His companion’s deep-set, luminous eyes emitted a singular flash.  It moved Cameron to say that in the years of his wandering he had met no man who could endure equally with him the blasting heat, the blinding dust storms, the wilderness of sand and rock and lava and cactus, the terrible silence and desolation of the desert.  Cameron waved a hand toward the wide, shimmering, shadowy descent of plain and range.  “I may strike through the Sonora Desert.  I may head for Pinacate or north for the Colorado Basin.  You are an old man.”

“I don’t know the country, but to me one place is the same as another,” replied his companion.  For moments he seemed to forget himself, and swept his far-reaching gaze out over the colored gulf of stone and sand.  Then with gentle slaps he drove his burro in behind Cameron.  “Yes, I’m old.  I’m lonely, too.  It’s come to me just lately.  But, friend, I can still travel, and for a few days my company won’t hurt you.”

“Have it your way,” said Cameron.

They began a slow march down into the desert.  At sunset they camped under the lee of a low mesa.  Cameron was glad his comrade had the Indian habit of silence.  Another day’s travel found the prospectors deep in the wilderness.  Then there came a breaking of reserve, noticeable in the elder man, almost imperceptibly gradual in Cameron.  Beside the meager mesquite campfire this gray-faced, thoughtful old prospector would remove his black pipe from his mouth to talk a little; and Cameron would listen, and sometimes unlock his lips to speak a word.  And so, as Cameron began to respond to the influence of a desert less lonely than habitual, he began to take keener note of his comrade, and found him different from any other he had ever encountered in the wilderness.  This man never grumbled at the heat, the glare, the driving sand, the sour water, the scant fare.  During the daylight hours he was seldom idle.  At night he sat dreaming before the fire or paced to and fro in the gloom.  He slept but little, and that long after Cameron had had his own rest.  He was tireless, patient, brooding.

Cameron’s awakened interest brought home to him the realization that for years he had shunned companionship.  In those years only three men had wandered into the desert with him, and these had left their bones to bleach in the shifting sands.  Cameron had not cared to know their secrets.  But the more he studied this latest comrade the more he began to suspect that he might have missed something in the others.  In his own driving passion to take his secret into the limitless abode of silence and desolation, where he could be alone with it, he had forgotten that life dealt shocks to other men.  Somehow this silent comrade reminded him.