Zane Grey

Desert Gold Zane Grey

This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set in with its dead silence, wasone in which Cameron's mind was thronged with memories of a time long past-of a home back inPeoria, of a woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector for gold, ahunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed infinitude, because he wanted to be alone toremember. A sound disturbed Cameron's reflections. He bent his head listening. A soft wind fanned thepaling embers, blew sparks and white ashes and thin smoke away into the enshrouding circle ofblackness. His burro did not appear to be moving about. The quiet split to the cry of a coyote. Itrose strange, wild, mournful-not the howl of a prowling upland beast baying the campfire orbarking at a lonely prospector, but the wail of a wolf, full-voiced, crying out the meaning of thedesert and the night. Hunger throbbed in it-hunger for a mate, for offspring, for life. When itceased, the terrible desert silence smote Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul. He and thatwandering wolf were brothers. Then a sharp clink of metal on stone and soft pads of hoofs in sand prompted Cameron toreach for his gun, and to move out of the light of the waning campfire. He was somewhere along thewild border line between Sonora and Arizona; and the prospector who dared the heat andbarrenness of that region risked other dangers sometimes as menacing.