“And that’s what I’m kickin’ about!  Casey Ryan ain’t the man to let it stop there.  I been thinkin’ it over sence that devil’s lantern showed up again, and went and set over there on Tippipah.  Mebby I misjudged the dog-gone thing.  Mebby it’s settin’ somewheres around that gold mine.  Funny it never showed up no other time and no other place.  I been travelin’ the desert off’n on all my life, and I never seen anything like it before.  And I can tell yuh this much:  I been wanting that mine too darn long to give up now.  If you don’t feel like stakin’ me for the trip, I’ll go back to Lund and have a talk with Bill.  Bill’s a good old scout and he’ll stake me to an outfit, anyway.”

That was merely Casey’s inborn optimism speaking.  Bill was a good old scout, all right, but if he would grubstake Casey to go hunting the Injun Jim mine, then Bill had changed considerably.

The upshot of it was that we left Starvation the next morning, headed for town.  And two days after that I had pulled myself out of bed at daybreak to walk down to his camp under the mesquite grove just outside of town.  I drank a cup of coffee with him and wished him luck.  Casey did not talk much.  His mind was all taken up with the details of his starting,—­whether to trust his water cans on the brown burro or the gray, and whether he had taken enough “cold” shoes along for the mule.  And he set down his cup of coffee to go rummaging in a kyack just to make sure that he had the hoof rasp and shoeing hammer safe.

He was packed and moving up the little hill out of the grove before the sun had more than painted a cloud or two in the east.  A dreamer once more gone to find the end of his particular rainbow, I told myself, as I watched him out of sight.  I must admit that I hoped, down deep in the heart of me, that Casey would fall into some other unheard-of experience such as had been his portion in the past.  I felt much more certain that he would get into some scrape than I did that he would find the Injun Jim, and I was grinning inside when I went back to town; though there was a bit of envy in the smile,—­one must always envy the man who keeps his dreams through all the years and banks on them to the end.  For myself, I hadn’t chased a rainbow for thirty years, and I could not call myself the better for it, either.

* * * * *

In September the lower desert does not seem to realize that summer is going.  The wind blows a little harder, perhaps, and frequently a little hotter; the nights are not quite so sweltering, and the very sheets on one’s bed do not feel so freshly baked.  But up on the higher mesas there is a heady quality to the wind that blows fresh in your face.  There is an Indian-summery haze like a thin veil over the farthest mountain ranges.  Summer is with you yet; but somehow you feel that winter is coming.

In a country all gray and dull yellow and brown, you find strange, beautiful tints no artist has yet prisoned with his paints.  You dream in spite of yourself, and walk through a world no more than half real, a world peopled with your thoughts.