II

When he awakened he found, to his surprise, that his companion had

departed. A trail in the sand led off to the north. There was no

water in that direction. Cameron shrugged his shoulders; it was not

his affair; he had his own problems. And straightway he forgot his

strange visitor.

Cameron began his day, grateful for the solitude that was now unbroken,

for the canyon-furrowed and cactus-spired scene that now showed no sign

of life. He traveled southwest, never straying far from the dry stream

bed; and in a desultory way, without eagerness, he hunted for signs of

gold.

The work was toilsome, yet the periods of rest in which he indulged

were not taken because of fatigue. He rested to look, to listen, to

feel. What the vast silent world meant to him had always been a

mystical thing, which he felt in all its incalculable power, but never

understood.

That day, while it was yet light, and he was digging in a moist

white-bordered wash for water, he was brought sharply up by hearing the

crack of hard hoofs on stone. There down the canyon came a man and a

burro. Cameron recognized them.

"Hello, friend," called the man, halting. "Our trails crossed again.

That's good."

"Hello," replied Cameron, slowly. "Any mineral sign to-day?"

"No."

They made camp together, ate their frugal meal, smoked a pipe, and

rolled in their blankets without exchanging many words. In the morning

the same reticence, the same aloofness characterized the manner of

both. But Cameron's companion, when he had packed his burro and was

ready to start, faced about and said: "We might stay together, if it's

all right with you."

"I never take a partner," replied Cameron.

"You're alone; I'm alone," said the other, mildly. "It's a big place.

If we find gold there'll be enough for two."

"I don't go down into the desert for gold alone," rejoined Cameron,

with a chill note in his swift reply.

His companion's deep-set, luminous eyes emitted a singular flash. It

moved Cameron to say that in the years of his wandering he had met no

man who could endure equally with him the blasting heat, the blinding

dust storms, the wilderness of sand and rock and lava and cactus, the

terrible silence and desolation of the desert. Cameron waved a hand

toward the wide, shimmering, shadowy descent of plain and range. "I

may strike through the Sonora Desert. I may head for Pinacate or north

for the Colorado Basin. You are an old man."

"I don't know the country, but to me one place is the same as another,"

replied his companion. For moments he seemed to forget himself, and

swept his far-reaching gaze out over the colored gulf of stone and

sand. Then with gentle slaps he drove his burro in behind Cameron.

"Yes, I'm old. I'm lonely, too. It's come to me just lately. But,

friend, I can still travel, and for a few days my company won't hurt

you."

"Have it your way," said Cameron.

They began a slow march down into the desert. At sunset they camped

under the lee of a low mesa. Cameron was glad his comrade had the

Indian habit of silence. Another day's travel found the prospectors

deep in the wilderness. Then there came a breaking of reserve,

noticeable in the elder man, almost imperceptibly gradual in Cameron.

Beside the meager mesquite campfire this gray-faced, thoughtful old

prospector would remove his black pipe from his mouth to talk a little;

and Cameron would listen, and sometimes unlock his lips to speak a

word. And so, as Cameron began to respond to the influence of a desert

less lonely than habitual, he began to take keener note of his comrade,

and found him different from any other he had ever encountered in the

wilderness. This man never grumbled at the heat, the glare, the driving

sand, the sour water, the scant fare. During the daylight hours he was

seldom idle. At night he sat dreaming before the fire or paced to and

fro in the gloom. He slept but little, and that long after Cameron had

had his own rest. He was tireless, patient, brooding.

Cameron's awakened interest brought home to him the realization that

for years he had shunned companionship. In those years only three men

had wandered into the desert with him, and these had left their bones

to bleach in the shifting sands. Cameron had not cared to know their

secrets. But the more he studied this latest comrade the more he began

to suspect that he might have missed something in the others. In his

own driving passion to take his secret into the limitless abode of

silence and desolation, where he could be alone with it, he had

forgotten that life dealt shocks to other men. Somehow this silent

comrade reminded him.

One afternoon late, after they had toiled up a white, winding wash of

sand and gravel, they came upon a dry waterhole. Cameron dug deep into

the sand, but without avail. He was turning to retrace weary steps

back to the last water when his comrade asked him to wait. Cameron

watched him search in his pack and bring forth what appeared to be a

small, forked branch of a peach tree. He grasped the prongs of the

fork and held them before him with the end standing straight out, and

then he began to walk along the stream bed. Cameron, at first amused,

then amazed, then pitying, and at last curious, kept pace with the

prospector. He saw a strong tension of his comrade's wrists, as if he

was holding hard against a considerable force. The end of the peach

branch began to quiver and turn. Cameron reached out a hand to touch

it, and was astounded at feeling a powerful vibrant force pulling the

branch downward. He felt it as a magnetic shock. The branch kept

turning, and at length pointed to the ground.

