weary way to
the land of their desire. As he walked up it and the prospect widened
on his sight, its message came, clearer with every mounting step. Thus
forever would he look out on a blasted world uncheered by sound or
color. The stillness that lapped him round was as the stillness of his
own dead heart. The mirage quivered brilliant in the distance, and he
paused, a solitary shape against the exhausted sky, to think that his
dream of love had had no more reality. Beautiful and alluring it had
floated in his mind, an illusion without truth or substance.

He reached the higher elevation, barren and iron hard, the stone hot to
his feet. On three sides the desert swept out to the horizon, held in
its awful silence. Across it, a white seam, the Emigrant Trail wound,
splindling away into the west, a line of tortuous curves, a loop, a
straight streak, and then a tiny thread always pressing on to that
wonderful land which he had once seen as a glowing rim on the world's
remotest verge. It typified the dauntless effort of man, never
flagging, never broken, persisting to its goal. He had not been able
to thus persist, the spirit had not reached far enough to know its aim
and grasp it. He knew his weakness, his incapacity to cope with the
larger odds of life, a watcher not an actor in the battle, and
understanding that his failure had come from his own inadequacy he
wished that he might die.

On one side the eminence broke away in a sheer fall to the earth below.
At its base a scattering of sundered bowlders and fragments lay, veiled
by a growth of small, bushy shrubs to which a spring gave nourishment.
Behind this the long spine of the rock tapered back to the parent ridge
that ran, a bristling rampart, east and west. He sat down on the edge
of the precipice watching the trail. He had no idea how long he
remained thus. A shadow falling across him brought him back to life.
He turned and saw Courant standing a few feet from him.

Without speech or movement they eyed one another. In his heart each
hated the other, but in David the hate had come suddenly, the hysteric
growth of a night's anguish. The mountain man's was tempered by a
process of slow-firing to a steely inflexibility. He hated David that
he had ever been his rival, that he had ever thought to lay claim to
the woman who was his, that he had ever aspired to her, touched her,
desired her. He hated him when he saw that, all unconsciously, he had
still