@Shefford halted his tired horse and gazed around with slowly realizing eyes.
A long slope of sage rolled and billowed down to Red Lake, a dry red basin, bare and glistening. It was a hollow sunk in the desert, a bleak and lonely door to the vast, wild, and broken hills beyond.
For days now, Shefford had ridden the wild, bare flats and climbed the rocky desert benches. He had plodded steadily onward, always feeling the clear horizon was out of reach in the dim and deceiving distance.
But a hundred miles of desert travel, with its mistakes and lessons and hints of what lay beyond had not prepared him for what he saw now. Before him lay a world that seemed built entirely of greatness. Shefford looked at it with awe and wonder, his mind detached from any conscious thought. Then that dark and unknown land seemed to cloud, as if to warn him not to search for what lay hidden beyond the towering ranges. But Shefford thrilled with both fear and elation. This was the country that had been described to him. Far across the red valley, far beyond the ragged line of black mesa and yellow range, lay the wild canyon with its haunting secret.
He was faced with a choice. He could either enter the unknown to seek and find that secret, or he could turn back and always be haunted by his lack of knowledge. A friend's strange story had prompted his journey, and a beautiful rainbow with its mystery and promise had decided him. For once in his life he had answered the call adventure that lay within him, and for once in his life he was happy. But here in the vastness of the unforgiving desert, he grew cold; he hesitated, even while he felt drawn to move forward. No, he had not choice. He must go to Red Lake.
As Shefford started his horse down the sandy trail, he checked the way ahead. It was the month of April, and the waning sun quickly lost its heat and brightness. Long shadows crept down the slope ahead of him and the sparse sage turned a deep gray. He watched the lizards shoot like brown streaks across the sand, leaving their slender tracks; he heard the rustle of pack-rats as they darted into their brushy homes; his horse startled at the cry of a low-sailing hawk.
Like ocean waves the slope rose and fell. Its hollows were choked with sand, its ridge-tops showing scant growth of sage and grass and weed. The last ridge was a sand-dune, beautifully ribbed and scalloped and lined by the wind. From its knife-sharp crest a thin sheet of sand blew, drifting, almost like smoke. Shefford wondered why the sand looked red at a distance, for here it seemed almost white. It rippled everywhere, clean and glistening, always leading down.
Suddenly he became aware of a house looming out of the bareness of the slope. It dominated that long white incline. It was grim, lonely, forbidding. How strange, then, that it blended in so well with the surroundings, yet it did. The structure was octagon-shaped, built of uncut stone, and resembled a fort. There was no door on the sides exposed to Shefford's gaze, but small openings about two-thirds of the way up probably served as windows.
