into the stream and drank with
eager, silent draughts, Calumet swung himself crossways in the saddle,
fumbled for a moment at his slicker, and drew out a battered tin cup.
Leaning over, he filled the cup with water, tilted his head back and
drank. The blur in the white sky caught his gaze and held it. His
eyes mocked, his lips snarled.

"You damned greaser sneak!" he said. "Followed me fifty miles!" A
flash of race hatred glinted his eyes. "I wouldn't let no damned
greaser eagle get me, anyway!"

The pony had drunk its fill. Calumet returned the tin cup to the
slicker and swung back into the saddle. Refreshed, the pony took the
opposite slope with a rush, emerging from the river upon a high plateau
studded with fir balsam and pine. Bringing the pony to a halt, Calumet
turned in the saddle and looked somberly behind him.

For two days he had been fighting the desert, and now it lay in his
rear, a mystic, dun-colored land of hot sandy waste and silence;
brooding, menacing, holding out its threat of death--a vast natural
basin breathing and pulsing with mystery, rimmed by remote mountains
that seemed tenuous and thin behind the ever-changing misty films that
spread from horizon to horizon.

The expression of Calumet's face was as hard and inscrutable as the
desert itself; the latter's filmy haze did not more surely shut out the
mysteries behind it than did Calumet's expression veil the emotions of
his heart. He turned from the desert to face the plateau, from whose
edge dropped a wide, tawny valley, luxuriant with bunch grass--a golden
brown sweep that nestled between some hills, inviting, alluring. So
sharp was the contrast between the desert and the valley, and so potent
was its appeal to him, that the hard calm of his face threatened to
soften. It was as though he had ridden out of a desolate, ages-old
world where death mocked at life, into a new one in which life reigned
supreme.

There was no change in Calumet's expression, however, though below him,
spreading and dipping away into the interminable distance, slumbering
in the glare of the afternoon sun, lay the land of his youth. He
remembered it well and he sat for a long time looking at it, searching
out familiar spots, reviving incidents with which those spots had been
connected. During the days of his exile he had forgotten, but now it
all came back to him; his brain was illumined and memories moved in it
in orderly array--like a vast army passi