Smoke hung above the canyon where tall chimneys of nitrate plant and smelters belched their foulness against the blue sky. In the forests the loggers were tearing and slashing into all but the remnant of the timber. Down the gloomy gulch cut out of the lava ran a broad, white ribbon of concrete road. Lastly, and primary cause of all this change, where had once been the roaring falls now sprang a gigantic bow of masonry, two hundred feet in height, and back of it the canyon held a vast lake of water where once had run the foaming Serpentine. From the dam enormous dynamos took their impulses, and from it also huge ditches and canals led the water out and around the valley down below. Where the lonely road house had stood at the ford across the Serpentine, and the reckless range riders had stopped to drink and gamble, now stood the town, paved with asphalt and brick, jammed with cottages and office buildings, theaters, factories, warehouses, and mills. Plate glass gleamed in the sun or, at night, blazed in the effulgence of limitless electricity. Around the town, grown in a few years to twenty thousand souls, stretched countless acres of fenced and cultivated land, yielding bountifully under the irrigating waters. From east and west long trains of nickel-plated Pullmans pulled into a granite station. The people spoke the slang of Broadway and danced the fox trot in evening clothes. Southward, where the limitless desert had been, brown or white with alkali, one beheld, as far as eye could reach, orderly green patches of farmland, fenced and dotted with the dainty houses of the settlers. But no! There was something more, beyond the farms and beyond the desert. It was a blue and misty haze on the horizon, running an uneven and barely discernible line about the edges of the bright blue sky. It was faint and undefined, but De Launay knew it for the Esmeralda range, standing out there aloof and alone and, perhaps, still untamed and uncivilized. He felt resentful and at the same time helpless. To him it seemed that his last chance to win ease of mind and rest from the driving restlessness had been taken away from him. Only the mountains remained to offer him a haven, and those might be changed as this spot was. The natural thing to do was to drown his disappointment in drink, and that is what he set out to do. He left Solange safely ensconced in the shiny, new hotel, whose elevators and colored waiters filled him with disgust and sought the darker haunts of the town. With sure instinct for the old things, if they still existed, he hunted up a "livery and feed barn." He found one on a side street, near a lumber yard and not far from the loading chutes which spoke of a considerable traffic in beef cattle. He noted with bitterness a cheap automobile standing in front of the place.