a little crafty smile
in one corner of his eye, seemed utterly unaffected by the heat, cool
as autumn. His loose sleeve fell back from his forearm when he moved
his hand forward, laying his bets. A jade bracelet slipped back and
forth as smoothly as on yellow ivory.

Or again, one night when the plain was like a sea of liquid black, and
the sky blazed with stars, we rode by a sheep-herder's camp. The
flicker of a fire threw a glow out into the dark. A tall wagon, a
group of silhouetted men, three or four squatting dogs, were squarely
within the circle of illumination. And outside, in the penumbra of
shifting half light, now showing clearly, now fading into darkness,
were the sheep, indeterminate in bulk, melting away by mysterious
thousands into the mass of night. We passed them. They looked up,
squinting their eyes against the dazzle of their fire. The night
closed about us again.

Or still another: in the glare of broad noon, after a hot and trying
day, a little inn kept by a French couple. And there, in the very
middle of the Inferno, was served to us on clean scrubbed tables, a
meal such as one gets in rural France, all complete, with the potage,
the fish fried in oil, the wonderful ragout, the chicken and salad, the
cheese and the black coffee, even the vin ordinaire. I have forgotten
the name of the place, its location on the map, the name of its
people,--one has little to do with detail in the Inferno,--but that
dinner never will I forget, any more than the Tenderfoot will forget
his first sight of water the day when the Desert "held us up."

Once the brown veil lifted to the eastward. We, souls struggling, saw
great mountains and the whiteness of eternal snow. That noon we
crossed a river, hurrying down through the flat plain, and in its
current came the body of a drowned bear-cub, an alien from the high
country.

These things should have been as signs to our jaded spirits that we
were nearly at the end of our penance, but discipline had seared over
our souls, and we rode on unknowing.

Then we came on a real indication. It did not amount to much. Merely
a dry river-bed; but the farther bank, instead of being flat, cut into
a low swell of land. We skirted it. Another swell of land, like the
sullen after-heave of a storm, lay in our way. Then we crossed a
ravine. It was not much of a ravine; in fact it was more like a slight
gouge in the flatness of the country. After that we began to see