“About a week. Outfitted at San Diego an’ came over the mountain trail through El Campo. Landed in Frisco two weeks an’ more ago. By ship from Japan.” “Did you have these old clothes hid away somewhere?” inquired Adam. “I remember them.” “No. I packed them wherever I went for the whole three years.” “Three years! Has it been that long?” “Aye, friend Wansfell, three years.” Adam gazed out across the desert with slowly dimming eyes. The wasteland stretched there, vast and illimitable, the same as all the innumerable times he had gazed. Solemn and gray and old, indifferent to man, yet strengthening through its passionless fidelity to its own task! “Dismukes, I want you to tell me where you went, what you did, why you came back,” said Adam, with earnestness that was entreaty. Dismukes heaved a long sigh. He wagged the huge, shaggy head that was now gray. But he showed no more indication of emotion. How stolid he seemed--how locked in his aloofness! “Yes, I’ll tell you,” he said. “Maybe it’ll save you somethin’ of what I went through.” Then he became lost in thought, perhaps calling upon memory, raking up the dead leaves of the past. Adam recalled that his own memory of Dismukes and the past brought note of the fact how the old prospector had loved to break his habit of silence, to talk about the desert, and to smoke his black pipe while he discoursed. But now speech did not easily flow and he did not smoke. “Lookin’ back, I seem to see myself as crazy,” began Dismukes. “You’ll remember how crazy. You’ll remember before we parted up there on the Mohave at that borax camp where the young man was--who couldn’t drive the mules.... Wansfell, from the minute I turned my back on you till now I’ve never thought of that. Did you drive the ornery mules?” “Did I?” Adam’s query was a grim assertion. “Every day for three months! You remember Old Butch, that gray devil of a mule. Well, Dismukes, the time came when _he_ knew me. If I even picked up the long bull whip Old Butch would scream and run to lay his head on me.” “An’ you saw the young driver through his trouble?” “That I did. And it was more trouble than he told us then. The boss Carricks had was low-down and cunning. He’d got smitten with the lad’s wife--a pretty girl, but frail in health. He kept Carricks on jobs away from home. We didn’t meet the lad any too soon.” “Humph! That’s got a familiar sound to me,” declared Dismukes. “Wansfell, what’d you do to thet low-down boss?” “Go on with _your_ story,” replied Adam.