Each succeeding day and night Cameron felt himself more and more
drawn to this strange man. He found that after hours of burning
toil he had insensibly grown nearer to his comrade. He reflected
that after a few weeks in the desert he had always become a different man.
In civilization, in the rough mining camps, he had been a prey to unrest
and gloom. But once down on the great billowing sweep of this lonely
world, he could look into his unquiet soul without bitterness.
Did not the desert magnify men? Cameron believed that wild men
in wild places, fighting cold, heat, starvation, thirst, barrenness,
facing the elements in all their ferocity, usually retrograded,
descended to the savage, lost all heart and soul and became mere
brutes. Likewise he believed that men wandering or lost in the
wilderness often reversed that brutal order of life and became
noble, wonderful, super-human. So now he did not marvel at a slow
stir stealing warmer along his veins, and at the premonition that
perhaps he and this man, alone on the desert, driven there by life's
mysterious and remorseless motive, were to see each other through
God's eyes.
His companion was one who thought of himself last. It humiliated
Cameron that in spite of growing keenness he could not hinder him
from doing more than an equal share of the day's work. The man
was mild, gentle, quiet, mostly silent, yet under all his softness
he seemed to be made of the fiber of steel.
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