sand blew, almost like smoke. Shefford wondered why the sand looked
red at a distance, for here it seemed almost white. It rippled
everywhere, clean and glistening, always leading down.

Suddenly Shefford became aware of a house looming out of the bareness
of the slope. It dominated that long white incline. Grim, lonely,
forbidding, how strangely it harmonized with the surroundings! The
structure was octagon-shaped, built of uncut stone, and resembled a
fort. There was no door on the sides exposed to Shefford's gaze, but
small apertures two-thirds the way up probably served as windows and
port-holes. The roof appeared to be made of poles covered with red
earth.

Like a huge cold rock on a wide plain this house stood there on the
windy slope. It was an outpost of the trader Presbrey, of whom
Shefford had heard at Flagstaff and Tuba. No living thing appeared
in the limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed shudderingly at the
unwelcoming habitation, at the dark eyelike windows, at the sweep
of barren slope merging into the vast red valley, at the bold, bleak
bluffs. Could any one live here? The nature of that sinister valley
forbade a home there, and the, spirit of the place hovered in the
silence and space. Shefford thought irresistibly of how his enemies
would have consigned him to just such a hell. He thought bitterly and
mockingly of the narrow congregation that had proved him a failure in
the ministry, that had repudiated his ideas of religion and immortality
and God, that had driven him, at the age of twenty-four, from the
calling forced upon him by his people. As a boy he had yearned to make
himself an artist; his family had made him a clergyman; fate had made
him a failure. A failure only so far in his life, something urged him
to add--for in the lonely days and silent nights of the desert he had