“To fight and to think were to be my blessings,” soliloquized Adam, and he shook his head with a long-familiar doubt. Then he had to remember that no blessings of any kind whatsoever could be his. Stern and terrible duty to himself! So he rolled in his blankets and stretched his long body to the composure of rest. Sleep did not drop with soft swiftness upon his eyes, as it had upon those of Dismukes. He had walked far, but he was not tired. He never tired any more. There seemed to be no task of a single day that could weary his strength. And for long he lay awake, listening to the deep breathing of his companion, and the howl of the coyotes, and the sounds of Tecopah, so unnatural in the quiet of the desert. A sadness weighed heavily upon Adam. At first he was glad to have met Dismukes, but now he was sorry. A tranquillity, a veil seemed to have been rent. The years had not really changed the relation of his crime, nor materially the nature of his sin. But they had gradually, almost imperceptibly, softened his ceaseless and eternal remorse. By this meeting with Dismukes he found that time effaced shocks, blows, stains, just as it wore away the face of the desert rock. That, too, was a law; and in this Adam divined a blessing that he could not deny. Dismukes had unleashed a specter out of the dim glow of the past. Eight years! So many, and yet they were as eight days! There were the bright stars, pitiless and cold, and the dark bold mountains that had seemed part of his strength. In the deep-blue sky above and in the black shadow below Adam saw a white face, floating, fading, reappearing, mournful and accusing and appalling--a face partaking of the old boyish light and joy and of the godlike beauty of perfect manhood--the haunting face of his brother Guerd. It haunted Adam, and the brand of Cain burned into his brain. The old resurging pangs in his breast, the long sighs, the oppressed heart, the salt tears, the sleepless hours--these were Adam’s again, as keen as in the first days of his awakening down on the Colorado Desert, where from the peaks of the Chocolate Mountains he had gazed with piercing eyes far south to the purple peak--Picacho, the monument, towering above his brother’s grave. “Some day I’ll go back!” whispered Adam, as if answering to an imperative and mysterious call.