piece of gold. Around him lay scattered heaps of black pebbles
and bits of black, weathered rock and pieces of broken ledge, and
they showed gold.

"Warren! Look! See it! Feel it! Gold!"

But Warren had never cared, and now he was too blind to see.

"Go--go!" he whispered.

Cameron gazed down the gray reaches of the forlorn valley, and
something within him that was neither intelligence nor emotion--something
inscrutably strange--impelled him to promise.

Then Cameron built up stone monuments to mark his gold strike. That
done, he tarried beside the unconscious Warren. Moments passed--grew
into hours. Cameron still had strength left to make an effort to
get out of the desert. But that same inscrutable something which
had ordered his strange involuntary promise to Warren held him
beside his fallen comrade. He watched the white sun turn to gold,
and then to red and sink behind mountains in the west. Twilight
stole into the arroyo. It lingered, slowly turning to gloom.
The vault of blue black lightened to the blinking of stars.
Then fell the serene, silent, luminous desert night.

Cameron kept his vigil. As the long hours wore on he felt creep
over him the comforting sense that he need not forever fight sleep.
A wan glow flared behind the dark, uneven horizon, and a melancholy
misshapen moon rose to make the white night one of shadows. Absolute
silence claimed the desert. It was mute. Then that inscrutable