Every one of his intense words had been burned into Adam’s sensitive mind in characters and meanings never to be forgotten. Dismukes had found eager and fertile soil for the planting of the seeds of his toil-earned philosophy. The effect upon Adam was profound, and so wrought upon his emotions that the black and hateful consciousness which had returned to haunt him was as but a shadow of his thought. Adam stared out into the night where Dismukes had vanished. Something great had happened. Was the man Dismukes a fanatic, a religious wanderer of the wasteland, who imagined he had found in Adam an apt pupil, or who had preached a sermon because the opportunity presented? No! The prospector had the faith to give out of his lesson of life on the desert. His motive was the same as when he had risked much to follow Adam, staggering blindly across the hot sands to his death. And as Adam felt the mounting passion of conviction, of gratitude, his stirred mind seemed suddenly to burst into a radiant and scintillating inspiration of resolve to be the man Dismukes had described, to fight and to think and to remember as had no one ever before done on the desert. It was all that seemed left for him. Repentance! Expiation! True to himself at the last in spite of a horrible and fatal blunder! “Oh, Guerd! Guerd, my brother!” he cried, shuddering at the whisper of that name. “Wherever you are in spirit--hear me!... I’ll rise above wrongs and hate and revenge! I’ll remember our boyhood--how I loved you! I’ll atone for my crime! I’ll never forget.... I’ll fight and think to save my soul--and pray for yours!... Hear me and forgive--you who drove me out into the wastelands!” CHAPTER IX Adam lay awake for some length of time, waiting for Dismukes to return, but he did not come. Adam at length succumbed to drowsiness. It was Dismukes’s call that awakened him. The sun already tipped the eastern range, rosy red, and all the open land lay fresh and colorful in the morning light. Adam felt no severe effects from his hard experience, except an inordinate hunger, which Dismukes was more disposed to appease. Still he cautioned Adam not to eat too much. “Now, Wansfell, you must learn all about burros,” began Dismukes. “The burro is the most important part of your outfit. This desert would still be a blank waste, unknown to white man, if it had not been for those shaggy, lazy, lop-eared little donkeys. Whenever you get sore at one an’ feel inclined to kill him for some trick or other, just remember that you could not get along without him.