Silvermane stumbled, jolting Hare out of his stupid lethargy.  Before him spread a great field of bowlders with not a slope or a ridge or a mesa or an escarpment.  Not even a tip of a spur rose in the background.  He rubbed his sore eyes.  Was this another illusion?

When Silvermane started onward Hare thought of the Navajos’ custom to trust horse and dog in such an emergency.  They were desert-bred; beyond human understanding were their sight and scent.  He was at the mercy now of Wolf’s instinct and Silvermane’s endurance.  Resignation brought him a 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 barrenness, and his dumb companions were the world to him.  Wolf pattered onward, a silent guide; and Silvermane followed, never lagging, sure-footed in the dark, faithful to his master.  All the love Hare had borne the horse was as nothing to that which came to him on this desert night.  In and out, round and round, ever winding, ever zigzagging, Silvermane hung close to Wolf, and the sandy lanes between the bowlders gave forth no sound.  Dog and horse, free to choose their trail, trotted onward miles and miles into the night.

A pale light in the east turned to a glow, then to gold, and the round disc of the moon silhouetted the black bowlders on the horizon.  It cleared the dotted line and rose, an oval orange-hued strange moon, not mellow nor silvery nor gloriously brilliant as Hare had known it in the past, but a vast dead-gold melancholy orb, rising sadly over the desert.  To Hare it was the crowning reminder of lifelessness; it fitted this world of dull gleaming stones.