“I have my burden. Once it was even more terrible than yours. Through that I can feel as you feel now. I have lived the loneliness--the insupportable loneliness--of the desert--the silence, the heat, the hell. But my burden still weighs on my soul. If I might somehow help your husband, who is going wrong, blindly following some road of passion--change him or stop him, why that would ease my burden. If I might save you weariness, or physical pain, or hunger, or thirst, or terror--it would be doing more for myself than for you.... We are in Death Valley. You refuse to leave. We are, right here, two hundred feet below sea level. When the furnace heat comes--when the blasting midnight wind comes--it means either madness or death.” “Stay--Sir Knight,” she said, with a hollow, ringing gayety. “Who shall say that chivalry is dead?... Stay! and know this. I fear no man. I scorn death.... But, ah, the woman of me! I hate dirt and vermin. I’m afraid of pain. I suffer agonies even before I’m hurt. I miss so unforgettably the luxuries of life. And lastly, I have a mortal terror of going mad. Spare me that and you will have my prayers in this world--and beyond.... Good night.” “Good night,” replied Adam. She left him to the deepening gloom and the dying camp fire. Adam soon grew conscious of extreme fatigue in mind and body. Spreading his blankets on the sands, he stretched his weary, aching body without even an upward glance at the stars, and fell asleep. * * * * * Daylight again, as if by the opening of eyelids! The rose color was vying with the blue of the sky and a noble gold crowned the line of eastern range which Adam could see through the V-shaped split that opened into the valley. He pulled on his boots, and gave his face an unusual and detrimental luxury in the desert. Water was bad for exposed flesh in arid country. The usual spring and buoyancy of his physical being was lacking this day. Such overstrain as yesterday’s would require time to be remedied. So Adam moved slowly and with caution. First Adam went to the spring. He found a bubbling gush of velvet-looking water pouring out of a hole and running a few rods to sink into the sand. The color of it seemed inviting--so clear and soft and somehow rich. The music of its murmur, too, was melodious. Adam was a connoisseur of waters. What desert wanderer of years was not? Before he tasted this water, despite its promise, he knew it was not good. Yet it did not have exactly an unpleasant taste. Dismukes had said this water was all right, yet he seldom stayed long enough in one locality to learn the ill effects of the water. Adam knew he too could live on this water. But he was thinking of the delicate woman lost here in Death Valley with an idiot or a knave of a husband.