Without, the afternoon sun slowly sank behind the mountains casting long shadows over the plains; the wind swirled the sand in tireless eddies, sometimes lifting it high in great sheets, forming sudden dunes; coyotes prowled among the foot-hills and out on the open levels, squatting with eyes fixed on the wagon, uttering sharp quick barks of interrogation. A herd of deer lifted their horns against the horizon, then suddenly bounded away, racing like shadows toward the lowlands of Red River. On the domelike summit of Mount Welsh, a mile away, a mountain-lion showed his sinuous form against the sky seven hundred feet in air. And from the mountainside near at hand stared from among the thick greenery of a cedar, the face of an Indian whose black hair was adorned by a single red feather. Within the wagon, unconscious of all, in strange fellowship, lay the living and the dead. CHAPTER IV AN UNWONTED PRAYER When Willock started up from the mattress in the covered wagon, the sun had set. Every object, however, was clearly defined in the first glow of the long August twilight, and it needed but a glance to recall the events that had brought him to seek shelter and slumber beside the dead woman. He sat up suddenly, staring from under his long black hair as it fell about his eyes. Accustomed as he was to deeds of violence, even to the sight of men weltering in their life's blood, he was strangely moved by that rigid form with the thin arms folded over the breast, by that white cloth concealing face and hair. A long keen examination of the prairie assured him that no human being was between him and the horizon. He turned again toward the woman. He felt an overpowering desire to look on her face. For years there had been no women in his world but the abandoned creatures who sought shelter in the resorts of Beer City in No-Man's Land--these, and the squaws of the reservations, and occasionally a white terrified face among the wagon-trains. As a boy, before running away from home in the Middle West, he had known a different order of beings, and some instinct told him that this woman belonged to the class of his childhood's association. There was imperative need of his hurrying to the mountain, lest, at any moment, a roving band of Indians discover the abandoned wagon; besides this, he was very hungry since his rest, and the wagon was stocked with provisions; nevertheless, to look on the face of the dead was his absorbing desire. But it was not easy for him to yield to his curiosity, despite his life of crime. Something about the majestic repose of that form seemed to add awe to the mystery of sex; and he crouched staring at the cloth which no breath stirred save the breath of evening.