certainly am not going to crawl into that cursed bed! And in the
morning--"

"Well? In the morning?"

"Thank God there's a train due then!"

Conniston left him and went out into the twilight. He passed by the
store, by the saloon, along the short, dusty street, and out into the
dry fields beyond. He followed the road for perhaps a half-mile and
then turned away to a little mound of earth rising gently from the
flatness about it. And there he threw himself upon the ground and let
his eyes wander to the south and the faint, dark line which showed him
where the hills were being drawn into the embrace of the night
shadows.

The utter loneliness of this barren world rested heavy upon his
gregarious spirit. Sitting with his back to Indian Creek, he could see
no moving, living thing in all the monotony of wide-reaching
landscape. He was enjoying a new sensation, feeling vague, restless
thoughts surge up within him which were so vague, so elusive as to be
hardly grasped. At first it was only the loneliness, the isolation and
desolation of the thing which appalled him. Then slowly into that
feeling there entered something which was a kind of awe, almost an
actual fear. A man, a man like young Greek Conniston, was a small
matter out here; the desert a great, unmerciful, unrelenting God.

First loneliness, then awe tinged with a vague fear, and then
something which Conniston had never felt before in his life. A great,
deep admiration, a respect, a soul-troubling yearning toward the very