He was, in fact, coming to that Valley of Desolation where the body
faints and only the spirit's dauntlessness can keep it up and doing.
What dauntlessness his spirit once had was gone. He moved wearily,
automatically doing his work and doing it ill. The very movements of
his hands, slack and fumbling, were an exasperation to the other men,
setting their strength to a herculean measure, and giving of it without
begrudgment. David saw their anger and did not care. Fatigue made him
indifferent, ate into his pride, brought down his self-respect. He
plodded on doggedly, the alkali acrid on his lips and burning in his
eyeballs, thinking of California, not as the haven of love and dreams,
but as a place where there was coolness, water, and rest. When in the
dawn he staggered up to the call of "Catch up," and felt for the buckle
of his saddle girth, he had a vision of a place under trees by a river
where he could sleep and wake and turn to sleep again, and go on
repeating the performance all day with no one to shout at him if he was
stupid and forgot things.
Never having had the fine physical endowment of the others all the
fires of his being were dying down to smoldering ashes.
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