* * * * *
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
