Then he endeavored to get his bearings. Adam could see by the stain on the arrowweeds that the flood had subsided a foot during the night. A reasonable calculation was that he had drifted a good many miles. “I’ll row till it gets hot, then rest up in a shady place,” he decided. Pushing away from the weeds, he set the oars and rowed out to meet the current. As soon as that caught him the motion became exhilarating. By and by, what with the exercise and the cool breeze of morning on his face and the sweet, dank smell of river lowlands, he began to wear off the effects of the liquor and with it the disgust and sense of unfitness with which it had left him. Then at length gloom faded from his mind, though a pang abided in his breast. It was not an unfamiliar sensation. Resolutely he faced that wide traveling river, grateful for something nameless that seemed borne on its bosom, conscious of a strange expansion of his soul, ready to see, to hear, to smell, to feel, to taste the wildness and wonder of freedom as he had dreamed it. The sun rose, and Adam’s face and hands felt as if some hot material thing had touched them. He began to sweat, which was all that was needed to restore his usual healthy feeling of body. From time to time he saw herons, and other long-legged waterfowl, and snipe flitting over the sand bars, and somber, gray-hued birds that he could not name. The spell of river or desert hovered over these birds. The fact brought to Adam the strange nature of this silence. Like an invisible blanket it covered all, water and brush and land. “It’s desert silence,” he said, wonderingly. When he raised the oars and rested them there seemed absolutely no sound. And this fact struck him overpoweringly with its meaning and with a sudden unfamiliar joy. On the gentle wind came a fragrant hot breath that mingled with the rank odor of flooded bottom lands. The sun, hot as it was, felt good upon his face and back. He loved the sun as he hated cold. “Maybe Guerd’s coaxing me West will turn out well for me,” soliloquized Adam, with resurging boyish hope. “As the Mexicans say, _Quien sabe?_” At length he espied a sloping bank where it appeared safe to risk landing. This was a cove comparatively free of brush and the bank sloped gradually to the water. The summit of the bank was about forty or fifty feet high, and before Adam had wholly ascended it he began to see the bronze tips of mountains on all sides. “By Jove!” exclaimed Adam. “No sign of man! No sign of life!” Some distance from the river bank stood a high knoll. Adam climbed to the top of it, and what he saw here made him yearn for the mountain peaks. He had never stood at any great elevation. Southward the Colorado appeared to enter a mountain gateway and to turn and disappear.