A wild cry pealed down to ring in Adam’s ears. He had struck terror to the heart of the murderer. And Adam beat down his savage eagerness, so as to lengthen the time till Virey’s doom. Not thus did the desert in Adam speak, but what the desert had made him. Agony, blood, death! They were almost as old as the rocks. Other animate shapes, in another age, had met in strife there, under the silent, beetling peak. Life was the only uttermost precious thing. All else, all suffering, all possession, was nothing. To kill a man was elemental, as to save him was divine. Virey’s progress became a haunting and all-satisfying spectacle to behold, and Adam’s pursuit became studied, calculated, retarded--a thing as cruel as the poised beak of a vulture. Virey got halfway up a gray, desolate, weathered slant, immense in its spread, another fan-shaped, waiting avalanche. The red ragged heights loomed above; below hung a mountain-side as unstable as water, restrained, perhaps, by a mere pebble. Here Virey halted. Farther he could not climb. Like a spent and cornered rat he meant to show fight. Adam soon reached a point directly below Virey, some hundreds of yards--a long, hard climb. He paused to catch his breath. “Bad slope for me if he begins to roll stones!” muttered Adam, grimly. But neither rolling stones nor avalanches could stop Adam. The end of this tragedy was fixed. It had been set for all the years of Virey’s life and back into the past. The very stones cried out. Glaring sun, smoking heat, shining slope, and the nameless shadow--all were tinged with a hue inimical to Virey’s life. The lonely, solemn, silent desert day, at full noontide heat, bespoke the culmination of something Virey had long ago ordained. Far below, over the lower hills of the Panamints, yawned Death Valley, ghastly gray through the leaden haze, an abyss of ashes, iron walled and sun blasted, hateful and horrible as the portal of hell. High up and beyond, faintly red against an obscure space of sky, towered the Funerals, grand and desolate. Adam began to climb the weathered slope, taking a zigzag course. Sliding stones only slightly retarded his ascent. He stepped too quickly. Usually when a stone slipped his weight had left it.