At last the day came when Adam watched Dismukes drive his burros out on the lonely trail, striding along with his rolling gait, a huge, short, broad-backed man, like a misshapen giant. What a stride he had! The thousands of desert miles it had mastered had not yet taken its force and spring. It was the stride of one who imagined he left nothing of life behind and saw its most calling adventures to the fore. He had tired of the desert. He had used it. He had glutted it of the riches he craved. And now he was heading down the trail toward the glittering haunts of men and the green pastures. Adam watched him with grief and yet with gladness, and still with something of awe. Dismukes’ going forever was incomprehensible. Adam felt what he could not analyze. The rolling voice of Dismukes, sonorous and splendid, still rang in Adam’s ears: “Pard, we’re square!... Good-by!” Adam understood now why a noble Indian, unspoiled by white men, reverenced a debt which involved life. The paying of that debt was all of unity and brotherhood there existed in the world. If it was great to feel gratitude for the saving of his life, it was far greater to remember he had saved the life of his savior. Adam, deeply agitated, watched Dismukes stride down the barren trail, behind his bobbing burros, watched him stride on into the lonely, glaring desert, so solemn and limitless and mysterious, until he vanished in the gray monotony. CHAPTER XXII When the following March came, Adam had been a week plodding southward over the yucca plateaus of the Mohave. The desert had changed its face. Left behind were the rare calico-veined ranges of mountains, the royal-purple porphyries, the wonderful white granites, the green-blue coppers, the yellow sulphurs, and the ruddy red irons. This desert had color, but not so vivid, not so striking. And it had become more hospitable to the survival of plant life. The sandy floor was no longer monotonously gray. Adam loved the grotesque yucca trees. They were really trees that afforded shade and firewood, and they brought back no bittersweet memories like the _palo verdes_. The yuccas were fresh and green, renewed in the spring from the dusty gray sunburnt trees they had been in the autumn. Many of them bore great cone-shaped buds about to open, and on others had blossomed large white flowers with streaks of pink. A yucca forest presented a strange sight. These desert trees were deformed, weird, bristling, shaggy trunked, with grotesque shapes like specters in torture.