“Oh no, Dismukes,” protested Adam. “You are a prospector, honest and industrious, and wealthy now, almost ready to enjoy the fruits of your long labors. Your life has a great object.... But I—I am only a wanderer of the wasteland.”
“Aye, an’ therein lies your greatness!” boomed the prospector, his ox eyes dilating and flaring. “I am a selfish pig—a digger in the dirt for gold. My passion has made me pass by men, an’ women, too, who needed help. Riches—dreams!... But you—you, Wansfell—out there in the loneliness an’ silence of the wastelands—you have found God!... I said you would. I’ve met other men who had.”
“No, no,” replied Adam. “You’re wrong. I don’t think I’ve found God. Not yet!... I have no religion, no belief. I can’t find any hope out there in the desert. Nature is pitiless, indifferent. The desert is but one of her playgrounds. Man has no right there. No, Dismukes, I have not found God.”
“You have, but you don’t know it,” responded Dismukes, with more composure, and he began to refill a neglected pipe. “Well, I didn’t mean to fetch up such talk as that. You see, when I do fall in with a prospector once in a month of Sundays I never talk much. An’ then it’d be to ask him if he’d seen any float lately or panned any color. But you’re different. You make my mind work. An’, Wansfell, sometimes I think my mind has been crowded with a million thoughts all cryin’ to get free. That’s the desert. A man’s got to fight the desert with his intelligence or else become less than a man. An’ I always did think a lot, if I didn’t talk.”
“I’m that way, too,” replied Adam. “But a man should talk when he gets a chance. I talk to my burros, and to myself, just to hear the sound of my voice.”
“Ah! Ah!” exclaimed Dismukes, with deep breath. He nodded his shaggy head. Adam’s words had struck an answering chord in his heart.
“You’ve tried for gold here?” queried Adam.
“No. I was here first just after the strike, an’ often since. Water’s all that ever drew me. I’d starve before I’d dig for gold among a pack of beasts. I may be a desert wolf, but I’m a lone one.”
“They’re coyotes and you’re the gray wolf. I liken ’most every man I meet to some beast or creature of the desert.”
“Aye, you’re right. The desert stamps a man. An’, Wansfell, it’s stamped you with the look of a desert eagle. Ha-ha! I ain’t flatterin’ to either of us, am I? Me a starved gray wolf, huntin’ alone, mean an’ hard an’ fierce! An’ you a long, lean-headed eagle, with that look of you like you were about to strike—pong!... Well, well, there’s no understandin’ the work of the desert. The way it develops the livin’ creatures! They all have to live, an’ livin’ on the desert is a thousand times harder than anywhere else. They all have to be perfect machines for destruction. Each seems so swift that he gets away, yet each is also so fierce an’ sure that he catches his prey. They live on one another, but the species doesn’t die out. That’s what stumps me about the desert. Take the human creatures. They grow fiercer than animals. Maybe that’s because nature did not intend man to live on the desert. An’ it is no place for man. Nature intended these classes of plants an’ these species of birds an’ beasts to live, fight, thrive, an’ reproduce their kind on the desert. But men can’t thrive nor reproduce their kind here.”