Hastily wiping his hands, he caught up his gun and stole out into the aisle between the mesquites. Such opportunity for fresh meat was rare on the desert. He thought he caught a glimpse of a rabbit. He had gotten the dough to about the proper consistency when a rustling in the brush attracted his attention. This he half-filled with flour, and, adding water, began to mix the two. He had a heavy pan which did duty as a gold-pan, a dish-pan, and a wash-pan. Then he scoured his oven with sand and greased it. It was not palatable, yet it would save life.Īdam set about the camp tasks long grown second nature with him, and which were always congenial and pleasant. Adam gazed at the water of the Amargosa with interest. The sun was already westering, and soon, as he descended, it hung over the ragged peaks. Mesquite and other brush spotted its gravelly slopes and sandy banks. ![]() The narrow meandering stream gleamed like silver in the sunlight. It looked the bitterness, the poison, and the acid suggested by its Spanish name. In the afternoon Adam rounded a corner of a league-long sloping mesa and gazed down into the valley of the Amargosa. He would conquer Death Valley he would see it in all its ghastliness he would absorb all its mysteries he would defy to the limit of endurance its most fatal menaces to life. He had surmounted all physical obstacles. The strife of the desert had awakened in him a craving to find the unattainable. From far beyond that upheaved black and forbidding range, the Funeral Mountains, something strange, new, thrilling awaited his coming. The dry, sweet desert air seemed to permeate his brain and clear it of miasmas and shadows. His stride was that of a mountaineer, and his burros had to trot to keep ahead of him.Īnd as Adam's body gradually responded to this readjustment to the desert and its hard demands, so his mind seemed to slough off, layer by layer, the morbid, fierce, and ruthless moods that like lichens had fastened upon it. The grey slopes beyond did not daunt him. He had been confined to one place, without action, for so long that now, as he began to feel the slow sweat burn pleasantly on his body, there came a loosening of his muscles, a relaxing of tension, a marshalling, as it were, of his great forces of strength and endurance. For Adam the most torrid weather had no terrors, and the warmth of a morning like this felt pleasant on his cheek. Day by day the heat had been increasing, and now, at sunrise, the smoky heat veils were waving up from the desert floor. This was a still morning in April, and the lurid sun, bursting above the black escarpment to the east, promised a rising temperature. If Adam Larey-or Wansfell, wanderer of the wasteland, as he had come to believe himself-had any home, it was out in the vast open, under the great white flare of sunlight and the star-studded canopy of night. The long, drab reaches of desert, the undulating bronze slopes waving up to the dark mountains, called to him in a language that he felt. ![]() Tecopah would not soon forget Wansfell! That was his grim thought. The long-deferred hour at last arrived in which Adam, on a ruddy-gold dawn in early April, drove his burros out into the lonesome desert toward the Amargosa.
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