He came to the top of the rise and halted under the psychic compulsion of boundless space. For space, crystalline and ethereal as the gulf between stars, flowed from him as an ocean. The air that filled this space was so thin, so impalpable as to seem no air at all, and it was tinted faint gold by reflection from the desert below. Mountains near and far were so many detached reefs taking the silent surf of the ocean of space; they were tawny where shadows did not smear purple-black down their sides. Near at hand showed the grim desert growths: prickly clumps of _cholla_, whose new daggers sparkled like frosted glass; fluted columns of _sahuaro_, or giant cactus, lifting their fat arms twenty and thirty feet above the ground; vivid green of cottonwoods laid in a streak to mark a secret watercourse. To the man just come from the softness and languor of Eastern landscapes, where lakes lie in the laps of green hillocks, this first intimate view of the desert carried some subtle terror prick. The iron savagery of it! What right had man or beast to venture here? Then flashed to his mind the picture of Benicia O’Donoju, the girl who loved the desert, who felt she was prisoner only when hedged about by the walls of cities in the East. Somewhere to the south where a higher raft of peaks marked Sonora’s mystery land--somewhere in country like this she was speeding to her home. What kind of a home might that be? How could a girl with the bounding vitality that was hers find life worth living in a land enslaved by thirst? A hundred miles from town or railroad, she had said:--a hundred miles deep in such a wilderness her home! Heavens, how he pitied her! Grant turned back to the town, revolving over and over in his mind the first steps he would have to take to learn where Benicia O’Donoju lived; and, haply discovering the place of her abode, how to get there. By the time night fell the restless visitor to Arizora had exhausted the town’s opportunities for amusement. He crossed the Line into the companion Mexican community, Sonizona. Here was beguilement enough. The rabbit-proof fence which converted Main Street into a Calle Benito Juarez also marked a frontier no less obvious. North of the fence was aridity to rejoice the conscience of the most enthusiastic prohibitionist; south of it the frail goddess Virtue tottered in her step. In Arizona a man sought traps and deadfalls consciously and with a secret thrill of bravado; in Sonora he avoided them only by the most circumspect watching of his step. Dark streets winding along the contours of the crowding mountains were raucous with the bray of phonographs and the tin-panning of pianos. Lattices over darkened windows trembled as one passed and the ghosts of whispers fluttered through them. Where an occasional arc lamp threw a spot of radiance across the ’dobe road lurked shadowy creatures who whined in an American dialect for money to buy drugs.