Desert Gold | Page 6

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 along 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