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