Stalking mountain sheep upon the mighty slopes was work to make a man. It was a wild and perilous region of jagged ridges and bare slants and loose slopes of weathered rocks. The eyes of the sheep that lived at this height were like telescopes; they had the keenest sight of all wild beasts. The marvelous organ of vision stood out on the head as if it were the half of a pear, so that there was hardly an angle of the compass toward which a sheep could not see. Like the antelope, mountain sheep were curious and could be lured by a bright color and thereby killed. But Adam learned to abhor this method. He pitted his sight and his strength and endurance against those of the sheep. In this way he magnified the game of hunting. His exhaustion and pain and peril he welcomed as lessons to the end that his knowledge and achievement must be in a measure what Dismukes might have respected. Failure to Adam was nothing but a spur to renewed endeavor. The long climb, the crumbling ledge, the slipping rock, the deceitful distance, the crawl over sharp rocks, the hours of waiting--these too he welcomed as one who had set himself limitless tasks. Then when he killed a ram and threw it over his shoulder to carry it down the mountain, he found labor which was harder even than the toil of the gold mill at Picacho. To stride erect with a rifle in one hand, and a hold upon a heavy sheep with the other, down the slippery ledges, across the sliding banks, over the cracked and rotten lava, from the sunset-lighted heights to the gloomy slopes below--this was how in his own estimation he must earn and keep the respect of the Indians. They had come to look up to the white man they called Eagle. He taught them things to do with their hands, work of white men which bettered their existence, and he impressed them the more by his mastery of some of their achievements. * * * * * The days passed into months. Summer came again and the vast oval bowl of desert glowed in the rosy sunrise, glared in the white noon hours, and burned at sunset. The moving heat veils smoked in rippling clouds over the Salton Sink; the pale wavering line of the Superstition Mountains changed mysteriously with each day; the fog clouds from the Pacific rolled over to lodge against the fringed peaks. Time did not mean anything to the desert, though it worked so patiently and ceaselessly in its infinite details. The desert might have worked for eternity. Its moments were but the months that were growing into years of Adam’s life. Again he saw San Jacinto and San Gorgonio crowned with snow that gleamed so white against the blue. Once Charley Jim showed Adam a hole in the gravel and sand of a gulley, where Dismukes had dug out a pocket of gold. Adam gathered that the Indian had brought Dismukes here. “White man gold mad,” said the chief. “No happy, little gold. Want dig all--heap hog--dam’ fool!”