There was necessity for quick thought and quick action. The Indian was not dead, but he soon would be. Adam could do nothing for him. It was imperative to decide whether to wait here for the return of the water carrier or at once follow the trail to the yellow clay slopes. Adam wore a gun, but it held only two unused shells, and there was no more ammunition in his pack. The Indian had no weapon. Perhaps the water carrier would be armed. If Dismukes were dead, there need be no rash hurry to avenge him; if he lived as prisoner a little time more or less would not greatly matter. Adam speedily decided to wait a reasonable time for the man who packed water, and, if he came, to kill him and then hurry up the trail. There was, in this way, less danger of being discovered, and, besides, one of the robbers dispatched would render the band just so much weaker. Adam especially favored this course because of the possibility of getting a weapon. “And more,” muttered Adam, “if he happens to be a tall man I can pretend to be him--packing water back.” Therefore Adam screened himself behind a thick clump of mesquite near the trail and waited in ambush like a panther ready to spring. As he crouched there, keen eyes up the canyon, ears like those of a listening deer, there flashed into Adam’s mind one of Magdalene Virey’s unforgetable remarks. “The power of the desert over me lies somewhere in my strange faculty of forgetting self. I watch, I hear, I feel, I smell, but I don’t think. Just a gleam--a fleeting moment--then the state of consciousness or lack of consciousness is gone! But in that moment lies the secret lure of the desert. Its power over men!” Swiftly as it had come the memory passed, and Adam became for fleeting moments at a time the embodiment of Magdalene Virey’s philosophy, all unconscious when thought was absent from feeling. The hour was approaching midday and the wind began to rustle the mesquites and seep the sand. Adam smelled a dry dust somewhat tangy, and tasted the bitterness of it as he licked his lips. Flies had began to buzz around the dead Indian. Instinctively Adam gazed aloft, and, yes, there far above him circled a vulture, and above that another, sweeping down from the invisible depths of blue, magically ringing a flight around the heavens, with never a movement of wings. They sailed round and round, always down. Where did they come from? What power poised them so surely in the air?