"GREY, Zane - Desert Gold" - читать интересную книгу автора (Grey Zane)

A FACE haunted Cameron--a woman's face. It was there in the white
heart of the dying campfire; it hung in the shadows that hovered
over the flickering light; it drifted in the darkness beyond.

This hour, when the day had closed and the lonely desert night set
in with its dead silence, was one in which Cameron's mind was thronged
with memories of a time long past--of a home back in Peoria, of a
woman he had wronged and lost, and loved too late. He was a prospector
for gold, a hunter of solitude, a lover of the drear, rock-ribbed
infinitude, because he wanted to be alone to remember.

A sound disturbed Cameron's reflections. He bent his head listening.
A soft wind fanned the paling embers, blew sparks and white ashes
and thin smoke away into the enshrouding circle of blackness. His
burro did not appear to be moving about. The quiet split to the
cry of a coyote. It rose strange, wild, mournful--not the howl
of a prowling upland beast baying the campfire or barking at a
lonely prospector, but the wail of a wolf, full-voiced, crying out
the meaning of the desert and the night. Hunger throbbed in
it--hunger for a mate, for offspring, for life. When it ceased,
the terrible desert silence smote Cameron, and the cry echoed in his soul.
He and that wandering wolf were brothers.

Then a sharp clink of metal on
stone and soft pads of hoofs in sand prompted Cameron to reach for his gun,
and to move out of the light of waning campfire. He was somewhere
along the wild border line between Sonora and Arizona; and the
prospector who dared the heat and barrenness of that region risked
other dangers sometimes as menacing.

Figures darker than the gloom approached and took shape, and in
the light turned out to be those of a white man and a heavily
packed burro.

"Hello there," the man called, as he came to a halt and gazed
about him. "I saw your fire. May I make camp here?"

Cameron came forth out of the shadow and greeted his visitor, whom
he took for a prospector like himself. Cameron resented the breaking
of his lonely campfire vigil, but he respected the law of the desert.

The stranger thanked him, and then slipped the pack from his burro.
Then he rolled out his pack and began preparations for a meal. His
movements were slow and methodical.

Cameron watched him, still with resentment, yet with a curious and
growing interest. The campfire burst into a bright blaze, and by
its light Cameron saw a man whose gray hair somehow did not seem to
make him old, and whose stooped shoulders did not detract from an