"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