“Man, I cannot think!” burst out Adam. “I am stunned.... Oh, the pity of it—the sickening, pitiless fatality! Oh, my heart breaks for you!... Dismukes, of what use is hope? Oh, why do we fight? Where—where does joy abide for such as you and me?”
The great, rolling ox eyes gleamed upon Adam, strong with the soul of peace, of victory in their depths.
“Wansfell, joy an’ happiness, whatever makes life worth livin’, is in you. No man can go forth to find what he hasn’t got within him.”
Then he gazed away across the desert, across sand and cactus and mesquite, across the blue-hazed, canyon-streaked ranges toward the north.
“I go to Death Valley,” he continued, slowly, in his deep voice. “I had left enough gold to grub-stake me. An’ I go to Death Valley, but not to seek my fortune. It will be quiet and lonely there. An’ I can think an’ rest an’ sleep. Perhaps I’ll dig a little of the precious yellow dust, just to throw it away. Gold!... The man who loves gold is ruined. Passion makes men mad.... An’ now I must go.”
“Death Valley? No! No!” whispered Adam.
“Straight for Death Valley! It has called me across half the earth. I remember no desert place so lonely an’ silent an’ free. So different from the noisy world of men that crowds my mind still! There I shall find peace, perhaps my grave. See! life is all a hopin’ to find! I go on my way. Wansfell, we never know what drives us. But I am happy now.... Our trails have crossed for the last time. Good-by.”
He wrung Adam’s hand and quickly whirled to his burros.
“Hehaw! Gedap!” he shouted, with a smack on their haunches. Adam whispered a farewell he could not speak. Then, motionless, he watched the old prospector face the gray wastes toward the north and the beckoning mountains. Adam had an almost irresistible desire to run after Dismukes, to go with him. But the man wanted to be alone. What a stride he had! The fruitless quest had left him that at least. The same old rolling gait, the same doggedness! Dismukes was a man who could not be halted. Adam watched him—saw him at last merge and disappear in the gray, lonely sage. And then into Adam’s strained sight seemed to play a quivering mirage—a vision of Death Valley, ghastly and white and naked, the abode of silence and decay set down under its dark-red walls—the end of the desert and the grave of Dismukes.