With steps that no longer dragged Adam began his descent of the canyon slope. It was a long, gradual incline, rough toward the bottom, and the bottom was a good deal farther down than it had seemed. At length he reached the wide bed of white boulders, strewn about in profusion, where some flood had rolled them. In the center of this bed trickled a tiny stream of water, slightly alkaline, Adam decided, judging from the white stain on the margin of sand. Following the stream bed, he made his way up into the zone of green growths, a most welcome change from the open glare of the desert. He plodded on perhaps a mile, without reaching the yellow thatch of palms. “Will I--never--get there?” panted Adam, almost spent. Finally Adam reached a well-defined trail leading up out of the stream bed. He followed it to a level flat covered with willows and cottonwoods, all full foliaged and luxuriantly green, and among which stately palms, swaddled in huge straw sheaths of their own making, towered with lofty tufted crowns. The dust in the trail showed no imprints of feet. Adam regarded that as strange. Still, he might be far from the camp or village that had looked so close from the slope above. Suddenly he emerged from the green covert into an open glade that contained palm-thatched huts, and he uttered a little cry of joy. But it took only a second glance to convince him that the huts were deserted, and his joy was short lived. Hastily he roamed from one hut to another. He found ollas, great, clay water jars, and pieces of broken pottery, and beds of palm leaves through which the lizards rustled, but no Indians, nor any signs of recent habitation. “Gone! Gone!” he whispered, hoarsely. “Now--I’ll starve--to death!” His accents of despair contained a note of hardness, of indifference born of his extreme fatigue. His eyes refused to stay open, and sleep glued them shut. When he opened them again it was to the light of another day. Stiff and lame, with a gnawing at the pit of his stomach and an oppressed mind, Adam found himself in sad plight. Limping down to the stream, he bathed his face and quenched his thirst, and then, removing his boots, he saw that his feet were badly blistered. He decided to go barefoot, to save his boots as well as to give the raw places a chance to heal. Then without any more reflection he wrought himself into a supreme effort of will, and it was so passionate and strong that he believed it would hold as long as intelligence governed his actions. “My one chance is to live here until the Indians come back,” he decided. There’s water here and green growths. It’s an oasis where animals, birds, living creatures come to drink.... I must eat.”