The utter loneliness of this barren world rested heavy upon his gregarious spirit.  Sitting with his back to Indian Creek, he could see no moving, living thing in all the monotony of wide-reaching landscape.  He was enjoying a new sensation, feeling vague, restless thoughts surge up within him which were so vague, so elusive as to be hardly grasped.  At first it was only the loneliness, the isolation and desolation of the thing which appalled him.  Then slowly into that feeling there entered something which was a kind of awe, almost an actual fear.  A man, a man like young Greek Conniston, was a small matter out here; the desert a great, unmerciful, unrelenting God.

First loneliness, then awe tinged with a vague fear, and then something which Conniston had never felt before in his life.  A great, deep admiration, a respect, a soul-troubling yearning toward the very thing from which his city-trained senses shrank.  He was experiencing what the men who live upon its rim or deep in its heart are never free from feeling.  For all men fear the desert; and when they know it they hate it, and even then the magic of it, brewed in the eternal stillness, falls upon them, and though they draw back and curse it, they love it!  The desert calls, and he who hears must heed the call.  It calls with a voice which talks to his soul.  It calls with the dim lure of half-dreamed things.  It beckons with the wavering streamers of gold and crimson light thrown across the low horizon at sunrise and sunset.

Greek Conniston was not an introspective man.  His life, the life of a rich man’s son, had left little room for self-examination of mood and purpose and character.  He had done well enough during his four years in the university, not because he was ambitious, but simply because he was not a fool and found a mild satisfaction in passing his examinations.  Nature had cast him in a generous physical mold, and he had aided nature on diamond and gridiron.  He had taken his place in society, had driven his car and ridden his horses.  He had through it all spent the money which came in a steady stream from the ample coffers of William Conniston, Senior.  His had been a busy life, a life filled with dinners and dances and theaters and races.  He had not had time to think.  And certainly he had not had need to think.

But now, under the calm gaze of the desert, he found himself turning his thoughts inward.  He had been driven out of his father’s house.  He had been called a dawdler and a trifler and a do-nothing.  He had been told by a stern old man who was a man that he was a disgrace to his name.  He had never done anything but dance and smoke and drink and make pretty speeches which were polite lies and which were accepted as such.  And now a minor note, as thin as a low-toned human voice heard faintly through the deep music of a cathedral organ, something seemed to call to him telling him again of these things.