The Quickest Way Home

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After he had showered and changed, Howard Darrow strolled out into the back yard of his two-year-old home, into the last minutes of the Friday evening sunshine, a drink in his hand. Beyond the green perimeter of lawn and plantings the earth changed abruptly to the ancient baked tans and browns, the sand and locks and the stubborn scrub growth of the southwest.

It was at this time of day, under the same conditions of light, twice in the past week he had seen — or thought he had seen — the significant wink of a bright reflection two-thirds of the way up Snake Mountain. The parched land stretched eastward in flatness for 500 yards from his property line, then lifted into the yellowed, furrowed, time-worn hill. It was less than a thousand feet high. It looked as if some gigantic lizard of pre-history had been half buried in the desert, the snout toward the north, the tail stretching south toward the city 12 miles away. Beyond Snake Mountain was tumbled, broken land reaching in a stone silence to the mountains 30 miles to the cast.

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