"Dig here," said the prospector.

"What!" ejaculated Cameron. Had the man lost his mind?

Then Cameron stood by while his comrade dug in the sand. Three feet he

dug--four--five, and the sand grew dark, then moist. At six feet water

began to seep through.

"Get the little basket in my pack," he said.

Cameron complied, and saw his comrade drop the basket into the deep

hole, where it kept the sides from caving in and allowed the water to

seep through. While Cameron watched, the basket filled. Of all the

strange incidents of his desert career this was the strangest.

Curiously he picked up the peach branch and held it as he had seen it

held. The thing, however, was dead in his hands.

"I see you haven't got it," remarked his comrade. "Few men have."

"Got what?" demanded Cameron.

"A power to find water that way. Back in Illinois an old German used

to do that to locate wells. He showed me I had the same power. I can't

explain. But you needn't look so dumfounded. There's nothing

supernatural about it."

"You mean it's a simple fact--that some men have a magnetism, a force

or power to find water as you did?"

"Yes. It's not unusual on the farms back in Illinois, Ohio,

Pennsylvania. The old German I spoke of made money traveling round

with his peach fork."

"What a gift for a man in the desert!"

Cameron's comrade smiled--the second time in all those days.

They entered a region where mineral abounded, and their march became

slower. Generally they took the course of a wash, one on each side,

and let the burros travel leisurely along nipping at the bleached

blades of scant grass, or at sage or cactus, while they searched in the

canyons and under the ledges for signs of gold. When they found any

rock that hinted of gold they picked off a piece and gave it a chemical

test. The search was fascinating. They interspersed the work with

long, restful moments when they looked afar down the vast reaches and

smoky shingles to the line of dim mountains. Some impelling desire, not

all the lure of gold, took them to the top of mesas and escarpments;

and here, when they had dug and picked, they rested and gazed out at

the wide prospect. Then, as the sun lost its heat and sank lowering to

dent its red disk behind far-distant spurs, they halted in a shady

canyon or likely spot in a dry wash and tried for water. When they

found it they unpacked, gave drink to the tired burros, and turned them

loose. Dead mesquite served for the campfire. While the strange

twilight deepened into weird night they sat propped against stones,

with eyes on the dying embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the

sand with the light of white stars on their dark faces.

Each succeeding day and night Cameron felt himself more and more drawn

to this strange man. He found that after hours of burning toil he had

insensibly grown nearer to his comrade. He reflected that after a few

weeks in the desert he had always become a different man. In

civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest

and gloom. But once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely

world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness. Did not

the desert magnify men? Cameron believed that wild men in wild places,

fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the

elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the

savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere brutes. Likewise he

believed that men wandering or lost in the wilderness often reversed

that brutal order of life and became noble, wonderful, super-human. So

now he did not marvel at a slow stir stealing warmer along his veins,

and at the premonition that perhaps he and this man, alone on the

desert, driven there by life's mysterious and remorseless motive, were

to see each other through God's eyes.

His companion was one who thought of himself last. It humiliated

Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him from

doing more than an equal share of the day's work. The man was mild,

gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness he seemed to

be made of the fiber of steel. Cameron could not thwart him.

Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron, not for

himself. Cameron's hands always trembled at the turning of rock that

promised gold; he had enough of the prospector's passion for fortune to

thrill at the chance of a strike. But the other never showed the least

trace of excitement.

One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon. The day had been

exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat from the

rocks persisted. A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy note from a

dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully. The stars shone

white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their whiteness. And on

this night Cameron watched his comrade, and yielded to interest he had

not heretofore voiced.

"Pardner, what drives you into the desert?"

"Do I seem to be a driven man?"

"No. But I feel it. Do you come to forget?"

"Yes."

"Ah!" softly exclaimed Cameron. Always he seemed to have known that.

