“Wot the divil! ...  B’gorra, ut’s to me fri’nd Neale—­an’ a love letter—­an’—­”

“Wal, kape it, thin, fer Neale an’ be dacent enough to rade no more.”

Lifting Beauty Stanton, they carried her out into the sunlight.  Her white face was a shadowed and tragic record.

“Mac, she wor shure a handsome woman,” said Casey, “an’ a loidy.”

“Casey, yez are always sorry fer somebody....  Thot Stanton wuz a beauty an’ she mebbe wuz a loidy.  But she wuz dom’ bad.”

“Mac, I knowed long ago thot the milk of human kindness hed curdled in yez.  An’ yez hev no brains.”

“I’m as intilligint as yez any day,” retorted McDermott.

“Thin why hedn’t yez seen thot this poor woman was alive whin we packed her out here?  She come to an’ writ thot letter to Neale—­thin she doied!”

“My Gawd!  Casey, yez ain’t meanin’ ut!” ejaculated McDermott, aghast.

Casey nodded grimly, and then he knelt to listen at Stanton’s breast.  “Stone dead now—­thot’s shure.”

For her shroud these deliberate men used strippings of canvas from the tent, and then, carrying her up the bare and sandy slope, they lowered her into the grave next to the one of the cowboy.

Again Casey made a sign of the cross.  He worked longer at the filling in than his comrade, and patted the mound of sand hard and smooth.  When he finished, his pipe was out.  He relighted it.

“Wal, Beauty Stanton, shure yez hev a cleaner grave than yez hed a bed....  Nice white desert sand....  An’ prisintly no man will ivir know where yez come to lay.”

The laborers shouldered their spades and plodded away.

The wind blew steadily in from the desert seeping the sand in low, thin sheets.  Afternoon waned, the sun sank, twilight crept over the barren waste.  There were no sounds but the seep of sand, the moan of wind, the mourn of wolf.  Loneliness came with the night that mantled Beauty Stanton’s grave.  Shadows trooped in from the desert and the darkness grew black.  On that slope the wind always blew, and always the sand seeped, dusting over everything, imperceptibly changing the surface of the earth.  The desert was still at work.  Nature was no respecter of graves.  Life was nothing.  Radiant, cold stars blinked pitilessly out of the vast blue-black vault of heaven.  But there hovered a spirit beside this woman’s last resting-place—­a spirit like the night, sad, lonely, silent, mystical, immense.

And as it hovered over hers so it hovered over other nameless graves.

In the eternal workshop of nature, the tenants of these unnamed and forgotten graves would mingle dust of good with dust of evil, and by the divinity of death resolve equally into the elements again.

The place that had known Benton knew it no more.  Coyotes barked dismally down what had been the famous street of the camp and prowled in and out of the piles of debris and frames of wood.  Gone was the low, strange roar that had been neither music nor mirth nor labor.  Benton remained only a name.