rode,
he counted it only the peace of surrender and despair. He knew now that
he had been cheated of all his great long-nursed hopes of some superior
exaltation. Nor this only; for he had sinned unforgivably and incurred
perdition. He who had fasted, prayed, and endured, waiting for his
Witness, for the spreading of the heavens and the glory of the open
vision, had overreached himself and was cast down.

When at last he slowed his horse to a walk, it was the spring of the
day. The moon had gone, and over on his left a soft grayness began to
show above the line of the hills. The light grew until it glowed with
the fire of opals; through the tree-tops ran little stirs of
wakefulness, and all about him were faint, furtive rustlings and
whispers of the new day. Then in this glorified dusk of the dawn a
squirrel loosed his bark of alarm, a crested jay screamed in answer, and
he knew his hour of atonement was come.

He pressed forward again toward the desert, eager to be on with it. The
page with the wash of blood across it seemed to take on a new vividness
in the stronger light. Under the stain, the letters of the words were
magnified before his mind,--"_And as ye would that men should do to
you_--" It seemed to him that the blood through which they came heated
the words so that they burned his eyes.

An hour after daybreak the trail led him down out of the hills by a
little watercourse to the edge of the desert. Along the sides of this
the chaparral grew thickly, and the spring by which he halted made a
little spot of green at the edge of the gray. But out in front of him
was the infinite stretch of death, far sweeps of wind-furrowed sand
burning under a sun made sullen red by the clouds of fine dust in the
air. Sparsely over the dull surface grew the few shrubs that could
survive the heat and dryness,--stunted, unlovely things of burr, spine,
thorn, or saw-edged leaf,--all bent one ways by the sand blown against
them,--bristling cactus and crouching mesquite bushes.

In the vast open of the blue above, a vulture wheeled with sinister
alertness; and far out among the dwarfed growing things a coyote skulked
knowingly. The weird, phantom-like beauty of it stole upon him, torn as
he was, while he looked over the dry, flat reaches. It was a good place
to die in, this lifeless waste languishing under an angry sun. And he
knew how it would come. Out to the south, as many miles as he should
have strength to walk, away from any