And now the desert was showing its teeth, and Carhart knew that he was trembling again on the brink of the horrors. He understood the sort of thing very well. He had seen men grow crafty and cowardly or ugly and murderous out there on the frontier. He had been in Death Valley. And as he had seen the symptoms in other men’s faces, so he now felt them coming into his own. He knew how a man’s sense of proportion can go awry,--how a mere railroad, with its very important banker-officials in top hats and its very elaborate and impressive organization, could seem a child’s toy here in the desert where the wonderful spaces and the unearthly atmosphere and the morning and evening colors lie very close to the borders of another realm, and where the eye of God blazes forever down on the just and the unjust. None of the little devices of a sophisticated world pass current in the desert. Carhart knew all this, as I have said, very well. He knew that a man’s mind is searched to the bottom out here, that the morbid tone and the yellow streak are inevitably dragged to the surface and displayed to the gaze of all men. But he also knew that where the mind is sound, the trouble may arise from physical exhaustion, and this knowledge saved him. He deliberately recalled the fact that for thirty-six hours he had not slept and that the work he had done and the strain he had been under would have sent many men to the nearest hospital, or, in the desert, to the nearest shallow excavation in the ground. And he walked slowly and steadily on, in that same shaky, determined manner. On the summit of a knoll he stopped short, and looked down at something on the farther side. The men came up, one by one, and joined him; and they, too, stopped short and looked. And then Carhart raised his eyes and watched their faces steadily, eagerly wondering if they saw what he saw,--a water-hole, fringed with green, and a mule lying at the water’s edge and a number of other mules quietly grazing. It was his test of himself. For a full half minute he gazed into those sweaty, drink-bleared faces. And then, at what he saw there, his own tense expression gave way to one of overwhelming relief. The men ran pell-mell down the slope, shouting with delight. And Carhart sat down there on the knoll, and his head fell a little forward over his knees. “Will you have a little of this, Mr. Carhart?” A big renegade with the face of a criminal was holding out a flask. The chief took it, and gulped down a few swallows. “Thank you,” he said quietly. “One of the boys found this here, down among them tin cans, Mr. Carhart.” It was the crumpled first page of the _Pierrepont Enterprise_. Carhart stiffened up, spread it out on his knees, and read the date line. The paper was only two days old. “Where’s Pierrepont?” he asked. “About a day’s journey down the river, sir.” Again the chief’s eyes ran over the sheet. Suddenly they lighted up. Here is what he saw:-- GOSSIP OF THE RAILROADS