But this was a short-lived passion. It did not ring true to Adam. It was his youth had suffered shame--the youth trained by his mother--the youth that had fallen upon wild and evil days at old Picacho. His youth flaming up with all its chivalry, its ideals, its sense of honor and modesty, its white-hot shame at even an unconscious wrong to a girl! Not the desert philosophy of manhood that saw nature clearly and saw it whole! “Peace!” he cried, huskily, as if driving back a ghost of his youth. “I am no beast--no animal!” Nay, he was a lonely wanderer of the wastelands, who many and many a time had dreamed himself sweetheart, lover, husband of all the beautiful women in the world. Ah! it was his love of beauty, of life! And so in his dreams, nature, like a panther in ambush, had come upon him unawares to grip him before he knew. Aye--he wanted Genie now--yearned for her with all that intense and longing desire which had falsely seemed love and joy of the whole living world. But it was not what it seemed. All the tenderness of a brother, all the affection of a father Adam had for Genie--emotions that now faded before the master spirit and the imperious flame of life. How little and pitiful arose the memory of Margarita Arallanes--how pale beside this blood fire of his senses! Life had failed him in his youth; life had cheated him. Yet he had arisen on stepping stones of agony to intenser love of that life. He had been faithful, while life had mocked him. Passionate love of life, to see, to hear, to feel, to touch, had come to him with its saving grace, after the ruthless and violent strife of the desert had taught him to survive. But these were not the soul of nature. This was not nature’s secret. He was a man, a creature of inherited instincts that the desert had intensified. In nature’s eyes he was no different from the lonely desert bird or beast seeking its mate. The law was not wrong, but all the progress of mankind as represented in Adam’s revolt made that law wrong. When at last he had driven shame from his mind and justified his manhood over the instincts of which he could have no control, then he faced the ordeal. Contending tides of passion and strife! That had been his desert life. And as the years had passed each new mounting tumult in heart or soul, each fight against men or elements, had exceeded the last. Would there never be an end? Was this his great ordeal--the last--before which he must go down in defeat? No--by all the gods false or true--no, it should never be! Thus he shot arrowy lightnings of soul at the fiery army of instincts trooping on to overwhelm his consciousness.