certain calmness of soul, cold as the touch of an icy hand on fevered
cheek. He remembered the desert secret in Mescal's eyes; he was about to
solve it. He remembered August Naab's words: "It's a man's deed!" If so,
he had achieved the spirit of it, if not the letter. He remembered
Eschtah's tribute to the wilderness of painted wastes: "There is the
grave of the Navajo, and no one knows the trail to the place of his
sleep!" He remembered the something evermore about to be, the unknown
always subtly calling; now it was revealed in the stone-fettering grip of
the desert. It had opened wide to him, bright with its face of danger,
beautiful with its painted windows, inscrutable with its alluring call.
Bidding him enter, it had closed behind him; now he looked upon it in its
iron order, its strange ruins racked by fire, its inevitable
remorselessness.



XV
DESERT NIGHT


THE gray stallion, finding the rein loose on his neck, trotted forward
and overtook the dog, and thereafter followed at his heels. With the
setting of the sun a slight breeze stirred, and freshened as twilight
fell, rolling away the sultry atmosphere. Then the black desert night
mantled the plain.

For a while this blackness soothed the pain of Hare's sun-blinded eyes.
It was a relief to have the unattainable horizon line blotted out. But
by-and-by the opaque gloom brought home to him, as the day had never
done, the reality of his solitude. He was alone in this immense place of