here to dig you up when I need you."

Wellesly handed his card and Jim carefully put it away in his
pocketbook.

Haney laughed jovially. "You may count me out, pard, on any of that
sort of business. I've blowed all the money into this damn country
that I want to. You'll never get anything out of it but 'orned toads
and rattlesnakes and 'bad men' as long as it lasts. If I can pull out
'alf I've planted 'ere I'll skip, and think I'm lucky to get out with
a whole skin."

They trotted across the dry, hot, barren levels of the desert into
which they had descended, seeing nowhere the least sign of human life.
The faintly beaten track of the road stretched out in front of them in
an almost straight line across the gray sand between interminable
clumps of cactus and frowsy, wilted sagebrush. Bunches of yellow,
withered grass cropped out of the earth here and there. But even these
forlorn caricatures of vegetation gave up and stayed their feet on the
edges of frequent alkali flats, where the white, powdery dust covered
the sand and dealt death to any herbage that ventured within its
domain. Hot, parched, forbidding, the desert grew more and more
desolate as they proceeded. To Wellesly there was an awe-inspiring
menace in its dry, bleaching, monotonous levels. He felt more keenly
than ever his own helplessness in such a situation and congratulated
himself on having fallen in with his two guides. He wondered that the
plain had not impressed him more deeply with its desolation and
barrenness when he came out to the ranch. But he had no doubt of the
ability and good faith of his two companions and he drew his horse a
little nearer to them and said:

"My God! What a place this desert would be for a man to be lost in!"

Then they told him stories of men who had been lost in it, who had
wandered for days without water and had been found raving maniacs or
bleaching skeletons--the sort of stories that make the blood of any
but a plainsman seem to dry in his veins and his tongue to cleave to
the roof of his mouth. Told in all their details and surrounded by the
very scenes in which their agonies had been suffered, they brought the
perspiration to Wellesly's brow and a look of horror to his eyes.
Haney and Jim saw that they made him nervous, and racked their
memories and their imaginations for more of the same sort.

They were approaching the mountains and the country around them was
broken into barren, rocky hills. The road grew ro