“Not if I see them first. My friend, don’t be concerned. Surely I don’t look sick.” “Humph! Well, just the same, now that you’re headin’ up into this country, I advise you to be careful. Don’t let anybody see you with money. I’ve been held up an’ robbed three times.” “Didn’t you make a fight for your gold?” “No chance. I was waylaid--had to throw up my hands.... They tell me you are ready with a gun, Wansfell?” “Dismukes, you seem to have heard much about me.” “But you didn’t throw a gun on Baldy McKue,” said Dismukes, with a dark flare from his rolling eyes. “No--I did not,” replied Adam. “You killed McKue with your bare hands,” flashed Dismukes. A red stain appeared to come up under his leathery skin. “Wansfell, will you tell me about that?” “I’d rather not, Dismukes. There are _some_ things I forget.” “Well, it meant a good deal to me,” replied Dismukes. “McKue did me dirt. He jumped claims of mine down here near Soda Sink. An’ he threatened to kill me--swore the claims were his--drove me off. I met him in Riverside, an’ there he threatened me with arrest. He was a robber an’ a murderer. I believe he ambushed prospectors. McKue was like most men who stick to the desert--he went down to the level of the beast. I hated him.... This stranger who told me--he swore there wasn’t an uncracked bone left in McKue’s body.... Wansfell, if you did that to McKue you’ve squared accounts. Is it true?” “Yes.” Dismukes rubbed his huge hands together and his ox eyes rolled and dilated. A fierce and savage grimness distorted his hard face for an instant and passed away. “What’d you kill him for?” “Because he’d have killed me.” “Didn’t you look him up on purpose to kill him?” “No.... A year before that time I went to Goffs. Some one took me into an old tent where a woman lay dying. I could do little for her. She denounced McKue; she blamed him that she lay there, about to die. She did die and I buried her. Then I kept an eye open for McKue.” “I wondered--I wondered,” said Dismukes. “It struck me deep. Lord knows fights are common out here. An’ death--why, on the desert every way you turn you see death. It’s the life of the desert. But the way this was told me struck me deep. It was what I’d like to have done myself. Wansfell, think of the wonderful meetin’s of men on the desert--an’, aye, meetin’ of men with women, too! They happen different out here. Think of the first time we met! An’ this time! Wansfell, we’ll meet again. It’s written in those trails of sand out there, wanderin’ to an’ fro across the desert.” “Dismukes, the desert is vast. Sometimes you will not meet a man in months of travel--and not in years will you meet a woman. But when you do meet them life seems intensified. The desert magnifies.”