Shefford knew it was an outpost of the trader @Presbrey. He had heard of the trader in both @Flagstaff and @Tuba. But no living thing appeared in the limit of Shefford's vision. He gazed at the unwelcoming house with a shudder, took in the dark eyelike windows, the sweep of barren slope merging into the vast red valley, the bold, bleak bluffs beyond.

Could anyone really live here? The nature of the valley forbade the warmth of a place to call home. Shefford thought irresistibly of how his enemies would have sent him to just such a hell. He thought bitterly of the narrow congregation that had proved him a failure in the ministry. He remembered painfully those that had rejected his ideas of religion and immortality and God, that had driven him, at the age of twenty-four, from the calling forced upon him by his people. As a boy he had yearned to make himself an artist; his family had made him a clergyman; fate had made him a failure. No, a failure only so far in his life, he reminded himself -- in the lonely days and silent nights of the desert he had experienced a strange birth of hope. True, it was adventure that had called him, but it was filled with a vague and spiritual hope. It contained a dream of promise, a nameless strength that gave support to his earlier ideas.

As he rode around a corner of the stone house his horse snorted and stopped. A lean, shaggy pony jumped at the sight of him, almost displacing a red long-haired blanket that covered an @Indian saddle. Quick thuds of hoofs in sand drew his attention to a corral made of peeled poles, and here he saw another pony.