“Warren!  Wait—­listen!” panted Cameron.  “I’ve got that marriage certificate—­I’ve had it by me all these years.  I kept it—­to prove to myself I did right.”

The old man uttered a broken cry.

Cameron stole off among the rocks.  How long he absented himself or what he did he had no idea.  When he returned Warren was sitting before the campfire, and once more he appeared composed.  He spoke, and his voice had a deeper note; but otherwise he seemed as usual.

They packed the burros and faced the north together.

Cameron experienced a singular exaltation.  He had lightened his comrade’s burden.  Wonderfully it came to him that he had also lightened his own.  From that hour it was not torment to think of Nell.  Walking with his comrade through the silent places, lying beside him under the serene luminous light of the stars, Cameron began to feel the haunting presence of invisible things that were real to him—­phantoms whispering peace.  In the moan of the cool wind, in the silken seep of sifting sand, in the distant rumble of a slipping ledge, in the faint rush of a shooting star he heard these phantoms of peace coming with whispers of the long pain of men at the last made endurable.  Even in the white noonday, under the burning sun, these phantoms came to be real to him.  In the dead silence of the midnight hours he heard them breathing nearer on the desert wind—­nature’s voices of motherhood, whispers of God, peace in the solitude.

IV

There came a morning when the sun shone angry and red through a dull, smoky haze.

“We’re in for sandstorms,” said Cameron.

They had scarcely covered a mile when a desert-wide, moaning, yellow wall of flying sand swooped down upon them.  Seeking shelter in the lee of a rock, they waited, hoping the storm was only a squall, such as frequently whipped across the open places.  The moan increased to a roar, and the dull red slowly dimmed, to disappear in the yellow pall, and the air grew thick and dark.  Warren slipped the packs from the burros.  Cameron feared the sandstorms had arrived some weeks ahead of their usual season.

The men covered their heads and patiently waited.  The long hours dragged, and the storm increased in fury.  Cameron and Warren wet scarfs with water from their canteens, and bound them round their faces, and then covered their heads.  The steady, hollow bellow of flying sand went on.  It flew so thickly that enough sifted down under the shelving rock to weight the blankets and almost bury the men.  They were frequently compelled to shake off the sand to keep from being borne to the ground.  And it was necessary to keep digging out the packs.  The floor of their shelter gradually rose higher and higher.  They tried to eat, and seemed to be grinding only sand between their teeth.  They lost the count of time.  They dared not sleep, for that would have meant being buried alive.  The could only crouch close to the leaning rock, shake off the sand, blindly dig out their packs, and every moment gasp and cough and choke to fight suffocation.