“Ah! So that’s it!” he muttered, in consternation. “But why?”
It came to Adam then—the secret of the mystery. Death Valley called him. All that it was, all that it contained, all he had lived there, sent out insidious and enchanting voices of terrible silent power. The long shadow of that valley of purple shadows still enveloped him. Death, desolation, and decay; the appalling nudity of the racked bowels of the earth; the abode of solitude and silence, where shrieked the furies of the midnight winds; the grave of Magdalene Virey—these haunted Adam and lured him back with resistless and insupportable claim.
“Death Valley again—for me. I shall go mad,” soliloquized Adam.
At last his mind was slowly being unhinged by the forces of the desert. Some places of the earth were too strong, too i
