Apache, wandered into the red mountains of Arizona, made our "locations," and separated—he to toil in the mines and fight the treacherous, prowling Indians for years, I to return to home and civilization. Alone I had made the return trip from La Paz to Chucolwala, and thence to Tabasaca and Cañon Springs, where the faithful old buckskin steed Muchacho Juan, companion and friend in all my wanderings, had fallen down and died in terrible agony, after eating the poisonous weed of the desert known as "muerto en el campo" (death in the camp), leaving me to finish my journey of two hundred miles back to the settlements of California on foot and alone. Out of the jaws of death we had ridden exultantly into the camp at Dos Palmas a month before; into the gates of hell I walked with bleeding feet as I left Dos Palmas next, in the terrible silence of the desert night, on my weary tramp toward San Bernardino.
It was two a.m. when I wearily climbed the summit of the divide between Dos Palmas and the Palma Seca, and looked down into the great plain below. When the last man looks down on the wreck of the universe, and sees our world going back into chaos, without form and void, he will not behold a scene of more utter and savage desolation, or find himself wrapped in a silence more truly terrible. The full, round moon flooded the whole landscape with mellow light, but naught of life was to be seen; the ghastly pallor of death was upon and over everything. Southward to the horizon stretched a great plain of snowy salt—the grim and silent ghost of a dead sea of the
