There were three other men shoveling, carrying, and dumping ore into the pit. One was slight of build and hard of face. A red-undershirted fellow looked tough and wiry, of middle age, a seasoned desert rat, villainous as a reptile. The third man had a small, closely cropped head like a bullet, and a jaw that stood out beyond his brow, a hard visage smeared with sweat and dust. His big, naked shoulders proclaimed him young. And the grizzled giant, whom the others were goading and working to death there in the terrible heat, was Adam’s old savior and friend, Dismukes. Cautiously Adam backed and slid down the clay slope, and hurried up and down another. When he had crossed several he turned to the left and ran down to the trail, and followed along that until he reached the spot where he had left the buckets of water. There he drank deeply, and tried to restrain his hurry. But he was not tired or out of breath. And his mind seemed at a deadlock. A weapon, a shovel, a sledge to crush their skulls! To keep between them and their guns! Thus Adam’s thoughts had riveted themselves on a few actions. There was, on the surface of his body, a cold, hard, tingling stretch of skin over rippling muscles; and deep internally, the mysterious and manifold life of blood and nerve and bone awoke and flamed under the instinct of the ages. Adam’s body then belonged to the past and to what the desert had made it. Swinging the crossbar over his shoulders and lifting the buckets, he took the trail down toward the camp! He bowed his head and his shoulders more than the weight of the buckets made necessary. The perverse gale blew more fiercely than ever, and the hollow roar resounded louder, and the yellow gloom of dust descended closer, and a weird, dim light streamed through the pall, down upon the moving shadows. All was somber, naked, earthy in this thickening, lowering pall. Odor of smoke and dust! A fiercely burning heat that had the weight of hotly pressing lead! Bellow and shriek and moan of gale that died away! It was the portal to an inferno, and Adam was a man descended in age-long successions from simian beasts, and he strode in the image of God, with love his motive, rage his passion, and the wild years of the desert at his back, driving him on. He rounded the last corner. There was the camp, fifty yards away. He now could almost straddle the only avenue of escape. The wind lulled. A yellow shadow drifted away from the sun, and again it shone with sinister magenta hue. All the air seemed to wait, as if the appalling forces of nature, aghast at the strange lives of men, had halted to watch. “Thar’s Bill with the water!” yelled the red-shirted man. Work and action ceased. The giant Dismukes looked, then heaved erect with head poised like that of a hawk. “Aw, Bill, you son-of-a-gun!” called another robber, in welcome. “We damn near died, waitin’ fer thet water!” “Ho! Ho!... Bill, ye musta run ag’in’ another Injun.”