"Pay for it!" grunted Roger. "Wait till I find it, will you? You and Gustav clean up after the storm to-morrow and go on with the absorber. I'll take a tramp up to Snake Peak."
He was on his way before sun-up, the next morning, a canteen of water over his shoulder and a lunch in his pocket. He moved as rapidly as the heavy walking permitted, driven by a sense of impatience to which he gave no name. But subconsciously he realized that forever behind that beauty of the desert to which, like Von Minden, he felt he might gladly sell himself, loomed the menace of the desert's brutality which he was not equipped to fight and which he could overcome only by the extraordinary precision and swiftness of his work.
The sun was not half an hour high when Roger reached the top of the mountain behind the ranch. Here he gazed eastward across the low ranges to a peak which dominated all the crests around it, a jagged, black and brown monster, its top crimson now in the morning glow.
Roger stood breathing deeply, hat in hand, the sun turning his bronze hair red, his thin strong body erect against the morning sky. He could see no trail, so he determined to reach Snake Peak by a direct cross line. The peak would be lost to view when he reached the valley below so he sighted a lonely cedar on the crest of the opposite range and began to climb downward. It was stiff going. The prickly pear cactus and the ollas grew thick and the ground was covered with broken rock that made short work of his already well-worn shoes.
When Roger reached the lonely cedar the sun was two hours high. He had thought to make it in twenty minutes. He dropped, trembling with weariness in the shadow of a little tree, drank deeply of the canteen and gave himself ten minutes of rest, lying flat on his back, his eyes on the magnificent expanse of the heavens.
The ten minutes up, he crossed the narrow ridge and after a moment found a landmark on the opposite crest, a single black rock against a lavender outcropping. Again he plunged into the narrow valley below him falling, sliding and swearing, then scrambling and clambering with knee and elbow and broken nail, until after another hour's interval, he cast himself down on the lavender outcropping.
Snake Peak was now just across the canyon and he could see clearly the gray white of the tailing dump that marked the mine. It was well after eleven when in a fury of impatience he reached his final goal.
The loneliness of the untouched wilderness is not so great as that of the deserted habitation. Roger had not felt the desert's solitude until he dropped on a bench outside the cook house and began to examine the lost endeavor about him. There were bunk houses and office buildings, shaft and engine houses, aerial tramways and car tracks, all the many and costly appurtenances of desert mining. Sand lay thick over everything. The silence was complete save for the flopping of the torn canvas that had been fastened over a hoist.
A sense of profound depression settled upon Roger. He dropped his head in his hands with a groan. A dream, vastly better financed than his own, had come to naught in the face of the distances and the difficulties of the desert. Was there any greater hell, he wondered than to be hounded by a creative desire for which there was no outlet; to have stored within one's brain gifts indispensable to humanity's best development, of which humanity would take heed only after the creator had been crucified by desperate handicaps and indifference.
As Roger brooded, his eyes fell on the engine house and a carefully locked shed beside it. His face brightened. He got stiffly to his feet and plodded up to the window of the engine house, raised it and clambered within. A great engine shrouded with greasy canvas lay in the dusky room. It was a gas-producer type, in excellent condition. Roger went over it as tenderly and eagerly as a horseman goes over a thoroughbred racer. Then he went through the open door into the shed adjoining. It was full of oil drums, some of them empty but with a sufficient number filled to more than satisfy Roger's needs.