He said no more. He watched the old man rise and begin his nightly

pace to and fro, up and down. With slow, soft tread, forward and back,

tirelessly and ceaselessly, he paced that beat. He did not look up at

the stars or follow the radiant track of the moon along the canyon

ramparts. He hung his head. He was lost in another world. It was a

world which the lonely desert made real. He looked a dark, sad,

plodding figure, and somehow impressed Cameron with the helplessness of

men.

Cameron grew acutely conscious of the pang in his own breast, of the

fire in his heart, the strife and torment of his passion-driven soul.

He had come into the desert to remember a woman. She appeared to him

then as she had looked when first she entered his life--a golden-haired

girl, blue-eyed, white-skinned, red-lipped, tall and slender and

beautiful. He had never forgotten, and an old, sickening remorse

knocked at his heart. He rose and climbed out of the canyon and to the

top of a mesa, where he paced to and fro and looked down into the weird

and mystic shadows, like the darkness of his passion, and farther on

down the moon track and the glittering stretches that vanished in the

cold, blue horizon. The moon soared radiant and calm, the white stars

shone serene. The vault of heaven seemed illimitable and divine. The

desert surrounded him, silver-streaked and black-mantled, a chaos of

rock and sand, silent, austere, ancient, always waiting. It spoke to

Cameron. It was a naked corpse, but it had a soul. In that wild

solitude the white stars looked down upon him pitilessly and pityingly.

They had shone upon a desert that might once have been alive and was

now dead, and might again throb with life, only to die. It was a

terrible ordeal for him to stand alone and realize that he was only a

man facing eternity. But that was what gave him strength to endure.

Somehow he was a part of it all, some atom in that vastness, somehow

necessary to an inscrutable purpose, something indestructible in that

desolate world of ruin and death and decay, something perishable and

changeable and growing under all the fixity of heaven. In that

endless, silent hall of desert there was a spirit; and Cameron felt

hovering near him what he imagined to be phantoms of peace.

He returned to camp and sought his comrade.

"I reckon we're two of a kind," he said. "It was a woman who drove me

into the desert. But I come to remember. The desert's the only place

I can do that."

"Was she your wife?" asked the elder man.

"No."

A long silence ensued. A cool wind blew up the canyon, sifting the

sand through the dry sage, driving away the last of the lingering heat.

The campfire wore down to a ruddy ashen heap.

"I had a daughter," said Cameron's comrade. "She lost her mother at

birth. And I--I didn't know how to bring up a girl. She was pretty

and gay. It was the--the old story."

His words were peculiarly significant to Cameron. They distressed him.

He had been wrapped up in his remorse. If ever in the past he had

thought of any one connected with the girl he had wronged he had long

forgotten. But the consequences of such wrong were far-reaching. They

struck at the roots of a home. Here in the desert he was confronted by

the spectacle of a splendid man, a father, wasting his life because he

could not forget--because there was nothing left to live for. Cameron

understood better now why his comrade was drawn by the desert.

"Well, tell me more?" asked Cameron, earnestly.

"It was the old, old story. My girl was pretty and free. The young

bucks ran after her. I guess she did not run away from them. And I was

away a good deal--working in another town. She was in love with a wild

fellow. I knew nothing of it till too late. He was engaged to marry

her. But he didn't come back. And when the disgrace became plain to

all, my girl left home. She went West. After a while I heard from

her. She was well--working--living for her baby. A long time passed.

I had no ties. I drifted West. Her lover had also gone West. In

those days everybody went West. I trailed him, intending to kill him.

But I lost his trail. Neither could I find any trace of her. She had

moved on, driven, no doubt, by the hound of her past. Since then I

have taken to the wilds, hunting gold on the desert."

"Yes, it's the old, old story, only sadder, I think," said Cameron; and

his voice was strained and unnatural. "Pardner, what Illinois town was

it you hailed from?"

"Peoria."

"And your--your name?" went on Cameron huskily.

"Warren--Jonas Warren."

That name might as well have been a bullet. Cameron stood erect,

motionless, as men sometimes stand momentarily when shot straight

through the heart. In an instant, when thoughts resurged like blinding

flashes of lightning through his mind, he was a swaying, quivering,

terror-stricken man. He mumbled something hoarsely and backed into the

shadow. But he need not have feared discovery, however surely his

agitation might have betrayed him. Warren sat brooding over the

campfire, oblivious of his comrade, absorbed in the past.

Cameron swiftly walked away in the gloom, with the blood thrumming

thick in his ears, whispering over and over:

"Merciful God! Nell was his daughter!"