Later he walked down to the creek bottom where the smelter was in operation. Laborers were at a premium there, and he was offered work. He said he would consider it. But unless there turned out to be some definite object to keep him in Tecopah, Adam would not have bartered his freedom to the dust-clouded mill for all the gold it mined. These clanging mills and hot shafts and dark holes oppressed him. CHAPTER XIV The long-deferred hour at last arrived in which Adam, on a ruddy-gold dawn in early April, drove his burros out into the lonesome desert toward the Amargosa. He did not look back. Tecopah would not soon forget Wansfell! That was his grim thought. The long, drab reaches of desert, the undulating bronze slopes waving up to the dark mountains, called to him in a language that he felt. If Adam Larey--or Wansfell, wanderer of the wasteland, as he had come to believe himself--had any home, it was out in the vast open, under the great white flare of sunlight and the star-studded canopy of night. This was a still morning in April, and the lurid sun, bursting above the black escarpment to the east, promised a rising temperature. Day by day the heat had been increasing, and now, at sunrise, the smoky heat veils were waving up from the desert floor. For Adam the most torrid weather had no terrors, and the warmth of a morning like this felt pleasant on his cheek. He had been confined to one place, without action, for so long that now, as he began to feel the slow sweat burn pleasantly on his body, there came a loosening of his muscles, a relaxing of tension, a marshaling, as it were, of his great forces of strength and endurance. The gray slopes beyond did not daunt him. His stride was that of a mountaineer, and his burros had to trot to keep ahead of him. And as Adam’s body gradually responded to this readjustment to the desert and its hard demands, so his mind seemed to slough off, layer by layer, the morbid, fierce, and ruthless moods that like lichens had fastened upon it. The dry, sweet desert air seemed to permeate his brain and clear it of miasmas and shadows. He was free. He was alone. He was self-sufficient. The desert called. From far beyond that upheaved black and forbidding range, the Funeral Mountains, something strange, new, thrilling awaited his coming. The strife of the desert had awakened in him a craving to find the unattainable. He had surmounted all physical obstacles. He would conquer Death Valley; he would see it in all its ghastliness; he would absorb all its mysteries; he would defy to the limit of endurance its most fatal menaces to life.