And those sad dark eyes and those sweet murmured words had made him flee--flee like a craven in the night. Yes, for Ruth’s sake he had fled. Not a farewell to Genie--not a wave of his hand, but gone in the night--gone forever out of their lives! * * * * * “The foxes have holes--the birds of the air have nests!” cried Adam, to the listening silence. Was it he who lay there with broken heart and magnified sight? Yes, wanderer of the wasteland again! Back to the lonely land! That limitless expanse of rock and sand was home. Was not that Ruth’s face limned on the clouds? Did not her sad, reproachful eyes haunt him in the dim, purple distances? From the lofty divide of the Sierra Madres Adam gazed down into the void he called home. Beyond the gray sands and far beyond the red reaches he saw across the California Desert into Arizona, and down into Mexico, and to the dim, blue Gulf. Home! All the years of Adam’s desert experience were needed to grasp the meaning of the stupendous scene. The eye of the eagle, the sight of the condor, supreme over the desert, most marvelous and delicate work of nature, could only behold, could only range that sun-blasted burned-out empire of the wastelands. Only the mind of man, the thought of man, could understand it. And for Adam it was home, and to his piercing eyes a thing, a place, a world, terribly true and beautiful and comforting, upon which he seemed driven to gaze and gaze, so that forever it must be limned on his vision and his memory. The day was one of sunlight and storm, of blue sky and purple clouds and fleecy white, of palls of swirling gray snow and dark veils of downward-streaming rain. The Sierra Madres rolled away on either side, range on range, rising to the north in the might of slow league-long mountain swell, until far against the stormy sky stood the old white-capped heave of San Gorgonio looming over the gray Mohave; and to the south, like the wave undulations of a calm sea, sank the long low lines of the arid arm of desert land. Beneath Adam piled the foothills, round and old and gray, sage gray, lavender gray, lilac gray, all so strangely gray--upheaved hills of aged earth and dust and stone. Hill by hill they lowered, with glaring gorges between, solitary hills and winding ranges and clustered domes, split by canyons and cleft by brushy ravines--miles and miles of foothills, reluctantly surrendering allegiance to the peaks above, moving downward as surely as the grains of their slopes, weathering and spreading at last in the sands.