As we watched the incessant play of lightning, Slim told me about his fall into the shaft: “Arkansas Ben Brandt was working about 100 yards away. Deaf as a lamp post, Ben is, but I kept praying and hollering and just when I’d given up, here comes a rope. You can argue with me all day but you can’t make me believe the Lord didn’t unstop old Ben’s ears.” Slim gave me a final warning. “Take the road over the mountain when you come to the Shoshone sign. When you get there be sure to see Charlie before you go any farther.” At every water hole where prospectors were gathered I’d heard someone tell someone else to see Charlie. At Furnace Creek I’d heard the vice president of the Borax Company tell an official of the Santa Fe railroad to see Charlie and only an hour before I met Slim I had stopped to give a tire patch to a young miner with a flat. While I waited to see that the patch stuck, I learned he was on his way to consult Charlie. “My helper,” he confided, “jumped my claim after he learned I hadn’t done last year’s assessment work. That’s legal if a fellow’s a skunk but when he stole my wife and chased me off with my own shotgun, bigod—that’s different.” I suggested a lawyer. “I’ll see Charlie first....” Naturally I became curious about this Charlie, who seemed to be a combination of Father Confessor and the Caliph Haroun Alraschid to all the desert. “Just who is Charlie?” I asked Slim. “He runs the store at Shoshone. Tell him I’ll be down soon. I want him to handle my deal.” He slapped his burro and we parted—he for his $100,000,000, I to leave the country. Watching the spring in his step a moment, I got into my car and knew at last the why of those dark alluring canyons that ran up from the hungry land and hid in the hills. I knew why there are riches that nothing can take away and why rainbows swing low in the sky. The good God had made them so that fellows like Slim could climb one and ride. Driving along I found myself trying to appraise the endless waste. Was it a blunder of creation, hell’s front yard or God’s back stairs? It was easy to understand the appeal of vast distances, of desert dawns and desert nights but what was it that made men “go desert”? The answer was becoming clearer. Fellows like Slim had found God in a snake hole, or if you prefer—a way of life patterned with infinite precision to their needs. It is easy enough to tear into scraps, another’s formula for happiness and recommend your own but that is an egotism that only the fool will flaunt and I began to suspect that the Slims and the Shortys had found a freedom for which millions in the tired world Outside vainly struggled and slowly died. “I wanted the gold, and I got it— Came out with a fortune last fall— Yet somehow life’s not what I thought it, And somehow the gold isn’t all.