Dismukes smoked in silence, thoughtful and sad. The man’s forceful assurance and doggedness seemed the same, yet Adam sensed a subtle difference in him, beyond power to define. The last gold faded from the bold domes of the mountains, the clouds turned gray, the twilight came on as a stealthy host. And from across the creek came discordant sounds of Tecopah awakening to the revelry of a gold diggings by night.
“How’d you happen along here?” queried Dismukes, presently.
“Tecopah was just a water hole for me,” replied Adam.
“Me, too. An’ I’m sure sayin’ that I like to fill my canteens here. Last year I camped here, an’ when I went on I kept one of my canteens so long the water spoiled.... Found some gold trace up in the Kingston range, but my supplies ran low an’ I had to give up. My plan now is to go in there an’ then on to the Funeral Mountains. They’re full of mineral. But a dry, hard, poison country for a prospector. Do you know that country?”
“I’ve been on this side of the range.”
“Bad enough, but the other side of the Funerals is Death Valley. That gash in summer is a blastin’, roarin’ hell. I’ve crossed it every month in the year. None but madmen ever tackle Death Valley in July, in the middle of the day. I’ve seen the mercury go to one hundred and forty degrees. I’ve seen it one hundred and twenty-five at midnight, an’, friend, when them furnace winds blow down the valley at night sleep or rest is impossible. You just gasp for life.... But strange to say, Wansfell, the fascination of the desert is stronger in Death Valley than at any other place.”
“Yes, I can appreciate that,” replied Adam, thoughtfully. “It must be the sublimity of death and desolation—the terrible loneliness and awfulness of the naked earth. I am going there.”
“So I reckoned. An’ see here, Wansfell, I’ll get out my pencil an’ draw you a little map of the valley, showin’ my trails an’ water holes. I know that country better than any other white man. It’s a mineral country. The lower slope of the Funerals is all clay, borax, soda, alkali, salt, niter, an’ when the weather’s hot an’ that stuff blows on the hot winds, my God! it’s a horror! But you’ll want to go through it all an’ you’ll go back again.”
“Where do you advise me to go in?”
“Well, I’d follow the Amargosa. It’s bad water, but better than none. Go across an’ up into the Panamints, an’ come back across again by Furnace Creek. I’ll make you a little map. There’s more bad water than good, an’ some of it’s arsenic. I found the skeletons of six men near an arsenic water hole. Reckon they’d come on this water when bad off for thirst an’ didn’t know enough to test it. An’ they drank their fill an’ died in their tracks. They had gold, too. But I never could find out anythin’ about these men. No one ever heard of them an’ I was the only man who knew of the tragedy. Well, well, it’s common enough for me, though I never before run across so many dead men. Wansfell, I reckon you’ve found that common, too, in your wanderings—dried-up mummies, yellow as leather, or bleached bones an’ grinnin’ skull, white in the sun?”