When he reached his own room in the Traveler’s Hotel he found Rion’s answer to his letter. Standing under the feeble light that fell from the sitting-room chandelier he read it. It was short, for Rion was but a poor correspondent. The position of assistant secretary of the Cresta Plata would be vacant on January first. The Gracey boys would be flattered if one of James Parrish’s reputation and position would care to fill it. The salary would be five hundred dollars a month. The Colonel turned the letter over, eying it. The heaviness of his spirit was lightened. Through the few lines he seemed to feel the strong grip of the mining man’s hand, to meet the searching look of his keen, honest eyes. They would all be together in Virginia--not such a bad beginning for a new life at sixty. END OF BOOK II BOOK III THE DESERT CHAPTER I NEVADA The mountain wall of the Sierra bounds California on its eastern side. It is a rampart, towering and impregnable, between the garden and the desert. From its crest, brooded over by cloud, glittering with crusted snows, the traveler can look over crag and precipice, mounting files of pines and ravines swimming in unfathomable shadow, to where, vast, pale, far-flung in its dreamy adolescence, lies California, the garden. On the other side--gaunt, hostile, gray--is Nevada, the desert. In other lands nature and man have ended their struggle for supremacy. Man has conquered and nature, after long years of service, is glad to work for him, to quicken the seed he sows, to swell the fruit on the branch, and ripen the heads of grain. She laps him round with comfort, whispers her secrets to him, reveals herself in sweet, sylvan intercourse. And he, cosily content, knows her as his loving slave, no more rebellious, happy to serve. But in Nevada, nature is still unconquered, savage and supreme. It is the primordial world, with man a shivering stranger amid its grim aloofness. When the voice of God went out into the darkness and said, “Let there be light,” the startled life, cowering in caves and beneath rocks, may have looked out on such a land--an unwatered waste, treeless, flowerless, held in an immemorial silence. Man as we know him has no place here. He is a speck moving between the dome of sky and the floor of earth. Nature scorns him, has watched him die and whitened his bones in a few blazing weeks. The seed he plants withers in its kernel, the earth he turns up, frosted with alkali, drops apart in livid flakes. The rare rivers by which he pitches his tent are sucked into the soil, as though grudging him the few drops with which he cools his burning throat. An outcast from a later age he is an intruder here. These solemn wastes and eternal hills have not yet learned to call him master.