beside the railroad, bought supplies and vanished, a ragged wraith, on the horizon.
Back in the cañon he set about his labors, finding a numbing solace in toil.
But at night he would think of the child's face. He had said to those with whom he had left the child that he would return with a fortune. They knew he went away to forget. They did not expect him to return. That had been ten years ago. He had written twice. Then he had drifted, always promising the inner voice that urged him that he would find gold for her, his child, that she might ever think kindly of him. So he tried to buy himself—with promises. Once he had been a man of his hands, a man who stood straight and faced the sun. Now the people of the desert town eyed him askance. He heard them say he was mad—that the desert had "got him." They were wrong. The desert and its secret was his—a sullen paramour, but his nevertheless. Had she not given him of her very heart?
He viewed his shrunken body, knew that he stooped and shuffled, realized that he had paid the inevitable, the inexorable price for the secret. His wine of dreams had evaporated.... He sifted the coarse gold between his fingers, letting it fall back into the pan. Was it for this that he had wasted his soul?