Here he dressed and lay for a time resting in the sand. The sun had sunk behind the ranges. The night shadows in the valley were cool. Partly because of this, partly from sheer nervous and physical exhaustion, Roger shivered. Finally when twilight had settled in the valley, he sat up and gazed across the river. It was too dark to see Peter. There was only the murmur of the river in all that barren solitude. Then suddenly Peter brayed. It was not the usual ridiculous hee haw of the burro but a strange blending of whinny and scream. Roger shuddered and told himself that he would keep Peter company just a little longer, then move on. The desert night came on quickly and completely. The great desert stars had pricked out before the last light had left the mountain tops. An hour passed, then two. Roger was too weary to build a fire, too wretched to sleep. He sat huddled in the sand, his head against a great cottonwood log, his face toward the river. A dim red edge began to show over the ranges. It lifted into a crescent, then into a half circle. Suddenly the little valley was flooded with white light and the moon sailed free over the sliding river. Roger stared eagerly toward the mesquite tree. Peter stood unmoving, his little gray head turned upward, his sturdy neck seeming unusually long and thin, stretched thus unnaturally. It seemed curious to Roger that the burro did not kick nor lunge. But Peter's patience, won by who knows what beaten and burdened ancestry, did not desert him. He did not tug at his rope but he brayed again, as if he were giving an eerie shriek of warning. Roger bit his nails nervously, then hollowed out a bed in the sand and lying down tried to sleep. The stars glowed down on him quietly. From where he lay he could see Peter. The little gray head must be tired. How Felicia had loved the little burro. Used to wash his face and brush his foolish mane. Felicia! Little lost Felicia! Roger groaned and sat up. His moment of reckoning had arrived, as it arrives once to every man. First he thought of Felicia. He recalled that first day on the train when she had sat in his lap so long and he had felt the whisper of fate in their meeting. He came down through the desert days with her. How pitifully few there were of them, after all! And he lived them over, one by one. He recalled her loveliness, her childish curiosity, her love of his work. He thought of her affection and of her timidity, her shrinking fear of a rough word. And suddenly he groaned and said aloud: "Thank God in His mercy that she didn't see me when I throttled Ernest!"