All at once, in a flash, he remembered his passion, his crime, his terror, his flight. Not until that instant had intelligence operated in harmony with his feelings. He lifted his face in the cool, darkening twilight. The frowning mountains held aloof, and all about him seemed detached, rendering his loneliness absolute and immutable. “Oh! Oh!” he moaned. “What will become of me?... No family--no friends--no hope!... Oh, Guerd--my brother! His blood on my hands!... He ruined my life! He’s killed my soul!... Oh, damn him, damn him! he’s made me a murderer!” Adam fell face down on the rock with breaking heart. His exceeding bitter cries seemed faint and lost in the midst of the vastness of desert and sky. The deepening of twilight to darkness, the cold black grandeur of the great peak, the mournful wail of a desert wolf, the pure pale evening star that pierced the purple sky, the stupendous loneliness and silence of that solitude--all these facts seemed Nature’s pitiless proof of her indifference to man and his despair. His hope, his prayer, his frailty, his fall, his burden and agony and life--these were nothing to the desert that worked inscrutably through its millions of years, nor to the illimitable expanse of heaven, deepening its blue and opening its cold, starry eyes. But a spirit as illimitable and as inscrutable breathed out of the universe and over the immensity of desert space--a spirit that breathed to the soul of the ruined man and bade him rise and take up his burden and go on down the naked shingles of the world. Despair and pride and fear of death, and this strange breath of life, dragged Adam up and drove him down the desert road. For a mile he staggered and plodded along, bent and bowed like an old man, half blinded by tears and choked by sobs, abject in his misery; yet even so, the something in him that was strongest of all--the instinct to survive--made him keep to the hard, gravelly side of the road, that his tracks might not show in the dust.