They interspersed the work with long, restful moments when they looked afar down the vast reaches and smoky shingles to the line of dim mountains.  Some impelling desire, not all the lure of gold, took them to the top of mesas and escarpments; and here, when they had dug and picked, they rested and gazed out at the wide prospect.  Then, as the sun lost its heat and sank lowering to dent its red disk behind far-distant spurs, they halted in a shady canyon or likely spot in a dry wash and tried for water.  When they found it they unpacked, gave drink to the tired burros, and turned them loose.  Dead mesquite served for the campfire.  While the strange twilight deepened into weird night they sat propped against stones, with eyes on the dying embers of the fire, and soon they lay on the sand with the light of white stars on their dark faces.

Each succeeding day and night Cameron felt himself more and more drawn to this strange man.  He found that after hours of burning toil he had insensibly grown nearer to his comrade.  He reflected that after a few weeks in the desert he had always become a different man.  In civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest and gloom.  But once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness.  Did not the desert magnify men?  Cameron believed that wild men in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness, facing the elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded, descended to the savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere brutes.  Likewise he believed that men wandering or lost in the wilderness often reversed that brutal order of life and became noble, wonderful, super-human.  So now he did not marvel at a slow stir stealing warmer along his veins, and at the premonition that perhaps he and this man, alone on the desert, driven there by life’s mysterious and remorseless motive, were to see each other through God’s eyes.

His companion was one who thought of himself last.  It humiliated Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him from doing more than an equal share of the day’s work.  The man was mild, gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness he seemed to be made of the fiber of steel.  Cameron could not thwart him.  Moreover, he appeared to want to find gold for Cameron, not for himself.  Cameron’s hands always trembled at the turning of rock that promised gold; he had enough of the prospector’s passion for fortune to thrill at the chance of a strike.  But the other never showed the least trace of excitement.

One night they were encamped at the head of a canyon.  The day had been exceedingly hot, and long after sundown the radiation of heat from the rocks persisted.  A desert bird whistled a wild, melancholy note from a dark cliff, and a distant coyote wailed mournfully.  The stars shone white until the huge moon rose to burn out all their whiteness.  And on this night Cameron watched his comrade, and yielded to interest he had not heretofore voiced.